Art theory

Wings of Meaning: The Aeroplanic Interventions of Marja Klein

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In a remote hangar on the outskirts of Toulouse, a Lufthansa Airbus A320 glows iridescent under the lights. Not from its metallic fuselage, but from a dizzying cascade of brushstrokes on its body. This is not a corporate stunt or a conceptual prank,it’s the latest work of Marja Klein, the reclusive Dutch-German painter who has become the most controversial figure in contemporary art by doing what no painter before her has done: use aircraft,actual, operational aircraft,as her canvas. For Klein, the plane is not a vehicle but a surface.

Her practice began unassumingly enough: graduate work in neo-expressionist abstraction at the Städelschule, a few residencies in Iceland and Patagonia, and a brief stint observing some aeronautical engineers. But it was her 2019 manifesto, “The Extended Canvas: Toward a Transatmospheric Aesthetics,” that revealed her ambition. In it, she argued that traditional painting had reached a saturation point, both spatially and semantically. “If canvas is a skin,” she wrote, “why not paint the organs of global movement? Why not paint the very arteries through which tourism and commerce flow?”

The first iteration of this idea,Fuselage No. 1 (For Barnett Newman),landed, quite literally, at Charles de Gaulle in early 2021. A retired cargo jet, reactivated temporarily for the work, bore a single red zip line down its side, splitting a field of hand-painted electric blue. It drew criticism from both art world purists and aviation traditionalists. “It’s neither safe nor comprehensible,” said one Parisian curator/pilot, who didn’t want to be named. “It’s somewhere between performance and vandalism.”

Undeterred, Klein’s work escalated. In collaboration with several independent air fleets and a little-known Estonian aerospace coating company, she began producing what she calls aero-paintings: labour-intensive, site-specific works executed directly onto the planes, which are then returned to flight. Each one requires months of bureaucratic negotiation, FAA consultations, and custom pigment development to withstand the UV exposure and atmospheric pressure changes. And yet, to Klein, all this is part of the piece.

These aircraft,glimpsed only briefly by passengers on the tarmac or through terminal windows,become ephemeral galleries of motion. “I’m not interested in permanence,” she said in a rare interview. “I’m interested in distribution. In becoming part of someone’s memory of a journey.”

Her 2024 project “Flightpath Diptych” involved two Boeing 737s: one painted in a palette of pale greens and muted greys based on 1950s Soviet military maps; the other inscribed with layers of coded writing drawn from declassified Cold War-era weather reports. The planes crossed paths over the Arctic Circle during the summer solstice, their coordinated flight paths generating a skyborne choreography visible only to satellite tracking systems and a small group of Klein’s paid subscribers who were given access to the live telemetry data.

Art historians struggle to categorize her work. Is it painting, performance, installation? Environmental art? Some invoke Robert Smithson’s Non-Sites or Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels; others trace her lineage to Gutai, to Yves Klein, to Panamarenko or Hipplo. But Klein herself resists the comparisons.

In so doing, she has raised thorny questions about authorship, temporality, and visibility. Philistine aviation crews mean that her planes are often cleaned or repainted without notice. A work might last six months or six days. Sometimes, she leaves only a signature in a hard-to-spot area- these stay airborne longer according to plane spotters/collectors around the world who have welcomed her work, tracking her oeuvre with vigilance, flight logs, and their familiarity with global aviation routes.

Yet for those who catch a glimpse,on a runway in Jakarta, during taxiing in São Paulo, or parked beside a generic corporate fleet in Oslo,Klein’s work lands like a glitch in the visual field. A disruption of the technocratic gloss of modern air travel. A reminder that the sky, too, can be colonized by art.

Since this piece was written we have heard that the B&A is reportedly in talks with Klein to acquire her entire series of aircraft skins in digital replica form.

Excavating the Algorithmic Sublime: The Work of Eira Varn

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Among the constellation of post-material digital artists emerging in the past decade, the formidable presence of Eira Varn has become a touchstone for critical debate. A figure equally at home in speculative philosophy and computational aesthetics, Varn’s practice orbits around one deceptively simple question: What does it mean to make art in a world where the material has become metaphysically irrelevant?

Born in 1989 in Helsinki but often described as a “non-geographic” artist, Varn’s early works were dismissed as opaque,dense video, sculptural assemblages and spliced open-source footage. But with the unveiling of her 2021 opus, “Substrate Will Not Save You,” critics were forced to contend with a practice that had moved beyond formal experimentation into something far more difficult to pin down.

