The
charming French phrase bâtir des
châteaux en Espagne literally means to
build castles in Spain, but a closer translation would be to build castles in the sky. In short, it means to dream something clearly
impossible, as is amply demonstrated by Willink’s picture.
This
dreamscape illustrates the notions of impossible castles in the sky to moody
effect. As I said earlier with some of
Willink’s pictures, while it is not exactly to my taste, the virtuosity on
display is without question.
Surely
few people of his generation mastered light with such facility. As with the two earlier pictures, Willink
bathes part of his landscape in light, other parts in shadow. Notice how the parts of the chateau in the
background that are illuminated by the sun pop out thanks to the use of shadows
along the side. Willink also uses light
to show that the chateau is all façade with no interior – in fact, the crumbled
wall facing the viewer could only be part of a ruin.
Light
creeps through the rail columns, leaving shadows at the base of the statue of
the Apollo Belvedere. The base is
illuminated, but the statue itself (a great masterpiece now on hand at the
Vatican), is shrouded by darkness.
That
Willink chooses the Apollo Belvedere is, in itself, of great interest. It was first discovered circa 1489, and
quickly became lionized as a great masterpiece of the Classical world. The statue’s reputation waxed and waned over
the years, and today it is considered one of the great touchstones of classic
homoerotic art. (A judgment that baffles
your correspondent, but that’s another story.)
In 1969 the great art critic and historian Sir Kenneth Clark (1903-1983)
wrote: for four hundred years after it
was discovered the Apollo was the most admired piece of sculpture in the
world. It was Napoleon’s greatest boast
to have looted it from the Vatican. Now
it is completely forgotten except by the guides of coach parties, who have
become the only surviving transmitters of traditional culture.
The
landscape seems to play upon one of the great themes in Willink’s work – that
of separation. We noted in two earlier
pictures that figures and individuals in Willink’s cluttered world view were often
denied the solace of connection. Here,
the chateau and Apollo are divided by a chasm that owes more than a little to
Renaissance portraiture. As with most of
these Post Modern games, one gets the impression that Willink is trying to say
something, but one is never sure what.
The sky
is wonderfully effective and the dramatic import and again fills the viewer
with a melodramatic sense of expectation.
There
sure is much to admire in this work – as with most of the Willink corpus – I
just wish his vision made a little more sense.
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