Rewind: Linda ONeill
Wynick/Tuck Gallery, Toronto
Perhaps the most challenging endeavour that an artist can take on in todays art world is figural painting. With certain exceptions, figuration has been left behind, driven underground by more conceptual and abstract art practices. In most critical accounts of painting since the 1940s, and through Clement Greenbergs influence, it has become accepted that abstraction and formal purity are characterized by a suppression of recognizable subject matter. This opened painting up to the order of the physical presence of the painted surface, and the aspiration to paint naturalistically passed into second place.
Linda ONeills exhibition Slow Float reactivates a traditional, formal understanding of painting so that form becomes the subject as well as the object of the work. The paintings are about a way of seeing, but more specifically about the doubleness of vision that, formalized, becomes an image with the potential to break down the figure/ground barrier. It is evident that what absorbs ONeill in the initial stages of painting is the problem of constructing different layers of matter and giving them solidity while simultaneously generating a convincing illusion of water and reflected sky. In some images, such as In the slow float of a different time and deep, the result is a reverse landscape of the real where the sky and the ground change places.
Painted images of landscapes are often dismissed as trite in todays art market. This is partly because they belong to the world of illustration, but also because they engage the universal language of paintingdepth, movement, forms, contours and colourwhich painters take for granted, thus tending to downplay the conceptually active and critical dimension of their art. Of course realism and figuration have been equated critically with bad painting, and often rightly so. Since the 19th century, much figurative art has been getting steadily stiffer and stiffer; consequently theres the sense that only a Fischl or a Freud can come to its rescue. Accordingly, what is welcome in this body of work is the sense of potential that emerges through ONeills handling of the medium. There is a traditional authority about these works, a denial of the pictorial surface that permits the investigation of an inductive experiment in painting. We glimpse it through the films, barriers and optical nuances that the artist confronts and celebrates. These devices arrange the meeting between the sensual order of an eventin which mark-making is front and centre and strokes and tones predominateand its representational form. It is almost like action painting in reverse. The upshot of ONeills emphasis on underlying structure is a push-pull rebuttal of simplistic attempts at mark-making. By inference, the work is a rejoinder to todays pervasive post post-painterly abstractionism from the side of notation and perceptual art.
Spring 2003
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