Polly Gould | Alpine Architecture: Dent du Géant

Danielle Arnaud, London, February 2020

The mountain Dent du Géant, part of the Mont Blanc massif, translates as ‘Giant’s tooth’. A craggy canine cutting through a snow-capped gum, Polly Gould’s choice of watercolour is unexpected here. The flatness of the medium softens the mountain’s extremity, lending the painting a dream-like quality; a climber’s mirage. In the tonal shifts of the mountain’s greys and browns, the negative space of snow, we almost forget what it would be like up there. The thin air and the freezing temperature; exhaustion overridden by determination.

On top of the mountain sits something strange, futuristic even; a purple and yellow structure, almost half the size of the page. It is made up of individual pyramid shapes, tent-like, the translucency of the paint revealing their convergence to a central point. The nature of watercolour, with its subtleties and softness, acclimatises the viewer to the appearance of this alien structure in all its precarity, somehow managing not to tumble from view. Drawing on Bruno Taut’s conception of a utopian city in the alps, Gould presents us with her vision of refuge. A refuge not only from the elements but also, as art so often is, a refuge from the world around us - an architecture that we can duck into, removing ourselves from the ascension of our own lives, just for a moment. A tentative suggestion of utopia, balanced on the tip of a Giant’s tooth.