Review

Culture

Music

23 September 2023

6 min read

Imagining our heart’s fragile condition

The songs and sketches of Paul Simon and Charlie Mackesy invites us to seek out sacred answers. Belle Tindall reviews their Sevens Psalms collaboration.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A illustration of a boy sitting in a field with his back to us, above him is a heart shaped cloud.

Paul Simon’s Seven Psalms – Illustrated by Charlie Mackesy.

No.9 Cork Street Gallery

Paul Simon and Charlie Mackesy are the duo we didn’t know we were missing. Well, their collaboration means that we need miss them no longer. In their joint exhibition in Mayfair, Charlie’s artwork is a visual tool with which to ponder Paul Simon’s latest body of work.

Simon and Mackesy

I once read that if you’re looking for the answer to the meaning of life in a pop song, look to Paul Simon. I think whoever wrote that is right. His best-known songs are now decades old, but it doesn’t seem to matter - they’re timeless. And maybe that’s why; he has always written of permanent and universal things.

For example - You may think that he’s crafted an ambiguous tale about two mischievous childhood friends who used to wreak havoc 'down by the schoolyard’, but what he’s actually offered us is a song that gives language to the unexpected and unknown aspects of life. The times that feel like a pathless expanse, the moments that knock us off course, the occasions where we are forced to admit that ‘we don’t know where we’re goin’, but we’re on our way… ’.

And what may, at first glance, appear to be a direct message to an iconic character in The Graduate (Mrs Robinson) or a New York Yankees player (Joe DiMaggio), is actually a song that mourns a loss on behalf of us all. It laments the disappearing of ‘grace, dignity, privacy and fidelity’ in public life – the attributes that ‘our nation turns its lonely eyes to…’

You get the sense that Paul Simon tells the truth, even when he’s spinning a tale.

And then, every now and again, he strips away the fictitious and releases the hymn-like ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ or the haunting ‘Sound of Silence’, reminding us that he is concerned with the deepest and truest aspects of existence. His latest body of work, Seven Psalms, is one such offering. But before delving into it, there’s Charlie Mackesy to consider.

Mackesy is an artist who diagnoses our wounds and heals them all at once. As discussed at length in a previous article about his immense impact, his work offers an antidote to our loud and crowded lives. His modern fable - The Boy, the Mole, The Fox, and the Horse - allows us to escape into a fictitious world that feels so much kinder than our own, while also acting as a tool for deep introspection. Charlie puts language and image to our heart’s beautiful yet fragile condition.

And this is undoubtedly why his work has garnered such incredible success. His film is Oscar-winning, his book is best-selling, and his paintings are a fixture of this cultural moment. Charlie’s thoughts adorn therapy waiting rooms, his words are taught in school classrooms, and his images are simply everywhere. It’s hard to think of someone to whom the world is more openly and obviously grateful.

And there we have it: the duo that dreams are made of (it feels appropriate to give Art Garfunkel an honourable mention at this point - what is it with Paul Simon and iconic twosomes?). Now, without further ado, onto their recent collaboration.

Seven Psalms

Seven Psalms is a thirty-three-minute-long body of work. I reference the length, as opposed to the number of tracks, because Simon has released it as one continuous suite of songs; un-skippable and un-shuffle-able. The album makes the most sense as a whole, as a continuation, as a journey. The listener is not in control of how it is listened to, rather, they are tasked with letting it wash over them. They must surrender to Simon’s stream of thought and follow his ponderings to their end. It’s interesting how much un-learning that takes.

I’m no music critic, so I will leave the delineation of the technical details and musical mastery to Rolling Stone, and instead focus my attention on the profoundly spiritual dimensions of this body of work.

And with such, it is hard to know where to begin. There is not one song, in fact, there is not one line, that is not dripping with theological thought. I’m not sure how to sum it up, except to re-iterate Paul’s own understanding of what he has crafted – he has written seven Psalms.

The first song in the interlinked line-up is ‘The Lord’. The chorus of which goes like this:

The Lord is my engineer

The Lord is the earth I ride on

The Lord is the face in the atmosphere

The path that I slip and slide on

These four lines, a re-working of which re-appear as interludes throughout the album, are not pondering the existence of God (which, as Francis Spufford often says, ‘is surely his most boring characteristic’), but the nature of God. This album assumes God’s existence, in fact, it completely hinges upon it. Therefore, it is questions such as - How does he work? How is he present? How do we experience him? How can we perceive him? – that are held within these lyrics.

