‘Hear the voice of the bard!
Who past, present and future sees!’

So said William Blake in his majestic ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience.’  William Blake, a man of many idiosyncracies, was himself the unfortunate sufferer of a form of epilepsy that, so the saying goes, allowed him to see his visions in three dimensions. As a boy, he saw angels hovering above a tree. Young William Blake, far from being slightly freaked out by this sight, was able to walk up to these angels, to move around them, to look behind them and see from where their halos came. And so this vividness of vision transmitted to his poems.

Artists are often influenced by the ‘other’ and this, some might say, is a leitmotif of Blue Rim’s spring-summer collection. How else does one explain the story of Paul Binnie: a man, brought up in Scotland, trained in Paris, who becomes the world’s preeminent living woodblock printer? Or Sebastien Munoz, who eschewed the catwalks of Paris to take pictures of breathtaking colour and and beauty amidst the solemn solitude of Mongolia? Or even our latest acquisition, Sebastian Marchal, the great French photographer, who settled the unspoilt isle of Reunion; who now sees his new home with an epic eye; epic in a cinematic, Stanley-Kubrick sense (behold the photo, a primal Reunion sky, above); epic in a way that is so removed from the voyeuristic quotidien of one his many predecessors, that old pervert, Gauguin.

Blake’s pathologies were realised in art. Is this love for the ‘other’ another form of pathology? A type of cultural fetishism that itself recalls the ‘dark, satanic mills’ of Blake’s nightmares? A fetish in which artist and gallery are complicit and guilty…?