Dr Ben Street

The pleasure provided by this work is one very separate from that of Caulfield’s paintings. It’s one of opacities and transparencies intersecting and undermining each other, of things seen as both solid and elusive at once. Drawing can do that, and what it in turn does to the visual world is to subject it to a kind of scepticism.

Caulfield’s looking, which is dramatized in the range of actions of his drawing hand, is a hard stare at the world of objects generally thought of as transparent things. On the whole, we look through, not at, grapes, and in a sense they only become visible to us when they start to rot and shrink. The same might be said for the other subjects of Caulfield’s drawings: bouquets, brushes, lamps, pipes, jugs; all these are objects that are submerged in the backgrounds of our lives up until the point that their failures restore them to visibility.

Caulfield’s drawings show these things in a suspended state of noticing. What we are seeing is a moment of clarity, in which the opacity of things, however briefly, makes itself available.

Read my 2023 text on Patrick Caulfield’s work on paper on my Substack - link where it usually is.