Oscar Murillo: The Flooded Garden review - my
inner Pollock could not be contained
================================================

Look at me - I'm Jackson Pollock! Doing action
painting in the Tate Turbine Hall!

I usually dread interactive art. I prefer to
look at art silently, passively and, assuming
it's good enough, to absorb its nuances and
meanings slowly. Why do some artists insist on
making us doers rather than observers? Queuing
with my family to enter the oval arena that
Oscar Murillo has set up for us, the masses, to
paint his latest work, I even started
questioning the financial side. Murillo is a
successful artist who will also open a doubtless
lucrative show with Gagosian this summer. And he
expects people, especially children, to paint
his latest hit for free? Seeing his own fussy
works on display in Tate's Tanks, I suppose he
needs all the help he can get.

At this point I was not planning to give Murillo
my painterly fluids. Yet by the time we got to
the reception point where staff tell you the
"rules", I couldn't resist taking one of the
long brushes arrayed in plastic trays, feeling
its heft, length and soft hairs. Before me
expanded a vast forum of canvas, with paint-
covered trolleys standing at regular intervals
where people of all ages - but with a large
cohort of the very young and their parents -
were busy adding whatever they felt like to a
giant communally-created immersive painting.

The installation is inspired by Monet's Nymphéas
(Water Lilies). The great impressionist
repeatedly depicted the garden he designed at
his house in Giverny, lingering over the giant
pads, pink flowers and still, reflective water
of his lily pond.

The most radical, abstract and dreamlike of his
Water Lilies are in the Orangerie in Paris. The
shape and size of Murillo's installation recalls
the two specially designed oval galleries where
Monet hung them as a memorial to the dead of the
first world war - a space for memory and
reflection, resonating like music.

If you want to experience The Flooded Garden in
that quiet contemplative spirit look down on it
from the Turbine Hall bridge. From here, it's a
lovely oval of blue. The enthusiastically
dabbed, smeared and pooled paint may not have
the illusionistic depths of Monet, but it does
have an aquatic cool that's refreshing on a
summer afternoon.

When you go inside the painting arena, however,
it is less harmonious. All around you are
graffitied names, cartoonish creatures, flowers,
clouds. Though one person had painted a luscious
wave of abstract blue in the style of the late
Howard Hodgkin.

I've always wanted to see big, sublime paintings
in the Tate Turbine Hall. Ever since I had a
hard hat tour before it opened, I dreamt of
seeing Pollocks, Rothkos, Rileys and Twomblys on
these vast grey industrial walls. But they say
the Turbine Hall isn't safe enough. Now, though,
I've got the chance to create the modern
painting it deserves.

Is it just summer fun? As I sink the brush in a
mound of thick, gooey blue paint that slimes and
slides as I stir and dip, it feels more real
than that. More primal. Here with the false wall
in front of you, in the Turbine Hall's vast
cavern, we're connecting with the artists who
made handprints and dots and portraits of
animals in caves 30,000 years ago. Like the
stone age artists we've just got to make our
mark, however simple. It is tempting to stick
your hand in the paint and make your impression
that way.

Instead I start with some dots, mere specks of
blue in the great cloud of colour. Then I try
painting actual water lilies but they are
unrecognisable so I turn them into eyes. Making
a mark worthy of the canvas is not easy. The
sheer size of this oval surface and the giant
gallery looming over it makes your own efforts
look tiny. Is that what Murillo wants us to see,
that we're just microscopic elements in a
collective creative cloud?

But a memory is calling. "I reject the easel
painting," says the American voice, cigarette in
mouth as he paces around a horizontal canvas,
flicking paint. "The modern painting must be on
a mural scale. It must be an action painting".

I put the brush into the paint again and roll it
about until I've got a top-heavy dollop. I stand
back from the canvas, and raise the brush. With
one strong flick I send the blue flying through
space to land in a curly streak on the surface.
Chance and physics have created something much
more alive than anything I could have
consciously shaped. And to scale with the place.

Let's make this wild! This time I take a run up.
I dash forward, flick the brush to arc a long
blue line through space.

Then a Tate team member intervenes. Please can I
stop doing that? The children might copy me. But
I was just trying to imitate Jackson Pollock, I
try to explain.

The Flooded Garden is irresistible. It taps into
a euphoric urge in us all - anyway it did in me.
Paint is energy, it is life. Every kid knows
that. Now I remember it, too.

  * Oscar Murillo: The Flooded Garden is at Tate
  Modern, London, until 26 August




^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This article on the web:
  https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jul/22/oscar-murillo-the-flooded-garden-review-tate-modern

All content (c) The Guardian