Shape Shifting With Solids

What more could be said about Giacometti? 

The word that comes to mind when considering his classic sculpted figures is etiolated: pallid, drawn, not just devoid of light but devoid of substance. The attempt to give depth just results in further elongation as though multiple dimensions cannot be achieved simultaneously. The sheer effort of will required to study and reflect on the human form is such that it is impossible to see them all. Indeed Giacometti is more likely to emphasise gaps and holes; often jagged and raw in nature.

Much of this seems to prefigure death and dissolution and reflects the shattering effect of the Second World War and the horrors it unleashed. 

Walking round the exhibition one is reminded of the blasted trees in a Paul Nash painting of the trenches. It is as though humans have been reduced to something between automata with straight backs and legs from which most of the joints have been removed and shambling remnants - or indeed revenants - on the wall after a nuclear explosion. 

Yet the exhibition does show us more of the Giacometti that is much less well known and which should be celebrated. Not so much his painting which for me adds little but his earlier sculpture and his commercial design work from the period before the War.

These are more playful; in some cases Surreal and in some cases clearly influenced by other cultures that were important for many artists in the period notably African art but in the case of Giacometti, particularly Egyptian art and also, for me at least, the Moai of Easter Island.

The most profound insight though is the similarity of some of the sculpture to the wonders of Brancusi with a common emphasis on minimum interventions to allow the nature of the material to speak whether that is stone or metal or wood. The beauty of these sculptures is a reflection of the justly famous and profound Brancusi aphorism that 'simplicity is resolved complexity'. In other words the sculptor has gone through the mill to do as little as possible whilst conveying as much as possible in the relatively small number of interventions that are made. 

Two things come across most strongly from all of this work and form common threads across his whole output: first, an obsessive observation of detail and worrying away at the heart of the matter and secondly, a fascination with perspective. 

At one stage that emphasis on perspective was particularly concerned with distance. His tiny heads and figures are a reflection of seeing images and people from afar; glimpsed and evanescent. When conveyed through the medium of plaster the sheer roughness of the surface reflects the lack of certainty about the actual form but also the degree to which there are certain basic facts about any individual which are observable immediately from any distance. And that is surely the genius here: to capture something of the essence in the way that we as humans do when we see others without necessarily needing or indeed expecting to see all of the detail.  

These tiny heads are also endlessly protean. I particularly loved one of the French writer Simone de Beauvoir. A photograph cannot possibly do justice to the extraordinarily tactile and mercurial effects that Giacometti produces. Looking at this tiny piece from different angles gives wholly different perspectives: it's like shape shifting with solids with a different personality and indeed age of life revealed depending on your vantage point.

There is also a glorious drawing made by Giacometti (not in the exhibition) in preparation for the sculpture which is a classic pose but from which the sculpted version takes flight into completely different dimensions. 

Finally, here is the great man in classic pose in the mid 1960s; tousled hair, cigarette, slightly down at heel. The picture seems to perfectly capture his weight of experience to the extent that the strangely elongated hand suggests that even he is in need of a disembodied arm to support his head.

We for our part can be grateful that - with or without the arm - he produced such astonishing work, often dark and despairing in tone but reflecting a truly humanist ambition to reflect as much as he genuinely could of his fellow human beings; and nothing more.