For senior curator Justin Paton, John Reynolds’s Table of dynasties is a good place to end – or begin – your tour through Brought to Light.
Over several days a couple of weeks ago, this work grew like a small art-city in front of the last and largest wall in the gallery.
It’s the result of John’s rummagings in a book called the Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms. But where dictionaries impose order on art, John cheerfully disorders it.
He’s taken hundreds of terms out of the dictionary and brought them back into the material world, spreading them in silver ink across more than 1,650 small paintings, from ‘abacus’ all the way through to ‘zeitgeist’.
They’re all stacked up on one long table – and by long, I mean enormous. The result is a kind of art historical jumble sale, a teetering heap of history and culture.
The work was inspired by tables stacked with products that Reynolds encountered on the streets of Hong Kong. And it’s a great work to see at the end of a big collection show, because it insists that art history isn’t a procession of masterpieces bolted to the walls forever. It’s up for grabs and up in the air.
A permanent work in progress.
Brought to Light 