Anish Kapoor @ The Royal Academy

There is a work in the first room, When I am Pregnant. It is easy to overlook as the rest of the room is filled with pigment sculptures emitting rich colour and beguiling form and to look at this piece in comparison is to look at nothing. It is to see other people looking at nothing. That is the first thing one sees,  other viewers peering and pacing around it. It is to focus on an empty bit of space. It is like seeing something that is not there and is hence like witnessing a shared hallucination. It is to see the wall melting and to also see an artwork melting into the wall. If one stands around three foot directly in front of the work these optical effects are at their most powerful. It is dizzying to try an focus on what form might be there. Viewed from the side, it is a line, pure and 2-dimensional. As one walks around to the front of the work the line shrinks and eventually disappears. Viewed from about a metre away, it is nothingness but as one steps back more it appears once again as a spotlight. I was once pregnant. Now I am not. It was something both evident and invisible. The wall is impregnated with an idea, those intangible foundations of creativity. It breaks down the physicality of space - what is wall and what is not wall? The closer one is to the work, the less one can see it. 

Much of Kapoor's art works on the same basis. To view his work is to see other viewers looking in awe at nothingness or what is not really there, at an optical illusion. For it is the empty space, this reflecting space that creates an aura for the work. The aura that eats up space by creating something illusory that we perceive as physical. The viewer completes the work, indeed it is just as intriguing to watch people looking at the work as to look at the work itself. In the mirror works they look at their own reflections and reflections of the gallery, really quite ordinary things that now appear marvelous. Stand in the right place and one can even disappear. Viewers are abstracted in the same way as the architectural forms around them. The mirror brings together these distorted forms to create a surrealist composition. The mirror works are particularly effective in the Royal Academy compared to say in a white cube because the gallery space is so evidently a gallery space, it has more formality to be broken down. The other great theme in Kapoor's work is pigment which is an equally anarchic presence in the gallery. It exists outside of the confines of a canvas and crashes onto walls and floors. There is an obvious violence to the canon that fires pellets of pigment repeatedly at the gallery wall but it is also evident in the stately procession of a huge block of red wax which plows through the galleries, smashing pigment across the doorways. The building itself becomes the sculptor carving the form into a cast. Viewed from the front each room temporarily appears painted red as the pigment trundles through.