I have known John Beard for a number of years and have followed his work with interest. In February 2020, he asked me if I might consider writing something about a work he was creating, inspired by Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa. I was intrigued, in part because it sounded so different from John’s other paintings, but then COVID hit and travel restrictions meant that there was no way I could see what he had made. Digital images were available, but I didn’t feel I could form an opinion on the basis of reproductions, no matter how faithful they might be to the original.
A year later (this year) I finally did see John’s version of the Raft, displayed on the far wall of the immense medieval tithe barn near Salisbury which Johnny Messum has adapted for use as a contemporary art gallery. I found the experience extremely moving, all the more so because of the conjunction of work and setting. John’s monumental, monochrome version of Gericault’s masterpiece, shown in low light in a vast timbered space of great antiquity, at once grand and functional, struck me as a kind of contemporary altarpiece.
But how to write about it? To me, it was an invitation to speak once more (as John’s work itself does) to the work of art that had originally inspired it, and to discover where that might lead. So what follows is not really a conventional catalogue essay, in the sense that it is not so much a piece of writing about John’s work, as a piece of writing inspired by it. I begin, as John did, with The Raft of Medusa itself; and I end up, as I believe John does, wondering what it might have to say to us now.
If I had to distil that message to its essence, I would say this. The Raft demands that we remember what empathy truly is. Beyond that it, demands that we understand that fellow feeling comes at a necessary cost: namely, the duty to help those who suffer shipwreck on the ocean of life, not just stand and watch the spectacle of their struggles. This is the tithe it exacts from us.
John Beard’s unsettlingly dark and mosaic-like homage to Gericault’s great painting is both reminder and warning. It presents an occluded version of the original Raft of the Medusa, recreated to scale but broken up into carefully squared-up monochrome fragments. The pieces are arranged on the wall according to the order determined by Gericault’s own composition, so it is less like a picture puzzle than a raft that has come to pieces. There are gaps for the eye to fall through (like the interstices in the original raft of La Meduse, through which some slipped on their way to drowning).
Integral to the work is the very low light level prescribed by the artist as part of the experience of looking at it. So low is it that some time is needed for the eyes to adjust sufficiently to distinguish the forms for what they are: bodies on a raft, bodied forth in light and dark, their contours emphasised by myriad cross-hatchings that recall etching more than painting.
The artist has not said much about his work, other than that he wants those looking at it to feel as though they might actually be on the raft – but perhaps that is enough. The subject of his melancholy creation is surely the difficulty of re-seeing The Raft of the Medusa, and therefore re-feeling the sense of the universal human predicament that it embodies, at all this distance of time.
The artist’s devices – the fracturing and colour-purging of Gericault’s original image, the lighting, the evocations of printmaking and, by association, reproduction – are all obstacles of a kind. But they might also be metaphors for all that stands between us and a true perception of what is going on in the world: our failures of attention, the distractions caused to us by all the white noise produced by our many and relentless information technologies.
To see the picture, we have to put it together in our minds, light it with our imaginations. Only then can we try to decide what it means; and deciding that is surely just the beginning of what we are supposed to do with the whole experience. There are works of art which invite looking, and there are works of art which incite action. The distinction matters. There are still people who need our help. The Raft of the Medusa is not some old story. The suffering that it reveals has not gone away.
Andrew Graham-Dixon, June 2021
