Dr Michael Hill, Head of Art History & Theory, National Art School September 2020
Beginning To See The Light
‘Who controls the past..’ depicts the sixteenth-century church of La Madonna di San Biagio in Montepulciano. Its composition is centred on the interior vertical axis formed by altarpiece and windows in the lunette and drum above. These items are three different types of light: one literal, namely direct sunlight passing through the plain glass on high; one figurative, in which light is fragmented into colours that make an image of the Virgin’s Immaculate Conception; and one metaphorical, which is the spiritual brilliance of the altar. This last consists of an aedicule housing a medieval painting of the Virgin and Child, whose attested weeping in 1508 promptly led to the rebuilding of the church in the classical style we see here. In fact, the altarpiece is behind a hanging oil lamp, an obscuration that by happenstance conveys the shadowy, unrepresentable lux of the divine that lurks in a miraculous icon.
La Madonna di San Biagio is a vessel of the spirit that appears all the more glorious because it is empty. Giles’s paintings of the medieval cathedral in Meissen and the Fontenay Abbey (Softened by promises and The only evidence) are likewise desolate. Yet all these buildings were built to house a congregation and the uplifting effect of their beauty was intended to that end. If contemporary artists had had a mind to represent the inside of a church it would have been as a setting for a narrative derived from the life of a biblical figure or saint. Only in seventeenth-century Clavinist Holland, after the iconoclasm of the 1560s and far from the Roman Catholic decorative eloquence of San Biagio, do we begin to see pictures of churches unencumbered by their role as a stage for the liturgy. The finest church painter of this period is Pieter Saenredam, whose majestic but lonely interiors seem like a message to the future. It is an old truism that art assumes the place of religion in modernity; the corollary is that religious art, of which church architecture is the most complete expression, comes to be the focus of awe. In that sense, Giles’s unpeopled church interiors are fuelled by admiration; they have the aura of spectral relics from the age of belief.
Nothing in Who controls the past is not in the church of San Biagio itself. The same cannot be said of Beginning to see the Light. In the middle of a Baroque church in Prague is the moon. It is no apparition, since Giles emphasises its spatial location with a shadow on the floor. Compared to the blurry grisaille of the church walls, the moon is in colour and sharp focus: its realisation - it must have appeared in a sudden - has quietened the experiential phenomena of the room. Placing disparate things starkly together is to create a poetic marvel, which as Aristotle said long ago opens the door to the beyond. A marvel shows something that might be true if the humdrum laws of the world were relaxed for a moment. In art as in religion - marvel and miracle have the same root - the mind is willing and able to imagine things that cannot be experienced in the normal course of events. A painting of the Virgin Mary who cries real tears? Okay. A celestial orb suspended inside a basilica? Alright. The church is many things: the ark (the central aisle is called a nave, from the Latin word for ship) of the Flood; the tabernacle of the Holy of Holies; the body of the Virgin; the Corpus Christi; the bejewelled Jerusalem of the Book of Revelations, crowned by the domus of God. Conceptually, the idea of the church is massive enough to house the cosmos and overcoming the physical difficulty of accommodating a modest asteroid within its space requires no more than a reasonable suspension of disbelief. Perhaps it would not be out of place to point out that one of the Virgin’s symbols is the moon, complement to the sun which is Christ; she is the morning star, the star of the Sea – Ave Maris stella.
The marvel occurs within the rhetorical mode reserved for topics of the highest order. Such expression is intended neither to describe nor to prove, but to praise. The conceit allows one to speak of the unspeakable. Rather than labour over the details, it gives sense in a moment to the vastness of the matter. It demands that the beholder acknowledge that another order of reality is in play, otherwise he or she will be stuck in stubborn refusal to admit the impossible. The marvel insists that art is understood within the game of theatre. Wit and design are the magic arts by which seeing is deceived in a manner of astonishment, as the poet Marino once wrote.
The moon in Beginning to see the Light appears daunting, rendered in telescopic detail, measured against the detail of its ecclesiastical surrounding. It is gloriously visible. The celestial body of the moon has arrived, as if on a day of reckoning. What have we done? Another painting by Giles, Enlightenment Indeed?, pictures the smoke from the recent Australian bush fires as captured by satellite, while the night-time side of the globe glows with the energy of fossil fuels. Giles is at a crossing, waving goodbye to his youth. He is painfully aware that life allegorises itself. The father who imbued in him the love of architecture and perspective and history has gone. What awaits his own son seems fragile. The world is burning and demagoguery is on the rise; meanwhile, this exhibition has emerged from under the pall of a pandemic. Conditions are right for millenarian thinking. It is all going down the drain. Yet Giles remains sincere. Old churches still seem wonderful, as do the stories of astrophysics. Re-presenting the unseeable is an image of what the black hole should look like – black and circular. However, these are negative descriptors, since black is the want of light and the circle is simply the most efficient form of absence. A black hole does not look like anything. Another perfect marvel.