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Presences (c.1956-66)


 

 
In the summer of 1955, the artist is commissioned to tour Spain by Ambassador magazine on behalf of the British textile trade. Accompanied by the photographer Jay, travels to Granada, Cordoba, Segovia, Madrid, Seville, noting numerous impressions for textile designs. The artist's discovery there of a 'persistent visual tension', is translated into numerous patterns drawn from a wide range of sources, including cobblestones, sickles, stucco in village walls, and Azulejos in El Greco's Toledo house. Contributes Pattern in Contrast: Hot, Dull-Cool, Bright, 'a colour impression by Louis le Brocquy' (Ambassador, No 10, London 1955). Three leading textile firms issue the designs: David Whitehead, Furnishing prints; Seckers', woven silks, and Horrockses, Fashion prints, one famously worn by Princess Margaret. Inspired by the violent contrast of sun seen through lattice blinds in Andalusia, designs Sol Y Sombra (1955), the seventh tapestry to date, conceived to hang vertically or horizontally as evidenced by date and signature. Identified as le Brocquy's only abstract work, the design coincides with a momentous change about to take place in his painting. The extensive tour of Spain in the summer of 1955, signals a turning point in the work. The summer of 1955 signals a turning point in the work: 'One day while passing through a village in La Mancha in shimmering heat, I stopped spellbound before a small group of women and children standing against a whitewashed wall. Here the intensity of the sunlight had interposed its own revelation, absorbing these human figures into its brilliance, giving substance only to shadow. From that moment I never perceived the human presence in quite the same way. I had witnessed light as a kind of matrix from which the human being emerges and into which it ambivalently recedes ­ with which it even identifies'. Le Brocquy's revelatory vision of whiteness is curiously echoed by an earlier experience while living at Albert Studios, recorded by Anne Madden: 'Snow had blanketed the city during the night. He woke to a white world with no relation to yesterday's actuality, silent, unmarked, as he walked out in the morning and crossed Albert Bridge Road into Battersea Park. As he moved through the stillness of the other world without footprint, the only sound the thump of snow from an overweighted bough, under the little bridge he was crossing a heron rose suddenly from the matrix of snow, hung in the air quite still for a moment, then flapped away in slow motion.' ...