Varn’s art now resists simple description. Her pieces exist inside custom neural environments,interior algorithmic systems that evolve autonomously. The works mutate across time, trained on esoteric data such as 16th-century meteorological notations and abandoned GitHub repositories. The resulting outputs evoke the uncanny melancholia of relics that were never quite real.

Critics have attempted to classify Varn’s work as “post-medium,” “neuro-generative,” or even “meta-phenomenological,” but such terms barely scratch the surface. More accurately, her practice might be located within what theorist Amira Nze refers to as the algorithmic sublime,a genre of aesthetic experience that overwhelms not through scale or grandeur, but through its ontological opacity. In Varn’s hands, the algorithm becomes not a tool of control, but a site of divination: oblique, self-obfuscating, and never quite addressable by human cognition.

In her 2023 exhibition “Axiomatic Remains” at the Kunsthalle Birmingham, viewers were presented with a room of blank screens that emitted only spectral humming and intermittent pulses of near-blinding light. The press release contained nothing but an excerpt from a Spinozan treatise: the audience had to trust that the work was there, even if its visibility was ephemeral.

Yet the most fascinating element of Varn’s work isn’t its inaccessibility,it’s its ethical ambiguity. By generating works that resist authorship, permanence, and even interpretation, Varn denies the viewer the usual consolations of comprehension. She replaces the artist-subject inside a system with a set of evolving rules that are never fully disclosed.

To engage with Varn’s work is not to decode it, but to dwell within its milieu. It asks of us a new form of spectatorship,one that is less about reception than attunement, less about aesthetic pleasure than metaphysical risk.

And perhaps this is where Varn’s legacy will ultimately reside: not in objects or exhibitions, but in the philosophical residue her work leaves behind. An artist of shadows and systems, Varn invites us not to observe,but to wait, as the substrate pulses, and the unknowable unfolds.

Letters regarding the Symposium: Should Museums Ban All Visitors?

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Sir,

Regarding the recent Pimlico Wilde symposium, “Should Museums Ban All Visitors?”, I feel compelled to offer a modest rejoinder. The proposition that the salvation of art lies in quarantining it from its audience is rather like suggesting that books be preserved by never opening them. It may indeed keep them intact, but at what cost? “To preserve is to kill,” as André Malraux once warned.

Yes, the public is clumsy. We lean where we shouldn’t, photograph where we mustn’t, and, on occasion, trip into priceless canvases. But to remove the visitor entirely is to render the museum a kind of taxidermy shop for culture,objects embalmed, not experienced. Walter Benjamin’s “aura” of the artwork may well fade when digitised; it certainly suffocates when locked in a cupboard.

Art, unlike uranium, is not dangerous to behold. It is dangerous not to behold. “We do not see things as they are,” Anaïs Nin reminds us, “we see them as we are.” Without the flawed, imperfect, even damaging gaze of the human, the object becomes a sterile relic, stripped of its meaning, its context, and its risk.

Besides, if the visitor is to be banished for the occasional accident, must we also ban the curator who mishandles a frame, the restorer who over-bleaches a fresco, the registrar who misfiles a crate? The history of art is not the history of perfection, but of fallibility,of cracked varnish, of overpainting, of the coffee stain on the corner of a preparatory sketch.

Museums without visitors are simply warehouses with better lighting. One may admire the discipline of such a proposal, but as Oscar Wilde quipped, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” If no one is there to see the work, then no one is there to speak of it,and an unseen masterpiece is perilously close to a non-existent one.

I, for one, would rather risk the occasional elbow in a canvas than consign the whole of human creativity to a velvet-lined vault. Art is not made to survive us,it is made to be lived with.

Yours, somewhat exasperated,

Horatia Gardan

Author of the upcoming book The Mail Gaze, about art long ago when knights wore chain mail

The Voice as Canvas: A Conversation with Callisto Erendira

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Few artists today embody the spirit of intermedial exploration as fluidly as Callisto Erendira. Known throughout the 2010s for her boundary-pushing conceptual installations and para-architectural sculptures, Erendira has, over the last few years, immersed herself in an entirely different kind of construction: opera. Her latest work, The Air Remembers the Mouth, premiered this spring at the Tempelhof Terminal in Berlin, is less a traditional opera than an “architectonics of voice and breath.” We met in a rehearsal space,bare concrete, scattered reeds, a harpsichord ,to discuss her move into opera as medium, not genre.