It seems to me that those are also the questions that Charlie is pondering in the drawings that adorn the walls of Frieze Gallery. Each one is unmistakably a ‘Mackesy’ piece, he is easily identifiable, it is as if he leaves a piece of himself in every frame. What I found particularly interesting about this collection of work, all of which were created in response to him listening to Seven Psalms, is his use of clouds. They are not an uncommon feature in Charlie’s work, but in this context, they caught my attention afresh.

Both the songs and the accompanying sketches create an atmosphere that invites us to seek out sacred answers, to take the time (thirty-three minutes to be precise) to ponder truth and ask the most vulnerable of questions. We see strikingly simple silhouettes of people doing just that in Mackesy’s work, and they’re almost always doing so underneath an imposing canopy of clouds. Clouds that look dark and heavy, clouds that look so light they’re touchable, clouds that are formed in the shape of a heart, even. They vary, but they’re almost always there. I could be wrong, but I don’t think Charlie thinks that we ponder such things alone – his drawings make it seem as though whoever is ‘above’ stoops down to engage in our pondering. If there is a God, he listens in. If Heaven exists, it comes close.

And that, just from his use of clouds. I could write a whole other piece on his use of ‘posture’, and then another on colour. But perhaps you should just go and see for yourself.

Seven Psalms asks the permanent questions, the ones that transcend time, space, and matter. But it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. On the contrary, it is time-stamped for this moment. One of the most striking lines declares that ‘the Covid virus is the Lord’, as is ‘a meal for the poorest of the poor’, ‘an open door to the stranger’ and ‘the ocean rising’. The questions that Paul Simon asks of God directly relate to the questions he then asks about us and this earth we call our home – social justice, ecology, community – his perspectives on such things all seem flow from who the ‘Lord is’. Or perhaps it’s the other way around, the genius is that we’ll never know.

Again, Charlie’s sketches of bustling refugees all walking in the same direction or a mother hitchhiking with her child on what looks to be a bitterly wintry night, lead us to sit with the very same thoughts.

Truthfully, I am all too aware of how inadequate this, or any, review of this collaboration is doomed to be. Paul Simon knew this album transcended words, that’s why he called upon the genius of Charlie Mackesy. So, do yourselves the most profound of favours and spend thirty-three minutes in their company. I say thirty-three minutes, be warned, the impact of their work will reside with you for far longer.

‘Seven Psalms: Illustrated by Charlie Mackesy and Inspired by the Words and Music of Paul Simon’ is a free public exhibition that is running Tuesday-Saturday until the 27th of September 2023, at Frieze Gallery, No.9 Cork Street, Mayfair, London.

Article

Art

Belief

Culture

24 July 2025

5 min read

Critics and curators are missing this about contemporary artists

An interview with Jonathan Anderson

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A metak sculpture outlines an altar, stands on a beach.

Kris Martin, Altar.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, many modern artists engaged with religion in and through their work but art critics and art historians routinely overlooked or ignored those aspects of the work when writing about it. They did so because of a secularisation agenda that overrode reflection on key elements of the art that artists were creating.

In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture, Jonathan A. Anderson, together with William Dyrness, recovered some of the religious influences explored in the work of key modern artists by writing an alternative history of modern art. Now, with The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Anderson has addressed the central issue, which is the way in which art critics and historians have written about modern and contemporary art.

JE: What is it about this situation – that modern art has often wrestled with God, but critics and curators haven’t always shared that focus – that engages your interest and motivates you to write so compellingly about it?

JA: The more I have studied and circulated through the worlds of contemporary art (first as an artist, then as a critic), the more attentive I became to significant disconnects in the ways we talk and write about religion in modern and contemporary art. Many prominent artists working today and over the past century have been shaped by religious traditions, and their works are in serious dialogue with those traditions in various ways and from various perspectives. Their relationship to religion might be highly conflicted or nuanced—it often is—but it is a live issue in their work and one can talk with them about it in their studios or in informal settings. But when one moves to the critical writing and public discussions about these artists’ works, this aspect either disappears altogether or is discussed in ways that are clumsy, stifled, or shapeless.

