Dominic Redfern
Tragic, 2011

Here it is, the 500th entry of the blog. 500 is a beautiful number, it even has a dedicated Roman numeral – D, as in Dominic. But I have a complicated relationship to beauty, somehow it relates to death. Because once something is recognised as beautiful, it evokes the desire to preserve it as is, to prevent it from following with the flow of life that might wear off its beauty. But to step out of that flow is pretty much the same thing as to die… Maybe that’s why in some galleries, especially in the jewellery galleries with all those closed drawers filled with pendants and necklaces and rings and brooches, I tend to feel as if I was in a morgue… All that art being kept dead in all its unchanging glory… just like the mummy of the Mona Lisa behind the bulletproof glass…

I don’t expect Redfern to have had in mind anything even remotely resembling this train of thought. But his ‘Tragic’ can nevertheless be appropriated as illustration for it. A TV monitor displays the fragment of the wall obstructed from our view by its old-fashioned voluminous body. A beautiful concept of assumed transparency of representation that has to be preserved in its pristine state. So if some tragic event renders a bloody body in its view, the only appropriate thing to do is to drag it away and mop the floor clean, to reinstate the order of the conceptual beauty. We don’t need to care about any other irrelevant details beyond the frame. Tragic. Beautiful. Witty.

I find myself in a constant doubt about beauty. I am drawn to it – maybe because I am so conditioned, maybe because it does have a real power of its own. But I also distrust it, I find in it potential resistance to the flow of time, to unfolding of life, a deadly trap of sorts. I think, my answer is in ephemeral beauty, in the beauty of the brief encounter where connections are being made, where life is lived and enriched just as it moves on, without trying to hold onto that moment forever… Thus my work is not about monuments or polishing something to perfection, more about staging those transient encounters just as well as giving myself to random encounters in the everyday, staying alert enough to recognise and embrace their momentary evasive beauty before its gone…

Returning to the blog, the next number beautifuler than 500 would be 1000 (why are round numbers beautiful? does it have something to do with Rubens and Botero?). I am not sure I can commit to such a task. Perhaps I should enjoy the present beauty and stop here. Or?..