I went to the V&A today to see Donatello’s sculpture works. Although it was less about Donatello but related to similar styles or influenced by him, worth to see at least once for whom study Deleuze’s Logic of Sensation. I personally think it would be a different perspective on Egyptian Art, which Deleuze mentioned as tactile art, before and after.

I thought I already understood what are the differences between extreme tactile image and visual image, but now I realise that I misunderstood entirely. Donatello’s work, in a sense, is a valuable source to understand the betweenness of tactility and visuality following his flattened relief style. It would be worth to write a longer essay than in the diary, and I could write more than an essay, but as it is a personal diary, I’m contented to mention here first with some images.

Relief, compared to sculpture and painting, has a unique position in the figurative world. It places itself in between flat and cubic, something like a half-figure that is trying to escape from the flat surface. It is actually what I felt from Donatello’s early works. They all look like Han Solo who was frozen in his coffin.

Scared by unavoidable death. Stopped time and frozen in a spatiality of time.

But because it is less cubic or three-dimensional and flattened on the surface, it feels less tactile but more like a painting separated from the temporal sense. But the question is, what is the concept and notion of “time” why always that concept keeps coming back to the art practice? layers? dots? lines? It might be (again) worth to write down what I think about the concept.