got my head checked

Okay, yes, people have started razzing me for that spurious twice-a-week claim, so at least I know somebody is checking up on me. I spent the weekend in Brescia and Bergamo with my mate Flavio. We saw Roman mosaics and medieval church frescoes. My favourite was the disembodied midsection of San Sebastian—the stucco had come off the wall in patches, leaving only his little pot belly and a loin cloth that looked very much like a pair of saggy y-fronts, all stuck through with arrows. We ate gnocchi with blue cheese, apple and chestnuts in a hilltop trattoria, and toast with nutella in the hostel breakfast room, watched by a pair of piranhas. It’s not every day you see a fish tank with a big yellow and black ‘danger’ sign on it. If you want to know what piranhas look like, they look like fat, sullen bastards.

Best of all, we saw a huge exhibition of Gauguin and Van Gogh. It had examples of their earliest work, through to the Arles and Tahiti paintings. I’ve never really thought about these artists that much. I started out in that complacent, drowsy “afternoon at the gallery” zone. I wasn’t expecting to see so clearly the development of—what can I call it? The word vision has been hijacked by car advertisements. If they were writers, I would call it a voice—and that was the real jolt of it, to see what I haven’t been able to see before in the work of visual artists: a shining, singular consciousness, the mind of the auteur.

Both of them struggling through high Impressionism (yuk, those stifling canvases full of figures cut in half by screens, cows straining through fences to reach water, figures dissolving in nauseous pointillist dots…) on their way to finding their own visual languages. Van Gogh’s colours dissolving in light, full of tenderness. Those self-portraits, where his left eye is looking straight at you, but the right is gazing softly out of the frame, as if he was seeing two realities at once—two differently-visible worlds. Gauguin’s colours, on the other hand, condensing in to obsessive blocks of pigment that hover over the canvas and do strange things to your head.

Both of them wanting to get at the core of things—not rendering them as they look, but as they are. Placing consciousness at the centre, but not consciousness as a recorder of sense impressions—rather as a desiring, wondering, knowing thing. Both gnostics in their different ways. They so desperately wanted us to understand. For god’s sake, the answer’s in that distant-gazing right eye—not in a mutilated ear. Skip the gift shop and the tut-tut pop psych. Just look, and look, and look, and try to see.