Odds and Ends

I

News from those masters of the oblong tableau, Kahn & Selesnick: the book version of their Apollo Prophecies show is set for release next month; and they have launched a new website devoted to their work. Their current project EISBERGFREISTADT: is ‘inspired by an actual incident in 1923 when a mammoth iceberg ran aground in the Baltic port of Lübeck, towering over the town and terrifying the populace. Many decided (not unreasonably) that the ice caps were melting and the apocalypse coming. This event inspired gloomy cafe songs and penny dreadfuls, even a deck of playing cards…’ All being well, this intriguing project should premiere next spring at the Pepper Gallery in Boston.

II

In the summer of 2001, my wife and I spent a week’s vacation at a delightful finca in Andalucía, inland from Estepona, not far from the town of Casares. In the lounge there was an unusual picture, a framed group of six ceramic tiles, collectively depicting a group of colourful, stylised figures aboard a rowing-boat. I was curious enough about it to take a photograph of the picture, with the intention, after our return, of asking the owners of the finca where they had obtained it.

Instead, the photo was put away and forgotten, and it was only a few months ago that I rediscovered it in a dark corner of our spare room. Intrigued anew, I made a few inquiries about it, at length contacting the house’s owner, Mr. B________, who was kind enough to inform me that the picture was entitled Carnaval en Venecia, and was the work of an artist called Guillermo Silva Sanz de Santamaria, a ‘painter, sculptor, engraver, writer and Yoga teacher,’ who was born in Bogotá, Colombia, but now lives and works in Málaga.

III

Oddly enough, I had guessed there might be some kind of Latin American connection or influence behind the tile-picture, even though I am more than usually ignorant when it comes to the subject of Latin American art. I hope to make one small dent in this ignorance by way of a recently-published book I’m currently reading about the Argentine visionary Xul Solar (1887-1963), a ‘painter, sculptor, writer, and inventor of imaginary languages.’

IV

I’m also currently reading the second instalment of Javier Marías’s ‘novel in parts’ Your Face Tomorrow. It’s a novel, that, so far, I have found alternately fascinating and frustrating: the larger canvas of a multi-volume tale allows more room for Marías’s marvellous way with meticulous observation, subtle insight and parenthetical by-the-ways, but there is so much of these that the exceedingly circuitous narrative is weakened to the point that, for this impatient reader, it can at times seem like an indefinitely prolonged shaggy-dog story… One or two regulars here may remember an entry I wrote a couple of years ago concerning Marías, M.P. Shiel, and the story of the ‘Kings of Redonda.’ Anyone interested in this subject should read the long & very interesting comment recently left there by Roger Dobson, co-editor of the Lost Club Journal, concerning his quest to find the final resting-places of the Redondan ‘monarchs.’

V

In an e-mail a few days ago, Mr. Byrne wondered if Giornale readers might be interested in his new site, which sells reproductions of old-master prints by the likes of Dürer, Giulio Campagnola, Hans Baldung Grien, Goltzius, de Ribera and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione; and which includes a links page which serves as ‘a select critical guide to finding images of old Master prints on-line:’ a useful resource indeed.