Berfrois

Colin Raff proceeds into the biotic sculpture room

Colin Raff proceeds into the biotic sculpture room

Nearing the south entrance, we come upon the Salon’s indisputable main attraction...

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Sober Seers

Sober Seers

A prevailing notion of the lives of artists holds that hedonism is a meaningful part of production. The slide projector on the subject has no shortage of famous faces: There’s boozy Faulkner, banging out novels and screenplays while pickled...

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Elephants, Horses, and the Proportions of Paradise

Elephants, Horses, and the Proportions of Paradise

What does a perfect elephant look like? This was a question that occupied the Flemish artist Crispijn van de Passe II in the years around 1620. By then, several elephants had visited the European continent...

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Colin Raff: Torpid Slivers #20-24

Colin Raff: Torpid Slivers #20-24

There was a nice breeze going, and the footpost-knot was nodding more rapidly than usual, and maybe tonight it appeared more malevolent than it ever had before.

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Unsentimental Vistas

Unsentimental Vistas

When the American photographer Berenice Abbott returned to New York in 1929 after nearly a decade away in Paris, she came back to a city transformed...

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Erica X Eisen: Paint It Black

Erica X Eisen: Paint It Black

Possibly because the current global political landscape resembles less a plausible point on the universe’s long arc towards justice than the dread outcome of a Koch brothers blood-pact with the Lord of the Flies...

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Cam Scott: Writing Drawing/Drawing Writing

Cam Scott: Writing Drawing/Drawing Writing

If thought consists in circularity, we could begin where we propose to end, with a question in two directions: how is writing drawing? And how is drawing writing?

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Colin Raff: Torpid Slivers #15-19

Colin Raff: Torpid Slivers #15-19

We have ascertained that the tail of Subject X can indeed work in conjunction with the test membrane and produce an apparition that will generate a modicum of fear in Subject A.

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Colin Raff: Torpid Slivers #11-14

Colin Raff: Torpid Slivers #11-14

Upon reaching the foot of a rocky cliff, a travelling hare saw that a goat was readying to climb up its face, and said to him: “O goat, I see how your long horns, that curve and point forwards

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Colin Raff: Torpid Slivers #6-10

Colin Raff: Torpid Slivers #6-10

A child must say to her playmate, “I love you as I would a timber marmot, because your house is sturdy and filled with hallways. I love you as I would a polar razorback, because your bristly coat matches the driven snow.

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Bharat Azad: Sculpture in Mexico

Bharat Azad: Sculpture in Mexico

"Mexico is a surrealist country", my host tells me in the living room of his Centro Historico apartment as we ponder over his collection of works by Alan Glass. I'm in Mexico City...

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Everybody Draw the Dinosaur

Everybody Draw the Dinosaur

What colour was a Tyrannosaurus rex? How did an Archaeopteryx court a mate? And how do you paint the visual likeness of something no human eye...

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Colin Raff: Slivers, Torpid

Colin Raff: Slivers, Torpid

Here the story shifts focus to Grunduline, who, having sung an air describing her flight from the convent, arrives in Vadtstul to find her groom-to-be embracing her mother...

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‘Isn’t Cézanne’s art precisely about not knowing?’

‘Isn’t Cézanne’s art precisely about not knowing?’

Woman with a Cafetière, Paul Cézanne, c.1895 From London Review of Books: The critics all seem to know, or think they know, what ‘as if they were apples’ means – what apples are like, and what painting them consists of, technically and temperamentally. But isn’t Cézanne’s art precisely about not knowing? Painting,...

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Dalston Loverboy Takes Over Greenwich by Paul Johnathan

Dalston Loverboy Takes Over Greenwich by Paul Johnathan

Charles Jeffrey moved from Glasgow to London to study fashion at Central Saint Martins. He soon ran out of cash, propelling him to start LOVERBOY...

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Heady intimacy enjoyed in the arid Mexican desert…

Heady intimacy enjoyed in the arid Mexican desert…

To look at surrealist art is to see female bodies in pieces. Here a disembodied leg, there a mysterious eye.

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