RENATA EL-AZHAR:

Callisto, many of us still associate your practice with material interventions in space,sheet metal bent like calligraphy, resin slabs embedded with soil. I have to ask, why opera?

CALLISTO ERENDIRA:

Opera, for me, is not an escape from materiality,it’s its sublimation. I often say I haven’t left sculpture; I’ve simply inverted its orientation. The voice is the breath made spatial. What interests me is the opera as a spatial organism, where the architectural body,stage, voice, gesture,becomes a site of invocation rather than representation.

EL-AZHAR:

Do you mean you are treating the voice sculpturally?

ERENDIRA:

Yes. But not only the voice,the conditions of the voice. I’m interested in the sonic theories of Oliver Jeffersen: the way sound moves through air is exactly like pigment moving across a canvas. In The Air Remembers the Mouth, each vocal part is assigned a material analogue. The contralto was paired with basalt powder, the mezzo-soprano with brass dust suspended in glycerin mist. We projected these associations as visual scores in the wings, but never explained them. I wanted the audience to intuit the logic of these breaths.

EL-AZHAR:

There’s a moment in that piece,around the 430-minute mark,where a performer simply exhales for nearly two minutes. No pitch, no language. Can you say a few words about that?

ERENDIRA:

That exhalation is the most “composed” moment in the piece. We rehearsed it for weeks. I wanted to unmoor the audience’s expectation of vocal climax. In operatic tradition, the voice is a vehicle of pathos, of narrative propulsion. I was more interested in how expulsion,of air, of grief, of refusal,can become a kind of anti-narrative. It’s a political gesture. Silence that isn’t mute.

EL-AZHAR:

You mentioned once that opera allows you to “ritualize the failure of language.” That seems paradoxical, given opera’s dependence on libretto.

ERENDIRA:

That’s the paradox I’m trying to inhabit. The libretto for The Air Remembers the Mouth was originally written entirely in glossolalia,non-semantic syllables chosen for their muscular demands on the mouth and larynx. I wasn’t happy with the result; instead I collaborated with a phonetician and a dancer. Meaning was replaced by valency, by the physical torque of speech. The failure of language is precisely where it becomes fertile again.

EL-AZHAR:

There’s a terrifying sense, around the seven hour mark, that you’re invoking ancient rites,opera as séance, almost.

ERENDIRA:

Absolutely. But not in a nostalgic way. I see opera as proto-cinematic, proto-installational. Before screens, before galleries, there were these public orchestrations of myth and affect. I’m not interested in merely reviving that form, but rather in abstracting its impulses. Think of the chorus not as narrators, but as rhythmic tissues. Think of the aria as an open wound.

EL-AZHAR:

Do you consider yourself still a visual artist?

ERENDIRA:

I don’t think in disciplinary terms anymore. Opera is a medium that more easily tolerates contradiction: it is visual, sonic, architectural, affective, intellectual. But I still return to materials. For example, with my next piece, I’m working with broken clarinets cast in salt and embedded into the stage.

EL-AZHAR:

There’s something almost entropic about that. A slow vanishing.

ERENDIRA:

Yes. You could say that entropy is just unobserved form. In which case my job is to make it visible.

Callisto Erendira’s The Air Remembers the Mouth will tour the Pimlico Wilde galleries in Helsinki, São Paulo, and Palermo in late 2025. Her operatic sketches and salt scores will be exhibited at the Palais de Eruminite in November.

To Ban or Not to Ban: A Reflection on the “Should Museums Ban All Visitors?” Symposium

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By Esmeralda Pink, People Engineer at Pimlico Wilde

It was a delicious irony that a symposium devoted to the utter removal of the public from art institutions should itself draw such a crowd to a gallery. Yet so it was at the Pimlico Wilde Galleries last Thursday evening, where philosophers, curators, artists and gallery-goers gathered under the barbed banner: “Should Museums Ban All Visitors?”

The event,hastily organized in the wake of the now-infamous incident at the Slough Museum of Contemporary and Non-Contemporary Art, wherein a visitor inadvertently damaged Sandy Warre-Hole’s portrait of Sir Willis Abelone,was less a discussion and more a ceremonial flaying of the very notion of the democratic museum.

