John Banting (1902-1972)

The present work shows a dislocated but playful composition based on the tension between fluidity and shapelessness on the one hand and control and geometricity on the other. The strings (the three lines) hold the image and dislocation in check, echoing the square of the piano keyboard on the other side. Organicity and ordering - a fundamental contrast so recurrent in Banting's works -, or, we might say, reason and imagination are, after all, the two "components" of music, feeling and structure, both mutually suspending each other, and thus creating a third reality, almost intangible and inaccessible.

We are very grateful to Michel Remy for his assistance in cataloguing the present lot and lots 20 and 22.