Hit The Rodin Jacques

This was the first event in a culturally cluttered weekend with Guy and Ali who'd come up from Cornwall for a few days. Classical sculpture has always left me cold, the quest for perfection and the flawless application of technique with all individual expression seemingly drained from the work. I'd kind of lazily lumped Rodin in there too, but was utterly gob-smacked at this show. Here technique was used as a jumping off point to satisfy a hungry desire to capture the human form in all it's imperfection, even grotesquery. The famous pieces, The Kiss and The Thinker were maybe a little too well known to really pack a punch but the epic Burghers of Calais was awesome. For the first time sculpture seemed to be able to offer way more than painting with it's puny two dimensions. You could walk around these pieces and every time you stopped there was a brand new masterpiece to take in.

There were a number of pieces where a similar pose was cast and re-cast in an obsessive attempt to get to it's essence. The preparation work was mightily impressive too, though some of the sketches were little more than back-of-fag-packet jottings, which should never have seen the inside of a frame, a series of watercolours with a woman half wearing a pair of pyjamas radiated pure sensuality. Stunning.