Painted found and placed contrivances, ornament and decorated theatre objects are subdued but prominent features of a drift into Altstein's allee and busy junctures of Düsseldorf. We're here primarily to work and to to see Federico Herrero's Language Melody at Sies + Hoek Galerie where a chrome yellow floor warmly enfolds the weary feet off the street, where the joins between each patch of colour make segway's of conjoined words and harmonics between colours, it is the joints and the borders that create a chiming melody, each patch of colour is an affront to the neighbouring one and the scale of the patch defies the perspective of the colour, especially the perspective of the colour's wavelength - I could be referencing colour theory here or the innate sense of harmonics we think of as personal aesthetics. Isolated blocks of colour could be considered a modern phenomena, we're perhaps less excited by the sheer vibrancy of a large steel vehicle painted glossy primary colours in the street than a child, there are so many cars, they cluster in the streets and block the pavements, they create pollution but as toys or images they conjure an exuberance that stimulates a potential adventure at many levels. Federico Herrero's paintings are softened by the amorphous shapes and flavours created by their combinations, they adorn the canvas with a pride that reflects the activities of a painted shed in a busy street, lifting the ordinary out of the humdrum and into the theatres double.
In the least compressed layers of Düsseldorf's townscape ornament ( ornament is among our most positive means of communicating objectively ) now at a point blind to the colour fields and piebald meanderings, herding cobblestones and flocking alleyways drifting from historic and ephemeral to random and discarded objets, styles of architecture and applied interventions. The town seemed cradled inside a knot of channels: motorways and rivers, the Rhein is the river in the room leaving us to the kernel of the pedestrianised and tramway bits, some layers are foxed and mouldy like pages that have been rewritten with fresh ink over the old, ornate friendly bars with a sense of an ordinary urban fellowship that sits and sips in altbier with a little gritty dust from the grating angle-grinders buzzing.
Still very impressed by well orchestrated chaos no matter how contrived or in which methodology, if when stalked the living creature bolts convincingly then there is the perfection of authenticity in such fleeting but intense moment, even I do not expect chaos to be protractively sustainable no matter how well received no matter the depth of the rapture, it is one of the functions of perception to permanently appreciate the phenomena of spectacle and to distribute the appreciation to each known receptor, the memory of the spectacle will be far more frequently experienced than the actual event.
In the trope of the sculpture trail there's a range of works posited circumnavigably to encounter or destroy the impressions of poetic semblance, more difficult for me to articulate is my interest in German romantic poetry, I was curious about any possibly connections with Heinrich Heine and Fred Hölderlin because Heine was born and lived in Düsseldorf, the streets and features in the townscape are named after Heine and I knew so little about Heine's work, the fabulously named Heine Haus of Müller & Böhm Literaturhandlung in Bolkerstrasse 53 Dusseldorf is a bookshop, a museum an events location and a source of great stimulation. I have enjoyed the liede of Robert Schumann without knowing that Heinrich Heine was the creator of those fine lyrics. Some beautiful objects and words in that store plus two beautiful greyhound dogs kept at the back of the library.
Uncertain of its origins walking from the airport I saw plenty of Pink Granite used on steps around UBahn stations on on contemporary upgrades etc, I wondered if it was Aberdonian, or from the Channel Islands I placed a greenstone "axe" on a water outlet of a massive pink granite sump, a water feature of the Kunst Sammlung Nordrheine-Westfalen Galerie, an act that created a the most nuanced ripple of interest in my sculpture trail days of Düsseldorfing.
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A Pink Granite sump/water feature on the threshold of the Kunst Sammlung Nordrhein Westfalen Galerie.
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