"I Wish I'd taken More Photographs" Isaac Andrews: Brussels
“Real art has the capacity to make us nervous,” the formidable critic Susan Sontag proclaimed in her seminal essay “Against Interpretation”.¹ When I first read this many years ago, Sontag offered me an alternative mode of attention: to let the sensations of colour and depiction move through the body without constraint, and to remain open to the possibilities of intimacy. Her critique grants sensuous, affective and embodied responses their own critical validity, allowing feeling, desire, love and loneliness to inform our encounters with art.
The nine oil paintings in Isaac Andrews’s exhibition I Wish I’d Taken More Photographs invite viewers to interweave their own affective and emotional worlds with his. Andrews’s first solo exhibition, it marks a pivotal moment in his career and includes his largest painting to date, the eponymous I Wish I’d Taken More Photographs. Although they depict semi-fictional worlds across deliberately flattened surfaces, the works possess genuine psychological resonance and depth. Wallpaper, patterns and fabrics shape domestic interiors that become psychological spaces, within which scenes unfold like cinematic stills.
The paintings’ two-dimensionality serves a distinct narrative logic: they do not seek to imitate reality and contain no single light source. Instead, they become vehicles for emotional states—whether desire in I Wish I’d Taken More Photographs, loneliness in What Was Left, or togetherness in You Are Love. For Andrews, painting is not simply a window onto the world, but a means of accessing the feelings through which life is constructed. Rendered in a palette of orange, teal, burgundy and lime, these sentimental works collectively form figurative meditations on personhood and on the dreams, desires, emotions and relationships through which it is shaped.
Four of the paintings depict flowers—odes to the liminal states of growth, life, wilting and decay. At first glance, three of these may not register as floral compositions: an oxblood-burgundy field dominates the delicate lines that traverse each canvas. Dear April, however, offers an intricate meditation on the fragility of rebirth and the unpredictability of life itself. Although the image appears two-dimensional and fixed within its frame, its flowers seem caught in motion. Looking at this painting, its tender pinks and shades of white and black wash over me with a sensitivity I had not felt in some time, opening my heart to the possibilities of painterly gesture and artifice.
In a world of visual saturation, where images curate lives in grids on our phones and photographs punctuate reality, the subtle sensations that dwell beyond the frame are often overlooked. By declaring I Wish I’d Taken More Photographs, Andrews articulates a simple yet profound desire: a recognition that life is composed of intimacy and moments of internal and external connection, and that within these snapshots we may contemplate what makes us human.
The beauty lies in Andrews’s ability neither to eclipse nor overdetermine these points of connection, but instead to bear witness to them. If, following Sontag, we approach art through the sensations it produces rather than reducing it to interpretation, we can look at these paintings and feel. The longing to have taken more photographs also acknowledges what photographs inevitably miss: rumination, psychological resonance and the fleeting textures of experience. Andrews prompts us to look again. -- Hatty Nestor
¹ Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 8.
