John Kørner: Venice Lido Light

A sunset-headed man and a woman with long brown hair are sitting on the sand with their backs to each other. A tall Campari sunburn apparition walks towards them waving – ‘Hej! Ciao!’ – while a single turquoise adidas Spezial and two plump strawberries float by. One, a novelty cultivar, is emerald, while the other is more universally accepted. The sunny thought bubbles of the apparition and the classic berry conspire to make the weather.

A painter of problems that take shape in reality finds himself painting in a city literally sinking under the weight of intractable troubles. Cocoon-like problems continue to manifest – a row is posing on a horizon, look – but never as a reaction to something gone wrong. On the beach, his mental clouds are precipitating doubt about how to picture a place that is already so saturated. No masks. No vedute. No Death in Venice. No Jeff in Venice.

Yet overexposure is one of John Kørner’s resources, looking directly into the rays. The diver is somehow diving upwards, breaking out of the sun, jumping into a pure reflection. He’s also falling sideways, skimming lagoon syrup and crab nebulae. Thought vapours form more easily around suspended detritus. Watch, the tiny bubbles hug the olive. Elsewhere beneath the surface, algae bloom in the nutrient-rich shallows and the microorganism–shrimp–flamingo collaboration thrives in the super-brine. Tutti frutti often includes glacé cherries, candied orange peel, and rum-drowned raisins. Spumoni is a moulded triptych: pistachio, cherry, chocolate. Stracciatella is more event than flavour, melt hitting cold churn – snap, shatter, scatter. But John knows that taxonomies fail under scrutiny. Each begins to slide under the glare.

The effervescent thought mass hovers in the air: Memphis Milano laminate, terrazzo shards, slightly bitter crystallised angelica. It thickens as the moist air rises, cools, and folds, causing droplets to collapse towards the base in bulbous cloud clusters that sublimate before the ground can register. A watermelon-rind ramp leads into it, a spill of narrative, an unexamined and unnamed cumulus. John remembers two silent forms held in the sky, lingering just long enough. Two human beings greet each other atop a sculpture of one of the reef-like concretions known as tegnùe which marine biologists have mapped off the Veneto coast. ‘Held back’ in Venetian dialect. A fishermen’s coinage, as nets were routinely snagged on these hidden masses. The diver? Surfaced. Vanished. Either way, gone.

If that’s the magic opal Adriatic on the right, we must be looking north, towards Sant’Erasmo. Another strawberry is asserting its political intention. The lightweight and low-cut trainer (originally designed for elite handball players) has circled around over the city and is now flying out into the gulf towards a sfogliatella cosmic object. Two apples sit where the path turns down to the Spiaggia di San Nicoletto. The looming morel mirage is on the inshore side because the mushroom-rich Cansiglio Forest sits inland, on the hilly limit of the Veneto region. The sky is not a platform, John has perceived.

The fingers of the waves reach for the strip of beach, nails foaming as they drag back. We must now be facing south, towards Pellestrina. The filter is pushed to 100; the sky opens and thought ruptures into a bokeh burst, a flurry of lens flare and ozone. The frame is burning through, bubbling and melting into a saturated retinal bouquet of light glitches, filigree, murrine, alum and tin mordants.

Rosso rubino seduces through tiny particles of gold suspended within the molten glass. The hue is not a pigment, but a physical effect produced by the scattering of light from nanoparticles, a phenomenon of optical interaction not chemical coloration. Select is fruitier than Campari; the latter sits at the drier, more austere end of bittersweet, while Aperol leans in bright and eager. A vitreous furnace of crimson, once extracted from insects, once worn in ecclesiastical vestments. John chooses Campari.

The sky splits, smoke and sugar fill the sinuses. Choreographed peonies and chrysanthemums, willows and palms arrive in sequenced delay – each a particulate combustion above Giudecca. The air screams, crackles, and rushes, the canvas congeals with ceremonial residues, dry and metallic, drifting over dark and aqueous.

Making his way back from the studio in the dark once more, the painter is walking the length of the Fondamenta delle Zattere, crossing Ponte de Ca’ Balà (in honour of salt cod), passing Spirito Santo, over Ponte dei Incurabili (in memory of the untreatable), Ponte de la Calcina (after quicklime), turning away from the slapping water, cutting through the sotoportego and joining Rio Terà Foscarini, onwards through to Ponte dell’Accademia, spanning, stepping, then threading through loiterers on Campo Santo Stefano – before finally veering left, right, left. The problems persist. Insoluble, posed differently, moulting into unvarnished doubts. No nostalgia. No need. No more.

 

Text © Max Andrews, 2025