The Human Stain

Again apologies for a few lean months. I did stay in a French chateau in July that had some very troubling artworks, but that was a holiday, not business, and not really a hotel, so I don't think it really counted.

This, on the other hand...

Poster paint on card.30cm x 50cm

This is from my bathroom in a room at the InterContinental San Francisco. I am a chemist by training, and so my first thought was of carbon rings. But what might that signify?
The picture is annotated in pencil with what looks like 'Humangerm'. It isn't clear whether this enigmatic scribble is supposed to be a title for the work or a pseudonym for the artist or perhaps both. I was mystified, although my girlfriend perceptively suggested that - this being San Francisco - it might be a reference to AIDS. And indeed, there was another picture in the living room that shamefully I don't seem to have photographed that looked to me like atoms, but which could also look like virus particles.
It certainly has the feeling that it's meant to disquiet. But sharing a bathroom with a painting about AIDS is maybe a bit *too* disquieting.

It Was The First Time That We Met..

Barcelona!

This has been the first entry for several months. Sadly, I appear to have spent my most recent travels in hotels with relatively tasteful decor. But returning to Barcelona this spring, a city that has already given us one blog entry, I have been overwhelmed with an embarrassment of riches once more, as the Catalan joie de vivre appears to lead hoteliers into enthusiastic bulk purchases of questionable value.
This is a nice, 5 star place, not far from the Ramblas, and apart from one rather bold abstract above the bed that's just you know, fine and all, every frame on the wall holds a corker.

My favourite has to be this one, from the bathroom:

Ink and watercolour on paper, 40x60cm

What are these? Towel rails? Trumpets? Axles? All we know is that it is only number 69 of 70 similar works that 'Ruester' appears to have drawn in 1991. The watercolour has been applied in a brown wash to give the paper the appearance of old parchment, as though this was a sketch dashed off by Leonardo for some astonishing device that was centuries ahead of its time. It taunts us with its enigmatic lack of form.

No such lack of form for our second contender;

Ink on paper. 30x50cm

Apologies if this is a bit blurred - the light isn't very good in the corridor. Here a woman in flowing robes peeps coyly from behind a fan, as we survey the offering in the bowl in front of us. Is she a Flamenca? The robe looks more toga-like than Andalucian. Is she concerned? She might well be - she appears to have given us three anchovies in a glass bowl, the whole picture is tilted at a Hitchcockian angle, and in the background a terrible storm appears to be raging, and a fish is flying - or swimming - past. These are all ground for concern, I would argue.
This one is, the signature tells us, no 11/30 in a series by E. Albardane, '91.  I think I'm beginning to detect when my room was furnished...


And then next to it there's this:

Paint on paper, 20x20cm

Is it me, or does that look like a crime scene? A series of bloody fingerprints left on the wall. The artist - the signature is indecipherable - has painted the central off-white area as a little miniature canvas in the centre of a large sheet of paper. This is number 77/99 in the CSI: Barcelona series.

The last one is not, strictly, hotel room art. Actually it's from one of the public areas downstairs. But I loved it so much I had to include it. Voila:

Poster paint on paper.

I didn't get a very good look at this one, but it's obviously a landscape - a tree to the left, a building against a hillside to the right, a country road, perhaps, in the foreground. For a moment I took it for Japanese-style calligraphy, but actually it's just painted in a very... shall we be charitable and say 'naive' fashion.

So once more then, let us say Viva Barcelona!