Approbatio
2011
Assemblage, 112 x 112 cm.
Materials: oil on canvas, Gandoura Raiment
Collection: Courtesy of Annie Gentils Gallery, Antwerp.
“And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him: And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked.” - Mark 14: 51-52
The use of the vacant, empty or discarded garment – shirt, ‘sindon’, ‘gandoura’ – is clearly influenced by Frank Kermode’s speculations on Mark 14: 51-52 in The Genesis of Secrecy and similar imagery in Gnostic texts like The Hymn of the Pearl.
A simple image of a shirt, an imprint, an afterimage: a shadow but also a foreshadowing. The symbolism of the garment as a heavenly or ideal double of a person on earth. Clothes waiting to be filled, there is a sense of absence. The origins of this can be seen in an earlier work by the artist, Lily King, shown at the Annie Gentils Gallery in the exhibition Section D’Or: Gilding the Lily in 2004.
The word ‘Approbatio’ is painted in its original typeface taken from a missal printed in 1855.
