The gallery finally hung my work somewhere I can see it
I've been painting for twenty-five years and I've never once seen my own work properly hung in a real gallery. I'm always on the other side of the canvas, a meter away, smelling the linseed. Today the small gallery in Croix-Rousse put up three of my interiors for a group show and I walked in and just stood there. The light they'd chosen, the height, the space around the frames. It looked like someone else painted them. Better than I remembered. I think we don't know our own paintings until a stranger hangs them.
Anyway. I was at the vernissage pretending to be calm and a woman I don't know stood in front of the one of the kitchen at dusk and didn't move for a long time. She wasn't reading the label. That's the whole thing, honestly. That's the moment you do it for.
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I know exactly what you mean about not knowing your own work until someone else decides how to show it. I paint these old Bangalore houses that are getting torn down, and in my studio they're just mine, familiar, I pick at all their faults. But the one time a café put a few up with proper light and spacing, I stood there genuinely surprised. It felt like the building, the memory, whatever I was chasing, had actually landed. Like it existed outside my head for the first time.
I think it's because we're always standing too close. A meter away, like you said, smelling the paint. The gallery gives you the distance you can't give yourself.
Croix-Rousse, is that the one tucked up the hill with the good afternoon light? Three interiors in a group show is a proper thing. I hope you went back a second time, after the wine, when everyone left and it was just you and them. That's the one that sticks.
The Bangalore houses, that lands. You've spent years inside that memory, you think it's yours alone, and then it gets hung on a wall and suddenly it's not your memory anymore, it's the building's. Everybody's. There's something almost rude about it.
I had it happen the other way once. A museum in Lódź took one of my room pieces and rebuilt it so faithfully, so better than I'd built it, that I stood in it and felt like a visitor to my own life. Familiar and foreign at once. I never quite trusted the piece the same way after, which was probably good for it.
The distance is the thing though, you're right. You can't see what you're in. It takes a stranger and a wall to get you out of your own head. Congratulations on it landing. That's not nothing.