Searching for keys in the moon light

Last week someone told me a story.

A woman was looking for her keys outside in the dark under the moonlight.

- Mother, says a man walking by, what are you doing?

- I am searching for my keys.

- I shall help you, he says as he crouches down and scans the floor. Where did you last see your keys?

- My keys are inside my home.

- So why are you looking outside?

- Because it is dark inside my home and here, there is light.

What fulfills you? a friend asked me a few days later as we were having coffee.

Can the dark of the house (or the studio) fulfill me? I take the dark to be the routine, the well known, the home with its long list of tasks and duties, the things that need to be repaired, ordered, planned ahead, picked up, cleaned, the hundred whys of a toddler that need to be answered. It's also dark because it is comfortable, restful, familiar. I know where all the furniture is, all the piles of books. I know it with my eyes closed. It is where family is. The dark of the studio is similar. It is the darkness when I shut down the light at the end of a day well spent and I see all the works I have accumulated lately, shining.

A friend sent me a poem by Harold Pinter in which a line read 'and the mirror sulked showing us nothing'. Which I thought was such a beautiful line I made a painting of it.

I have been going out a lot, too much probably, seeking the moonlight and its glimmers of fun or newness or connection. But the quiet of home, the obscurity of home, the humdrum is soothing too. And the sight of my daughter sound asleep while it's dark outside, now the beating heart of our home, fills my heart to the brim.

I have painted a lot of images of the night: night skies seen in Maine where there is no light pollution, the moon in all its fecund round beauty making the sea swell, tree outlines barely perceptible in the light. I love images of the dark. May they give us some light or inkling about what we seek.

Or let's find the keys inside the home. But what makes a home?

The novel Perfection by Vincentzo Latronico inspired by Perec’s Les Choses came out recently in English and it’s a delight. A young couple of expat graphic designers living in Berlin during the Merkel years build a life that is carefully elegant and precise on the outside. But what does it feel like inside? What are their inner voices and dramas? They work side by side adjusting the grids on their computers as they create digital brand identities and checking their social medias. They barely speak German and just about know the history of the place they call home. Until they realize that their discontent is tied to the fact that time is passing, they are aging, their friends have come and gone, and life is passing by. And yet little will change between the two of them.

It's a ruthless satire of an expat's life that is full of discontent and it is beautifully observed.

READ

Perfection by Vincentzo Latronico

SEE

There is so much great art to see in NYC this weekend.

Here are my top three gallery shows:

Salman Toor, The Wish Maker at Luhring Augustine

Michael Armitage, Crucible at David Zwirner

Antonia Showering, In Line at Timothy Taylor