Eric Brown: Starship Summer

The exhibition consisted of two separate sets of Matt Sommers’ work: the emotion crystals for which he was famous, and his more recent paintings. These latter were no mere graphic representations of visual subjects, but abstract pieces created from memory plastic, so that the picture within the frame changed constantly, consecutive scenes linked thematically to the last.

An increased buzz of chatter heralded the arrival of the artist. He stepped into the dome flanked by two officious-looking individuals: a suited silver-haired man in his sixties who was the mayor of Magenta, and a tall woman who carried her glamour with a distant, disdainful hauteur.

Between them, Sommers appeared reassuringly ordinary: he was an artist, and had nothing to prove by power-dressing or putting on a pose. He wore baggy trousers spattered with flecks of memory plastic, and an old shirt open at the chest to reveal a mat of unkempt grey hair.

Sommers was in his early seventies, a big, strong man with an open face and curly hair gone grey. He looked around the group and nodded to friends as the woman struck her champagne glass with a stylus.

When silence descended, she said, “Magenta has been privileged for many years now to be the home of the Expansion’s finest artist, who needs no introduction from me. The Arts Bureau of Chalcedony is proud to be staging this exhibition, Matt’s first in two years, the highlight of which is the series of graphics entitled Towards Infinity. I hope you will enjoy…”

Conversation resumed; people milled around the exhibits; Sommers was surrounded by admiring guests.

The crystals were arrayed on two long tables in the centre of the dome, while the graphics were displayed on free-standing dividers around the periphery.

I took a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and looked around for a familiar face, but saw neither Hawk nor Maddie. I moved around the tables in the middle of the dome, laying hands on the emotion crystals. I was familiar with them from Vancouver, but the examples of Sommers’ work I had experienced there had been copies only, pale imitations of the real thing. Now, as I caressed crystal after crystal, vicariously experiencing a slew of emotions as raw and real as my own, I came to see why Sommers was regarded as one of the very best artists in the Expansion.

Not only did the emotions invested in each crystal hit me with a clarity that was almost shocking, but the integrity of these emotions spoke to something deep inside me. I had experienced other artists’ crystals in the past, but those had been meretricious gee-gaws, done quickly and cynically to communicate emotions as universal as love and hate, happiness and joy.

With Sommers it was different.

He had created the crystals sparingly, releasing items only when he felt he had something relevant to impart. Now I experienced the emotion of love in its true ambiguity, the consuming passion that is often tinged with anger and frustration; I felt Sommers’ anger too, but an anger that acknowledged its origin in the artist’s own self-doubt and uncertainty—the ambivalence that is at the core of all of us.

I came away from the display deeply moved; it felt as though, briefly, I had been made privy to emotions I recognised but which, until now, I’d never had the insight to acknowledge.

The visuals were another matter. They were his latest work, the centre-piece of the exhibition, and were therefore attracting much attention. However much I tried to appreciate the vast rectangular designs, I was unable to comprehend what they were attempting to communicate. After the crystals they seemed shallow, mere abstract designs with little or no emotional content—pretty patterns that most of us, with technical coaching, would have been able to produce. Which, I told myself, was the reaction of the philistine: the fault was my own, an inability to appreciate the language of the form.

Then I saw Maddie, and my pleasure at glimpsing a familiar face was soon replaced by puzzlement. She was moving along the display of crystals, pausing before each one and touching it, but only briefly. This in itself was not unusual, but what made the scene so bizarre was that she was wearing on her right hand what looked like an oven glove.

“Maddie?” I said, coming up beside her.

She beamed at me. “Mr Conway,” she said, slipping the glove into her shoulder bag.

“Less of the formality,” I said, pretending I hadn’t noticed her sleight of hand. “I’ll answer to nothing but David. What do you think of the exhibition?”

“The crystals are so… powerful, don’t you think? They put you in touch with what it is to be human.”

Someone appeared at our side. “Which is what art is all about.” It was Hawk, smiling at the catalogue he was holding up before him. “Or so it states in here. According to our illustrious Arts governor, Hermione Venus, ‘Sommers communicates his vital essence in a powerful range of unsurpassed works of genius’.”

Maddie tut-tutted. To me she said, “Hawk had a fling with Hermione last year. He’s yet to get over the experience.”

Hawk grunted. “Venus swanned into the yard looking for scrap which she wanted to turn into art. She was everything I disliked in a person: vanity, pretension and a breathtaking egotism.”

“So Hawk tried to cure her in the only way he knows.”

“That’s unfair, and you know it,” he remonstrated. “Venus threw herself at me, and I was stupid enough to respond. Which, I think, is understandable. I mean, look at her, Conway. Admit it, she’s beautiful.”

Venus stood before a nearby graphic, a contemplative finger to her lips. Six feet tall, slim as a ballerina, she had elegance and poise and—Hawk was right—an undeniable Latin beauty.

I nodded. “And she knows it.”

Maddie said, “Would you be smitten, David?”

I shook my head. “Not my type.”

Hawk defended himself. “I was low, hadn’t had an affair for months, and then Venus decides she wants to slum it with a barbarian. I mean, who am I to refuse?”

“You’re so gallant, darling,” Maddie mocked.

“What is it with you two?” I said, glancing from Hawk to Maddie.

Hawk laughed. “We love each other, really.” He stopped and looked across the dome to the bar. Hermione Venus had moved from the exhibition and had cornered Matt Sommers who was gripping a bottle of beer and trying to appear politely interested in what Venus had to say.

“Come on,” Hawk said. “Matt looks like he needs rescuing.”

As we moved to the bar, I hung back to observe the reaction of Venus to Hawk’s sudden appearance. She was laying a hand on Sommers’ sleeve with cloying familiarity, and stopped talking suddenly when she saw Hawk.

“Oh, Hawksworth. This is an awkward time—Matt and I were just discussing the possibility of an exhibition in MacIntyre.”

Sommers smiled diplomatically, but I sensed his relief at Hawk’s arrival. “It’ll do some other time, Hermione. Look, why don’t you come over to my place next week, and we’ll discuss it then?”

“Why, that’s so kind of you, Matthew. I’ll hold you to that.” And she swept away, giving Hawk an icy smile en passant.

“Just in time,” Sommers said. “I could have been here for hours. What are you drinking?”

Sommers bought a round of beers and Maddie introduced me. “A friend of ours, just moved to Magenta. David Conway.”

“Welcome to Magenta, David,” Sommers said, taking my hand in a strong grip. He spoke with a slow, confiding Alabama drawl, his every word accompanied by a smile.

I mentioned that I was from Vancouver, and that my wife had stocked some of his reproductions.

Sommers shook his head, as if in wonder. “Know something, David? I still find it hard to appreciate that people across the Expansion buy my work.” The sentiment was, I thought, genuine, and not false modesty.