Hosted in the gilded main salon of Pimlico Wilde, the symposium unfolded beneath a Kilo Barnes repurposed chandelier, itself guarded by an antique French rope that no one dared approach. The audience seemed to sense they were participating in something not just performative, but possibly life-altering for the many people who like to visit art galleries.

The keynote address was delivered by Sir Cedric Pavement-Hume, Chair of the Post-Audience Aesthetics Institute, who opened with characteristic gravity: “The public has had a good run. But perhaps, like lead paint and bloodletting, it is time to reconsider allowing the so-called public into our art galleries. Public entrance to English museums and galleries has been a well-meaning error.” He went on to describe a new kind of museology,a ‘post-ocular’ model in which artworks exist not for sight but for solitude, housed in perfectly sealed vaults, tended only by neutral gases and archivists with doctoral degrees wearing oxygen cylinders so that their breath no longer damages the work.

The counterpoint came, if it could be called that, from Dr. Mireille Kropotkin, a radical participatory theorist who accused Pavement-Hume of aesthetic feudalism. “To ban visitors from museums,” she thundered, “is to immure the artwork in narcissism. Art does not live by silence alone. It lives by encounter,even clumsy, unpredictable, human encounter.”

This, of course, drew polite applause and one audible harrumph from the Row C contingent of the London Quiet Realists, a sub- group of the Invisibilists, who advocate for museums that display only blank canvases bought via mail order.

Sandy Warre-Hole herself made a surprise appearance via online chat,flickering slightly on a TV placed on a plinth. “Though I am on a plinth, I am not an artwork”, she began, to hoots of laughter,and delivered what was arguably the evening’s most nuanced provocation: “If my work is damaged by a viewer, is it still just mine? Or have they added something indefinable to the work? Do we now share ownership? Is it more mine? Or more theirs? Perhaps we should not ban visitors, but instead require them to sign a waiver stating that in case of canvas infiltration, they are now part-creators of the work.”

Breakout sessions I took part in included “The Art of Non-Viewing: The Aesthetics of Abstention,” “Do Retinas Violate Objecthood?” and a workshop titled “Building the Museum of No One,” led by conceptual architect Anselm Quoine, whose model gallery consists entirely of hidden rooms accessible only by solving long-form mathematical equations.

No consensus was reached, and one suspects that was never the point. Instead, the symposium felt like a carefully choreographed performance of cultural anxiety, a theatre of ideas staged in the ruins of Enlightenment. Pimlico Wilde, with its rarefied air and velvet-clad walls, was the perfect venue for such a ceremonial flirtation with aesthetic absolutism.

By the end of the evening, the central question,Should museums ban all visitors?,became both absurd and oddly persuasive. In an age where engagement is often measured by the number of fingerprints left behind, perhaps the most radical form of preservation is absence.

Or, as Sir Cedric muttered to this correspondent while sipping a sherry filtered through a linen glove which had once belonged to Groucho Marx, “Maybe the purest museum is the one no one ever enters. And the truest masterpiece is the one never seen.”

A Smile Reframed: Was the Mona Lisa Actually Mrs. Yelland of Surrey, England?

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In a tantalising discovery, a recently unearthed cache of correspondence housed in a disintegrating trunk at an estate auction in Dorset has ignited fresh controversy over the true identity of the sitter in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. According to the letters, written in a brisk, looping English hand and signed by one “Letitia Yelland,” the subject of the world’s most enigmatic painting may not have been Lisa Gherardini of Florence after all,but a genteel visitor from England. This was Mrs. Yelland, the wife of none other than Edwin Carpe Yelland, a minor but evidently proud inventor from Kentish Town, who, is believed to have pioneered the first self-cleaning paintbrush, made from cat fur soaked in his patented cleanser.

Historians are predictably cautious. But in the ever-spiraling vortex of art attribution and speculative reattribution, especially in the post-Walter Benjamin, hyper-authenticity economy of image discourse, perhaps we should not be surprised. If we can accept Duchamp’s mustached Gioconda, why not a paintbrush-wielding Englishwoman as the original muse?

