Nothing But Good: Caroline Walker / Edouard Manet

Saturday 11 June 2016

Caroline Walker / Edouard Manet

Edouard Manet

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

1882

oil on canvas

96 x 130 cm

I can’t remember when I first saw ‘A Bar at the Folies Bergere’ by Edouard Manet but it’s the painting that always comes to mind when I think of the things that make me most excited about looking at paintings and making them myself. Manet’s work in general, and this painting in particular does so many things at once. It tells us about the illusionistic space of painting and its own materiality, but also about the world beyond the picture place, making a social comment on the time in which it was made. The positioning of the figures and their reflections make it a spatial conundrum that can never be solved, yet its language of realism makes it utterly believable as a moment in time; a universally recognisable exchange between two people.

The paintings I love looking at the most are both an oblique mirror on the world we live in, and something much more subjective and personal. It’s that space between the familiar and the unknowable that makes me come back to this painting again and again and what keeps me painting.

Caroline Walker, 2016