Painting Blind

Eleanor Birne at the LRB:

Over the next eighteen months he painted all the Cadaques subjects and ‘largely forgot’ he was painting blind. Black Windows (2006) is a result of this process. It’s a view of a traditional Spanish street – white houses, green shutters, orange roofs – with a figure in a hat standing at the street corner gazing down. It’s hard not to see the figure as Mann himself, drinking in the scene the real man can’t. Green and white and shades of purple and yellow dance on the canvas. It’s the scene as felt recreated in paint, a sort of synaesthesia at work.

Many of the paintings have a strong feeling of warmth or heat about them, generated by the vibrancy of colour. In Infinity Pool III, three women in red, green and black bathing costumes lounge in a beach hut.

more here.