My basic, idiotic take on Mondrian is that he’s one of the hardest artists to see.
I don’t mean that curators like to bombard you with dry ice as you approach.
His squares and lines and blocks of primary colour have been thoroughly co-opted by the advertising and design industries.
He belongs to the billboards now.
He’s on cosmetic bottles and dresses and iPhone cases.
He’s retro even - not 1930s retro,1980sretro.
(These are possibly all excuses: in reality Mondrian just makes me feel a bit stupid.)
Blocks of flat colour.
This Mondrian is surely a creature of MS Paint?
So even at this level, c’mon, Touch the Artwork does people like me a service.
Actually, it’s really tricky to get it to look right.
like, Touch the Artwork is a playful puzzle game inspired by abstract art.
But it’s also, I think, something else.
See what you’re able to do.
For me it was a revelation.
The puzzles are fine and sometimes great.
In between this, you get bits of history and anecdote and theory.
Each of the three puzzle series has insights like this.
At times, it’s a bit too much for me.
This, like all the challenges, will grow in complexity as you work through the game.
They all evolve, the way that an artist’s work evolves.
Opportunities appear and are exploited.
Analogies and interpretations suggest themselves.
You get to sit closer to the artist while they are thinking.
That question of placement is key here I reckon.
Galleries, yes, which with their churchy silences and creaking floors encourage a certain kind of viewing.
It can be hard to get a sense of Kandinsky in places like that.
But this is just the staging, I have a go at tell myself.
It’s not the art.
As hard to separate things as I often find it, it is possible.
(A favourite city.)
Pretty ideal, I guess.
But in this photo Las Meninas is somewhere else.
Here it is out of doors, surrounded by the people who have been tasked with protecting it.
This is its gift.
Well, one of its gifts.
It gets you to ignore the gallery, and it gets you through the frame.
And yet halfway through playing I realised I didn’t have to do that.
The squares of red and blue and yellow reveal individual brushstrokes - are, in fact, surprisingly textured.
Or does it go even deeper?
Is the roughness, the clash of clarity and compromise, what he was after all along?
I don’t know, but it’s certainly something to think about.
It rescued him from the list of artists who make me feel a bit dim.
And I’m very grateful.
