41. 41AR ART & LANGUAGE (1968) Lovely Hostage I 2016 Signed, titled and dated on the back Mixed media on canvas Glass plate 65 x 78 x 5 cm Provenance Mulier Mulier Gallery, Knokke Private collection, Brussels David Batchelor: This series of Hostage paintings can be broken down into four more or less distinct elements - the landscape, the coloured band, the areas of compressed paint, and the glass - which, in the finished works are made to interact or interfere with one another. I would like to talk about these elements, starting with the landscape. I know the motif derives from an actual row of trees in a nearby field, but in the paintings they seem to exist more as a landscape token, a landscape-in-quotation-marks, than the result of direct observation. This is partly because the motif has been repeated so many times. Mel Ramsden: We had always had an interest in painting something which has a certain local existence - something somehow incompetent in respect of a secular, cosmopolitan, modernism. Interview with Art & Language. A Conversation in the Studio About Painting: David Batchelor