How do you solve a problem like Van Gogh? As a contemporary artist, can you make a show in an institution which bears that most familiar of names without gilding his myth? In Arles, Laura Owens's delicious, brilliant response has been to smother him. On the exhibition’s first floor, seven Van Gogh paintings, on loan from various international institutions, are hung against a visually overwhelming floor-to-ceiling wallpaper, dense with graphic motifs, luminous colour and trompe l’oeil detail. (One room seems to have been covered with googly-eyed stickers from a child’s activity book; in another, a facsimile of a handwritten note from Owens to a friend appears to have been pinned to the wall.)
The wallpaper patterns are drawn from early 20th-century designs by a little-known British designer, Winifred How, and an unknown French artist. That they are lost to art history while the Dutchman looms so large is an object lesson in the vagaries of fame (and a reminder that Van Gogh was never the naïf outsider so often portrayed). Safely enclosed by their elaborately gilded frames, Van Gogh’s paintings seem a little prim, a little stiff: just one more detail to draw the eye in Owens’s glorious all-over composition. As with the camouflaged protagonist of his Giant Peacock Moth (1889), your attention might initially glide right over them.
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