In my early teens I went to see a big Magritte exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London. It was a real blockbuster – there were segments about it on the BBC, and Magritte fever fairly shook London to its roots. I went with my older brother Paul who loved Magritte. It was an incredible experience, so much Magritte in one space: bowler hats, apples, pipes. I was delighted and unnerved, both at once, both sensation feeding the other. It remains one of my primal experiences of art.
Delighted and unnerved. I alway bring that heightened combination of emotions to Vectorpark, whose classic puzzle-adventure-thingy Windosill has just landed on Switch. I bring this combination of emotions even though Magritte is, I suspect, only one of the influences at work. Vectorpark, also known as Patrick Smith, makes playfully unsettling toys. In his back catalogue, alongside Windosill, which I promise we’ll get to in a bit, there’s an alphabet toy in which you can play the ribs of a living creature like a xylophone. There’s a sandcastle toy that takes exactly no words and only a few seconds of your day to remind you that all is vanity. Vectorpark’s stuff is always a surprise, but somehow it’s always coherent too. I play it and through my bedazzlement I still find myself saying: of course!
If you’d asked me a while back, I would have told you I place Vectorpark stuff on a continuum between Magritte and someone like Gaudi. You have that sort of matter-of-fact juxtaposition of elements that are rarely juxtaposed elsewhere that you get from Magritte – the world up-ended with a nod and a shrug. And you get that mixture of the animate and the inanimate, that question of whether something is ceramics or anatomy, say, that I associate with Gaudi, who would make a cathedral from the spine of a whale if he was so moved.