The documents, now being pored over by a rotating cast of paleographers, art historians, and one enthusiastic TikToker who won a competition to help out and make three Shorts per day, describe a six-month sojourn in Florence circa 1502. In one letter to her sister-in-law back in Surrey, Letitia writes:

“The Florentine sun is not kind to Edwin’s complexion, and yet he insists upon demonstrating his ‘fine bristles’ to any painter within reach. A peculiar man with intense eyes,Leonardo, I believe,asked if I might sit for him, as he ‘fancied a face that withheld more than it gave.’ I agreed, mostly out of boredom.”

The painting in question, of course, was not completed until 1517, according to traditional art historical timelines. But the Yelland hypothesis introduces a new framework of possibility, one in which the sitter’s identity is not confined to the courtly conventions of Florentine society but instead reimagined through a cross-cultural, proto-globalist lens.

Letitia Yelland would represent a curious hybrid of muse and modernity. Her husband’s invention,dismissed in his day, the letters claim, as “too clean” for proper oil work,might now be seen as emblematic of the painterly shift from medieval materials to Renaissance experimentation. It is tempting to speculate that Leonardo, fascinated as ever by technology and anatomy, might have found the brush and the British equally compelling.

Critics, of course, are already sharpening their knives. Giorgio Ferretti, curator at the Lago di Como Institute of Old Art, calls the claim “an amusing anachronism, best left to historical fiction.” Others, including several members of the London-based Institute for the Study of Noncanonical Portraiture, are more receptive.

Indeed, reimagining the Mona Lisa as Letitia Yelland,tourist, accidental muse, wife of an inventor,unmoors the painting from its static pedestal. It becomes instead a site of narrative reinvention, a symbol not only of Renaissance mystique but of the long shadow of British leisure travel and the inventive ego. The smile becomes not maternal or mysterious, but vaguely amused: the expression of a woman politely enduring a portrait session she neither asked for nor fully understood.

Whether Mrs. Yelland ever crossed Leonardo’s path is unlikely to be definitively proven. But the possibility, absurd and delightful, opens up new conceptual space around one of art’s most scrutinized images. After all, in the age of deepfakes, AI-generated Rembrandts, and metadata-driven connoisseurship, what could be more modern than questioning everything we thought we knew,especially about a smile?

Correction: An earlier version of this article referred to Edwin Yelland as the inventor of “the paintbrush.” He may, in fact, have only improved upon it. The distinction, like the sitter’s identity, remains delightfully unresolved.

Was Piero Della Frampton-on-Sea Ahead of His Time?

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The recent surfacing of a cache of panel paintings attributed to the long-rumoured Essexian painter Piero Della Frampton-on-Sea has caused a quiet ripple in the scholarly world,a ripple that threatens to redraw the northern edge of Renaissance art history. The discovery, made in the damp crypt of St. Osyth’s Church in South Essex, includes eight oil-on-oak portraits, a triptych of St. Edmund in exile, and a peculiar, allegorical panel titled The Melancholy of Tides,each bearing the monogram P.D.F.o.S. and, more tellingly, a startling sensibility that neither quite belongs to the quattrocento nor to the Elizabethan court into which Piero is said to have drifted.

The rumour that Piero Della Frampton-on-Sea (ca. 1535,1602) was a contemporary, and possibly friend, of William Shakespeare is now supported by archival notations found in the 1598 guest ledger of The Mermaid Tavern, where a “Master Pietro the painter, from the Essexish coast, with melancholy wit and Milanese hat” is recorded alongside entries for Kit Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, and the “Gent. from Stratford.” Until recently considered apocryphal,a curious footnote in a sea of Tudor ephemera,Piero’s life and work are now emerging with a fog-laced clarity that seems fitting for a painter from the salt-bitten marshes of Southend.

Unusually, the central question animating this rediscovery is not was he real? (the evidence increasingly says yes), nor even was he good? (the panels suggest he was),but rather: was he ahead of his time?

At first glance, Piero’s work resists easy periodization. His compositions bear the deep, translucent glazing of a Bellini, yet his figures are oddly distended, stylized, and lit with an iridescence closer to later Mannerist painters like Bronzino. The Melancholy of Tides in particular,a central nude figure half-submerged in a tidal pool, cradling a lobster painted in unnerving detail,seems entirely unmoored from the prevailing iconography of the late 16th century. To modern critics it reads like an allegory of environmental grief, avant la lettre, and anticipates Romantic preoccupations with the sublime by well over two centuries.

