COLVILLE
ANDREAS SCHULTZ
Germany | 2008, 66’

SESSION 10
15th NOV | 14h30
Museu Colecção Berardo - Sala Polivalente

“I suspect that what troubles people about my work, in which they find mystery and intrigue, may well be the idea that ordinary things are important”

This is a film about why painting will always be important - as a means to defend our memory against the barrage of images and to rmind ourselves of the temporality of our lives. Alex Colville, now aged 87, is Canada’s most celebrated living painter...
Where others see nothing more than what is before them, Alex Colville sees nothing but what is before him. He gives form to what others only sense diffusely, letting them see it in his work: the fragility of existence, its emptiness and the threat of failure. Emptiness has been a secret theme running through American culture. To speak of it has been taboo. But some have managed to paint it - first Hopper, then Colville.
“Civilisation is a kind of fragile shell, which can just split under your feet and then it is all over.
People feel that this could happen in my paintings and find this deeply irritating. I am more conscious of the possible immediacy of something like that than perhaps some people are.”