Doors as Art

The working week ended on an aesthetic high today as, during the course of the wanderings-along-corridors that, in part, passed for this particular week’s ‘work’, I encountered something that stopped me in my tracks in the interests of aesthetic contemplation.

The something or, rather, things I found so visually arresting were in fact doors, but not just any old doors (obviously). These were pairs of double swing doors, to engineering workshops, & were perfect examples of the sort of thing that must have inspired Gary Hume to make the early ‘door paintings’ which first brought his art to the world’s attention.

The doors in question were painted a vivid scarlet gloss, richly applied & holding the brushstrokes as gloss paint does in such a wonderfully painterly fashion, giving too the very particular highly-but-indistinctly-rather-than-sharply-reflective surface redolent of numerous layers of application. Framed in complementary grey, the red doors appeared most striking, their intensity increased. Whilst some of the sets of these doors along the corridor had glass porthole windows set into them, others were ‘blind’, having instead circular recesses (it has since occurred to me that these may have in fact been formerly windows subsequently painted-over), at adult head height, thus being completely red apart from a very dark brown footplate, beautifully composed ‘pictorially’ in a minimalist-modernist fashion & these in particular captured my attention: very ‘Humesque’ & aesthetic, substantially physical yet, viewed straight-on, reflecting nothing, appearing a deep, red void of indeterminate & quite possibly infinite depth, a fascinating effect & a profound aesthetic experience. Unquestionably, these doors were art, whatever the functional intention & their purpose might have been (& of which I had no requirement as such, enabling me to contemplate them as 'useless': indeed, as something about the doors suggested they were locked, the functional aspect, the 'use value' of them allowing passage from one physical space to another seemed to have been suspended, if only temporarily), & such was my experience of & appreciation of them: would that I have been carrying a camera to record something of the wonder & beauty of their nature.

As a gloss surface also invites an interactive appraisal, moving across & closer to the surface of the paint/doors revealed the lush nature of the brushstrokes, the manner in which they had been applied, laid over one another, ‘hatched’ & curving in the circular recesses, & a variety of aged (given some of the references), smoothed graffiti beneath, both suggestive of numerous coats of paint & a sense of history & memory embedded in the doors’ physical form as richly sensuous objects, which indeed they were.

All in all a wonderful experience, perhaps the more so for occurring where art might not have been conventionally expected to be found. Not bad for a Friday afternoon, at least.