The aim of a lot of my work is to understand in a non-superficial way why this has been the case, why there has been a recent resurgence of discussions of religion and spirituality, and how we might develop more substantive ways of thinking and speaking about these topics.

JE: What did you find most surprising as you undertook the research for both books?

JA: I am consistently surprised at how sprawling and dense this topic is. Once one begins rethinking ‘the strange place of religion’ in the histories of modern and contemporary, the more one finds that there is an enormous amount of material that deserves renewed investigation. Both books give a strong sense of this, but chapter three in my new book is especially full of sign-pointers toward items that require further exploration.

To give one concrete example, I found myself referring to several major curated group exhibitions that, in one way or another, significantly address topics of religion and spirituality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. As I began to look more seriously at the history of such exhibitions, this curiosity swelled into a huge endeavour. Over the course of several years, I assembled a long list of exhibition catalogues and other documentation—the most comprehensive list of its kind that I’m aware of—which in turn helped me not only to recognize how prevalent interest in these topics has been but to think through the diversity of approaches. A version of this list is published in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art as an appendix, and the full, updated list is also available on my website. I hope it’s a valuable resource for others.

JE: Both books offer ideas and suggestions for constructive ways to understand, address and write about the relationship between art and religion going forward. In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture there is the idea of a charitable hermeneutic, while in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art you offer substantial new frameworks for discussing art and religion. Why is it important that the dialogue between art and religion finds paths to conversation rather than conflict?

JA: This is an important question. The public dialogue between contemporary art and religion has been relatively dysfunctional for much of the past century, often riddled with mutual antagonisms, melodramatic controversies, misunderstandings, and mutual unintelligibility. But art and religion are complex, vital domains of meaning that have continued to deeply shape each other up to the present and that have an enormous amount to ‘say’ to one another today, both critically and constructively. My own experience is that the more the participants in this conversation become attentive to and conversant in the other’s history, vernacular, and ways of thinking, the more highly constructive and mutually enriching the dialogue becomes.

I think this kind of dialogue has everything to do with cultivating mutual care and love of neighbour. The art world is a series of loosely connected communities full of people who are your and my neighbours. I happen to really care about these communities who make, exhibit, and talk about art, despite their problems. And the same might be said about various religious communities, who have their own problems and who often have more complicated interrelations with those art communities than is generally recognized. Wherever you’re coming from—the arts, the church, or otherwise—I’m interested in expanding dialogue oriented toward loving one’s neighbours, or even one’s enemies if that’s how it must be. At the most basic level, that means listening in a way that tries to discern others’ animating cares and concerns.

JE: Do you see any parallels or differences between the way the relationship between secularism and religion has played out in the world of art and the way the broader relationship between the two has been shaped in Western society in the same period?

JA: This is a fascinating but complicated question. For some people, the whole point of the artistic avant-garde was to enact and exemplify, in a highly concentrated way, the secularization of Western society. At the same time, however, it was also widely recognized that the arts have, in almost all places and times, been deeply interconnected with religion and spirituality, and this was, in some conflicted or repressed way, still likely the case for much of the avant-garde as well.

Secularization has meant the pressurizing and pluralizing of religious belief, sometimes corresponding to disaffiliation from traditional organizations, but this has relatively little to do with an eradication or obsolescence of religious belief. Indeed, any notion of what Rosalind Krauss memorably described as an ‘absolute rift’ between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the secular’ is really just shorthand for some kind of social conflict, because there’s not really any rational way to absolutize these as mutually exclusive. Whether acknowledged or not, religion still provides the metaphysical and ethical groundings of modern secularity, and modern secularity provides the social conditions for contemporary religion. In this context, distinctions between religiosity and irreligiosity are often ambiguous, running through each of us in unexpected and ever-changing ways (rather than simplistically separating us from each other). In my view, contemporary art is highly illuminating to these broader dynamics. Anyone who has spent any extended time in the worlds of modern and contemporary art knows that they are full of spiritual and theological struggle. To put it succinctly: contemporary art is not an art of unbelief and nonpractice but an art of conflicted, pressurized belief and practice, which is theologically significant if attended to as such.

The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Jonathan A. Anderson (Notre Dame Press)

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