I love this gallery. With its marble and gilt, pale roses on the desk and hushed voices emanating from side rooms, it’s like a sophisticated fine art showroom from a 1950s movie – a little Ritzy, perhaps, but a wonderfully evocative space and a great contrast to the white cubes of the contemporary art world. It suits Julian Schnabel's paintings perfectly. The American is lauded more for his films than his canvases these days so it’s great to announce that this show is a belter.
Unafraid of the big themes, Schnabel is easily accused of hubris or, conversely, flippancy. What’s often forgotten is just how great he is at putting together a picture. With rich berry colours in ink and oil washed over gauzy polyester, these recent, huge pictures, all titled ‘Christ’s Last Day’, are object lessons in how to keep things translucent and fluid on a grand scale. Printed beneath thin layers of paint is X-ray imagery from the early twentieth century; indeed some of the works even appear to contain the patient details that accompanied these examples from the medium’s infancy, which Schnabel found in an abandoned house while filming ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’. There’s a poetic meditation here about corporeality and weightlessness, of the body as fallible container of thought, feeling and belief, which you can choose to get religious about if you wish. I didn’t, but I become quite fanatical about Schnabel’s touch, delineating what might be a swan’s neck, a head, or an island amid those easy calligraphic flourishes.