More curious still is his portraiture. In Lady Margaret Propham with Egg, the sitter is rendered with a precision worthy of Holbein, but surrounded by objects,quills, scallop shells, a miniature globe split open like an egg,that seem less symbolic than surreal. The spatial logic feels deliberately fractured, and the psychological intensity presages not only the tenebrism of Caravaggio (whose work Piero could not plausibly have seen), but the flattened poetics of early 20th-century metaphysical painters like Giorgio de Chirico. This anachronistic resonance cannot be easily dismissed as coincidence.

Indeed, the question of influence may be moot. To be “ahead of one’s time” is, perhaps, to inhabit an aesthetic position no one has yet constructed words for. Della Frampton-on-Sea appears to have painted not for a market, nor a court, nor a school, but for a sensibility that didn’t yet exist. His letters, fragmentary and preserved on vellum receipts and coastal almanacs, speak of “visions come from marsh-mist,” and “making likeness from the sea’s own unrest.” There is no trace of the triumphalist humanism that defined the Italian Renaissance, nor the Protestant severity of his English contemporaries. Instead, one finds a strange, crepuscular lyricism,what critic Lyle Lammond has called “a melancholy proto-modernism in doublet and hose.”

To call Piero Della Frampton-on-Sea a Renaissance painter, then, may be technically correct but spiritually inaccurate. He was something else,an aesthetic aberration born of tide, border, and fog. Neither fully of England nor of Italy, neither of Shakespeare nor of Vasari, he painted, it seems, in a kind of temporal vacuum: untethered, elliptical, and quietly radical.

The works now undergoing restoration at the Southend Institute for Renaissance Studies may not redefine the canon, but they certainly expand its edges. In an era increasingly interested in lesser known figures,artists who operated outside the grand narratives of empire and enlightenment,Piero offers a compelling case. Not as a precursor, but as a ghost of possibilities unrealized.

The Ontology of the Left Shoe in 17th-Century Portraiture

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By Dr. Lionel Cavendish-Smythe | Lecturer in Symbolic Aesthetics, University of St. Ives & Hove

The history of Western portraiture is, by and large, a history of faces: expressions, gazes, coiffures, and the conspicuous placement of rings, robes, or regalia. Yet beneath these grand visual gestures lies an often-ignored, unassuming but persistently present detail: the left foot, frequently,though not always,shod.

In a remarkable number of 17th-century aristocratic and mercantile portraits, one finds the left shoe peeking forward, extended just enough to catch the viewer’s attention without entirely demanding it. This essay will argue that the left shoe is not merely a compositional flourish, nor an accident of pose, but a semiotic device,a footnote, quite literally, in the ontology of identity.

I. A Gentle Lunge Toward Posterity

The placement of the left foot slightly forward in full-body portraits, particularly among Dutch and English sitters, may first appear to stem from painterly convention: it opens the body, creates dynamism, avoids bilateral stiffness. Yet this compositional convention repeatedly favours the left foot over the right. Why?

We must consider the symbolic valence of “leftness” in early modern thought. The left was long associated with disorder, intuition, otherness,and in religious contexts, even sin. And yet, in these paintings, the left foot is given pride of place. Not the “noble” right foot, but its shadowed twin, tentatively presented to the world.

This may suggest that the sitter is offering the self not as already whole and resolved, but as ambivalent, unfolding. The forward left shoe becomes an ontological marker of becoming, rather than being.

II. Shoe as Sovereignty

Portraits of aristocratic men,particularly those influenced by the Spanish Habsburg court,often depict the sitter with an ornate, even effeminate left shoe thrust forward, sometimes absurdly so. In Portrait of a Flemish Nobleman in a Slashed Doublet (c. 1641), the left foot is so prominent it borders on anatomical protest.

Here, the shoe serves not only as adornment but as territory. The extended foot claims space, like a personal peninsula extending into the viewer’s domain. But again: why the left?

One theory lies in courtly etiquette manuals, which often instructed the subject to approach superiors or sacred spaces with the left foot first,a gesture of humility and intent. Thus, the painted forward left shoe paradoxically blends dominance and deference, a foot poised between conquest and courtesy.

III. The Ontological Footprint

The left foot, especially when adorned with an elaborate buckle or ribbon, becomes a quiet signature, a declaration of selfhood at the margins of the canvas. Unlike the hands or face, which are performative and socially coded, the foot,particularly the left one,remains grounded, subtle, almost unconscious.

