Lord Anthony Cahn

It is rare to meet an artist who, in complete freedom, strives to keep the fervor of the creative act intact. Such is the case of Lord Anthony Cahn, whose artistic thinking has turned his sole medium—the wall—as the subject of art into a legible object that expresses his inner world, always with uncommon power and energy.

Lord Anthony Cahn prolongs the life of this almost humble, anonymous material—which, despite being made of stone, concrete, or earth, often goes unnoticed in the cityscape—and defines a sensitive space within it, constantly pushing reality further. Coming from the asphalt, every form becomes a pretext for manipulating reality.

The poetic play of the works never ceases to unsettle memory. Lord Anthony Cahn delights in provoking it with traces on his walls that he rescues from oblivion, preserving their precious shell of the past. Tiny remnants of worlds, fragments of everyday life, and old scraps come together in those magical places, the walls, where the artist plays with space and time with irony and at times tenderness. In this way he draws up an inventory of our present-day societies, where the cruellest violence rubs shoulders with messages of hope.

These walls, at times almost like fossils, are sculptures in their own right. Whether monumental or small in scale, they are hieratic symbols rising towards the sky in forms where age-old symbolism allows the stone to express its defiance of time. Their practical value is stripped away, leaving only their eloquence to shine through. They are a kind of almost definitive portrait of all civilisations – at once inquisitive, ironic and, at times, tender.

Capturing the world, the artist moulds forms, adorning them with colours, texts or images where the shadow hollows out and reveals the rough edges of the wall. The colour palette, with a certain preference for earth tones and greys, is enriched by shades ranging up to monochromes of silver or gold.

Lord Anthony Cahn’s walls are very much part of a reflection on art. A distinctive art form which, through its very ease, captures the eye; a consistency to which he has conferred a new nobility that restores – indeed, better reveals – in its silent splendour one of the often-overlooked facets of the world’s architecture: an economy of means that defines a genuine realm of lived experience.

Bearing trace-like forms, they assert themselves—whilst giving full account of the formal mechanistic effects and the act of creation—as places of encounter and action. Each wall leads on to the next, both similar and different, so that each appears to be a fragment of an infinite series. And therein lies the strength of Lord Anthony Cahn’s work.

Françoise Docquiert, art historian, exhibition curator, senior lecturer