MySpace
"MySpace" by Richard Rhodes, Spring 2007, pp. 14-16
If the resurgence of figurative painting had a moment of inception, it was in Germany, at Documenta IX in 1992. In Kassel's Aue Park, temporary pavilions for painting showcased Gerhard Richter and a handful of other painters, among them the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans, who presented a group of small canvases, including his 1988 series Die Zeit.
Predictably sleek, bright and big, the Richter abstracts looked like they belonged. The Tuymans works, on the other hand, were tiny, dun-coloured things, knotted with rough, rudimentary brushwork. It was as if a novice painter was next to a master–and yet the Tuymans paintings were riveting. Their awkwardness belied a ruthless eloquence. Wavering pine trees in a striped landscape, a quaint village scene, an empty display window, an architectural postcard and a low view of a shower-room ceiling milked image sources linked with the Nazi concentration camps. A cold-eyed resummoning of their era, the paintings communicated the banality of evil as well as the corrupted innocence and naïeveté that supported it. If they appeared elementary, it was because they were starting over, making a new beginning from an ethical and representational ground zero. Though they hung small on the walls, they sounded an expanded order of ambition for contemporary painting.
In the years since, Tuymans and other European painters (Neo Rauch, Michael Borrëmans and the Vienna team of Muntean/Rosenblum) have continued to push figurative painting into the politicized philosophical arena in which Leon Golub and Philip Guston once stood alone. Painting has regained its relevance–socially and professionally. It has re-established a life for images beyond photography and the mass media. It stands as an alternative to conceptualist art-making. Once buried by art theory, it has returned to reconnect with centuries of art and to anchor contemporary art to its accumulated weight of experience. From Tuymans's Documenta pictures onward, it has carried an unspoken mandate: to confront both who we are and where we come from.
In Canada, painting shows have gathered increasing momentum–at the National Gallery, with a Guston retrospective in 2000; the Art Gallery of Ontario, with "The Shape of Colour" in 2005; the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, with recent Anselm Kiefer and Rauch solo exhibitions; and the Vancouver Art Gallery, with "PAINT," which closed in February. Of all of them, "PAINT" has produced the most interesting catalogue. Why? Well, because of Vancouver’s abiding identification with photoconceptualism. It seems like an adventure for the VAG to take on painting, and it shows in the texts brought together for the catalogue, which circle and worry painting’s return.
In her introduction, the catalogue editor Monika Szewczyk reveals the partisan roots of the show, explaining that “conceptual is most often used to signal articulate thinking in art…[while in painting] the cognitive operations involved rarely start with fully formed concepts.” She quotes the curator Neil Campbell’s idea that painting provides access to “mentality in the broadest sense.” It is something “not necessarily rooted in the verbal.” This sounds like faint praise, but the point is to underscore the “psychedelic” or mind-expanding capacities of painting. In another text, the well-known international painter Peter Schuyff, in an e-mail exchange with Michael Morris, sounds put off by the terms of this new attention: “i’m told we are to talk about painting blah blah blah. i’d hoped that with this move to europe painting might start to speak for itself. fucking vancouver. i mean really. talking about painting…i believe vancouver’s critical theory is stuck in between what should not be talked about and what does not need to be talked about.”
That said, there is nonetheless a sense of a developing conversation and renewed consideration in the catalogue. In his essay “A Change of Mind,” the California-based critic and painter Thomas Lawson tells a story of coming from Scotland to New York in the early 1970s and finding Duchamp marginalized in the MOMA collection. When he returns for the MOMA reopening thirty years later, he finds that the intervening period has seen the apotheosis of Duchamp, who has become the central historical figure for contemporary art. But Lawson regards the Duchampian gambit as now cliché, an unthinking vestige of the 1960s and their “mantra of ‘Questioning authority.’” He would rather look at Picasso. For him, a 1914 still life offers an arena to consider “the power of observation, and the consequences of perception on a state of mind.” He changes his mind for an integrated art of thought and experience.
These are the terms of the new abstraction that is emerging as a second wave in painting’s resurgence. In “PAINT,” where the solvent surfaces of Holger Kalberg’s quasi-abstract modernist landscapes bear watching as metaphorical extensions of new climate realities, Elizabeth McIntosh’s patterned, asymmetrical geometries read as their inner-space parallel. There is playfulness in the way McIntosh’s origami triangle shapes shift to accommodate rogue four-sided ones. The adapting patterns cause the surfaces to buckle, become unstable and carry a sense of unpredictability out to the squared-up, fixed edges of the paintings. The bright colours are applied thinly enough for dark undertones to show through and make the shapes appear to fall in and out of shadow. It is a buoyant, subtle inner space—but not without fault lines. As paintings, they are a world apart from the abstraction that celebrates the viscous materiality of paint. Those paintings speak in an extroverted, self-evident language of display; McIntosh’s speak in terms of attaining poise and accomplished self-containment.
No one works this reticent painterly space more adroitly than Tomma Abts, the German painter who won Britain’s Turner Prize last year. Abts is to new abstraction as Tuymans is to figuration. She works in a tightly restricted format, making small, unlovely paintings that hold the wall with an impregnable density and summon up memories of Suprematism and early Constructivism, minus the spiritual metaphysics. Surface after surface, muted tertiary colour after muted tertiary colour, Abts builds her paintings with layered, incremental modulations of paint organized into composed and incised planes in which shapes can suddenly find a surface rift and fold into wayward graphic life. The end result is two-dimensional sculpture. Every plane, line and shadow is locked into a complex relational space. The paintings are topographies unto themselves, framed at an intensely personal scale, as if you could take the measure of the world in 19-by-15-inch increments. Controllable space has shrunk, but the paintings seem like affirmations of what’s left to manage—the elastic boundaries of my space; nothing else.
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