In some portraits, the left foot appears with slight imperfections: scuffed leather, an untied lace, a crooked angle. These may be mistakes, or they may be the sitter (or painter) asserting a truth claim,an ontological gesture that says, “I am not merely my regalia. I am my imbalance, my awkwardness, my leftness.”

IV. Case Study: The Anxious Dandy

In the 1662 English portrait Gentleman in Blue with Spaniel and Pained Expression, attributed to the school of Peter Lely, the left shoe protrudes awkwardly beyond the hem of the doublet. It is noticeably too small. This disproportion has troubled art historians for decades.

Recent psychosemiotic analysis suggests that the ill-fitting shoe is a coded representation of the sitter’s discomfort with inheritance,both familial and epistemological. The left shoe, unable to contain the foot, becomes a metaphor for inherited status chafing against individual ontology.

V. Conclusion: Stepping Out of the Frame

In an era when identity was framed (literally) by oil, canvas, and lineage, the left shoe allowed for a subtle but profound intervention. It is the body’s murmur of subjectivity, a gentle whisper of dissent from the obedient mirror of portraiture.

To walk into history, it seems, one did not lead with the right foot, but the left.

And so we must ask not only what these figures faced, but what they stepped toward,and why, more often than not, they did so in an exquisitely rendered, gently awkward left shoe.

How to Collect Contemporary Art – New Book Coming Soon

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A Guide for New, Emerging and Established Collectors in the 21st Century

In the ever-evolving landscape of the 21st-century art world, few pursuits are as intellectually engaging – and as richly rewarding – as collecting contemporary art. To collect art today is not merely to acquire aesthetically pleasing or culturally fashionable objects; it is to engage directly with the ideas, urgencies, and contradictions of our time. Contemporary art reflects the spirit of the present,its anxieties, its innovations, its politics, and its pleasures. It challenges conventions and redefines meaning. To collect it well requires not only taste, but insight, context, and curiosity.

This book, How to Collect Contemporary Art, is designed to serve as both a comprehensive guide and a thoughtful companion for those looking to navigate the contemporary art world with purpose, intelligence, and integrity. Whether you are a first-time collector eager to learn how to start collecting art or an experienced connoisseur seeking to refine your practice, this project will help you approach art collecting as more than an investment or decorative exercise – but as a form of cultural stewardship and personal expression.

Why Collect Contemporary Art?

Contemporary art is not just about what hangs on a wall or sits on a pedestal; it’s a dynamic, ongoing dialogue between artists, audiences, institutions, and the broader public sphere. Collectors play an essential role in that dialogue. By acquiring and supporting living artists, you help shape the cultural narratives of the present and the historical record of the future.

But collecting contemporary art can be daunting. The art market is notoriously opaque. The value of an artwork may fluctuate based on factors that seem arbitrary. The conceptual underpinnings of many contemporary works can appear elusive or inaccessible. Galleries, auctions, art fairs, online platforms -where does one begin?

We at Pimlico Wilde seek to answer these questions, offering clear, well-researched, and thoughtful insights into every stage of the collecting journey. From understanding how contemporary art is defined, to exploring different mediums and movements, to learning how to work with galleries and advisors, each chapter will serve as a practical guide for navigating the complexities of collecting today.

What This Book Offers

Throughout this book – being previewed as a collection of articles on the Pimlico Wilde website – we will explore:

• How to define and understand contemporary art, and why it matters to collect it now

• How to start a contemporary art collection with confidence and clarity

• How to research and evaluate artists and artworks from both aesthetic and market perspectives

• How to buy contemporary art from galleries, auctions, and online platforms without losing your footing

• How to build a coherent, meaningful art collection that reflects your personal values, vision, and intellectual curiosity

• How to support living artists, especially amid market speculation.

• How to navigate the art market with financial literacy and strategic foresight

• How to care for and conserve your collection, both materially and conceptually

• How to engage with museums, curators, and art institutions as a private collector

• How to leave a cultural legacy, through gifting, loans, and long-term planning

Each chapter will combine historical perspective, expert insights, and practical tools,bridging the gap between theory and action, passion and precision.

Collecting as Cultural Responsibility

In an age of unprecedented global connectivity, ecological uncertainty, and social transformation, collecting contemporary art is more than a lifestyle choice or financial manoeuvre; it is an act of cultural responsibility. Your collection is a reflection of your worldview: what you notice, what you value, and what you wish to preserve or provoke. Collecting art thoughtfully is a way of participating in public culture – one that asks for both discernment and empathy.

