Review: Entranced by Witching hour
It’s not often I make my way to an exhibition with the conviction that I could have been one of the artists proudly displaying his work.
That was how I felt with The Witching Hour – Darkness and the Uncanny.
Only a couple of weeks ago I carved my very own Jack O’Lantern for Halloween. A scary job I made of it, too. (Jack was the spit of Wayne Rooney, though slightly prettier.)
What I expected from The Witching Hour was the usual Gothic ghoulishness that has been part of the visual and literary lexicon since Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, and has now turned into a clunking cliché courtesy of the Twilight franchise.
What I found was something... different.
Curators Matthew Collings and Matt Price have opted for an elastic definition of ‘‘the witching hour’’.
The artists included in the exhibition – who all come from the West Midlands or have strong connections to the area – discombobulate and disturb with their work.
But all art should do that, not just the Gothic strain.
Some of the exhibits do deserve the ‘‘darkness and uncanny’’ label.
Toby de Silva’s images from his series Immortal, for instance.These are photographs of martyred saints who are said to have been taken to a remote church on the border of Germany and the Czech Republic, where they were dressed in the most lavish regalia of the period.
I was hypnotised by these gloomy, brooding photographs that are so rich in dark detail they could be Caravaggio oils. It was particularly satisfying to gaze at photographs of richly dressed skeletal figures, and know for certain that I wasn’t looking at snaps of Victoria Beckham in Heat magazine.
