Cardo’s Bar (Black) 1979

Curator: Here we have Howard Hodgkin’s “Cardo’s Bar (Black),” held within the Tate Collections. Editor: It feels immediately like a memory, blurred and tactile, doesn't it? As if touched, perhaps, with melancholic longing. Curator: Yes, the lithographic process certainly lends itself to that. Look closely at the layering of inks, the way the black frame almost seems built up, a physical barrier. Editor: The arches, though...they speak of a specific place, perhaps, or a shared cultural understanding of interior spaces. Curator: Hodgkin often blurred the lines between abstraction and representation. The title gives us a clue, but the materiality itself is the subject, the way the image is constructed through labor. Editor: Yet the subconscious symbolism lingers. The curve of the arches, the warmth of the reds against the black—inviting, but also contained. Curator: Perhaps it’s about the tension, then, between the constructed image and the feeling it evokes. Editor: A fitting end, a memory of a bar then, caught between a feeling and a place.