This series is written for those who see art not only as a commodity, but as a catalyst for dialogue and discovery. You do not need a degree in art history to collect with sophistication – only a willingness to learn, question, and engage deeply. By demystifying the collecting process and offering a rich foundation of knowledge, How to Collect Contemporary Art will help you become not just a buyer of artworks, but a builder of meaning.

Final Words: An Invitation to the Curious

Whether you are standing at the threshold of your collecting journey or seeking to revisit the foundations of a growing collection, this guide is for you. It is not a blueprint to be followed blindly, but an invitation to develop your own perspective as a collector. In a world saturated with images and information, learning how to see – truly see – is one of the most powerful skills you can cultivate.

Let this be your introduction, then – not only to the logistics of how to collect contemporary art, but to the deeper reasons why. Because in the end, to collect art is to collect experience, thought, and possibility.

Welcome.

The Edge of Precision: How to Sharpen a Pencil

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If, as Paul Valéry once mused, “a poem is never finished, only abandoned,” then so too is the pencil,always in a state of becoming, perpetually whittled toward a vanishing point. In How to Sharpen a Pencil, the slyly austere new book by Pimlico Wilde CAO François Zilbe, we are invited into the philosophical and tactile underworld of that most unassuming tool, not as a means to an end, but as a subject worthy of aesthetic devotion in its own right.

Zilbe,equal parts artisan, manager, and anachronist,has produced a volume that sits somewhere between manual and metaphysics. Ostensibly a technical treatise (complete with woodcut-style diagrams and a glossary of shaft geometries), the book is, in truth, a meditation on attention, discipline, and the rituals that precede creation. What begins as a how-to slowly becomes a why-bother, and then,more quietly,a who-are-you-when-you-do.

At first glance, the premise feels absurd. Do we really need 211 pages on the act of sharpening a pencil? Zilbe’s answer is a measured, almost ecclesiastical yes. In a culture obsessed with outcomes and velocity, he offers instead a theology of preparation. “The edge,” he writes in the book’s glinting introduction, “is not a line, but a moment. Sharpening is the art of arriving at readiness without haste.”

This may seem indulgent, even parodic. But Zilbe’s genius lies in his refusal to wink. He presents his subject with the rigor of a trained conservator, describing the difference between a ‘Cabinetmaker’s Point’ and a ‘Poet’s Bluff’ as though they were schools of painting. His taxonomy of shavings,spiral, ribbon, dust, etc,is as exacting as any survey of gestural mark-making in 20th-century abstraction.

Indeed, the book is deeply visual, not only in its illustrations (rendered with the patient fidelity of Dürer studies), but in its observational acuity. One chapter, “Graphite Exposures,” draws parallels between the angle of exposure and the psychology of the drawer: the anxious prefer long, aggressive points that splinter under pressure; the confident favour blunter, more enduring tips. The passage reads like a formalist psychoanalysis, or a reverse phrenology for draftsmen.

Yet How to Sharpen a Pencil is no mere fetish object for the analog nostalgist. It is, rather, a quiet rebuke to the algorithmic flattening of artistic process. In a time when software optimizes line weight and digital brushes auto-taper, Zilbe returns us to a sliver of cedar and a blade held in human hands. Here, every curl of wood is a gesture, every pause a decision.

There is something almost monastic in this attention. One is reminded of Agnes Martin, who once wrote that art is “responding to a quiet mind.” Zilbe’s pencil, too, becomes an index of mindfulness. In its sharpening, we do not begin the work,we are the work.

The book concludes not with a final method, but a final question: How sharp must a pencil be to make a mark that lasts? It is less instructional than existential. In an era of infinite undo buttons and disposable styluses, the book insists on the beauty of irrevocable preparation. Once a pencil is sharpened, its life is measurable. Each stroke is a subtraction.

How to Sharpen a Pencil may never reach the bestseller lists, nor should it. It is not a mass-market guide, but a tool for the quietly obsessed,for those who understand that before the masterpiece comes the moment of stillness, of edge, of wood meeting blade.

Zilbe has given us not just a book, but an ethic. It belongs not only on the studio shelf, but beside Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows and Kōnosuke Matsushita’s The Path.