Between Paintings

I went to the National Gallery's Ian Potter Centre and didn't look at a single painting. I looked between them, at the irregular configuration of the negative spaces. I looked beneath them to the floor with its polished grain flowing in one direction. I looked in front of the artworks, at the people moving past them: sometimes pausing, sometimes not. And I looked above them, noticing the zigzag patterns of the lighting tracking across the ceiling. Life started to look two-dimensional, with gallery-goers, words on information panels, pictures, doorways and walls all merging on a single plane.

I lingered in the hallways, between rooms. And admired the deliberate angles, reflective brushed-metal surfaces and warm light pooling in doorways. In the stairwells, a multitude of dots coalesce to form the floor-number '2', and the tube lighting running down the stairs seems to be escaping from the flood of white natural light pouring in through a skylight. The building seems wrapped in a net; any views to the outside are slightly obscured by its kinetic pattern.

I went to look at the gallery, rather than its contents, and applied the same process of scrutiny to the space as I would a single work. Appreciating its disparate components separately, then bringing them all back together again, reveals a modern masterpiece.

by guest: Ngoc Kee