Céline Condorelli’s Pentimenti (The Corrections), in Room 31 at the National Gallery only works if you let it. Intriguing, disarming and seductive, Condorelli’s work occupies a gallery dedicated to 17th-century French painting, a room dominated by several works by Nicolas Poussin and by Philippe de Champaigne’s imposing full-length portrait of Cardinal de Richelieu, Louis XIII’s first minister, and a collector of Poussin’s art.
Some will find Conderelli’s low-key intervention puzzling at best, if not infuriating, among the works by Claude and the Le Nain brothers, and above all Poussin, the enigmatic and sometimes haunting and bawdy classicist. Condorelli’s presence does not interfere. A printed rug on the floor, called Bulk: Everlasting Colour; a dyed textile, The Sun Shines Through a Hole in the Clouds, is slung beneath the skylights overhead; a series of shapes – The Force that Seems to Beckon – are painted on the metal grilles set into the floor over the gallery’s air ducts, and a four-channel audio Uprisings (Troppo Lento), composed by Hannah Catherine Jones (AKA Foxy Moron), plays from beneath the grilles. All this is less an ensemble of discreet artworks by the National Gallery’s current artist in residence, than a starting point.
