“After”
Františka and Tim Gilman’s series of paintings “After” (2006–) examines the nature of memory (or, to be more precise, forgetting) via the depiction of architectural interiors (or, to be more precise, fragments thereof). These components are derived from a variety of sources, including the work of other artists, and represent isolated moments of clarity plucked from a borderless psychic space in which far more is lost than retained. “The holes in our memory,” write the artists, “define our minds, as windows help define a structure.” In “After,” these “holes” are most often visualized as plain, depthless grounds that occupy more surface area than the images themselves. Each canvas thus holds linked but opposing forces in balance, pitting sharp—if partial—instances of recollection against what one might call “white noise,” an ambient backdrop from which “incident” emerges only through the fibrous grain of the support.
These well-nigh uninflected - fields lend a particular kind of abstracted cast to the fragments that the Gilmans select, one that parallels the images’ detachment from their original contexts. That the artists’ painterly mode is a deadpan naturalism only emphasizes their pictures’ quasi-dreamlike feel. Forms are displaced, cast adrift, stripped of functionality. And though the broad categories of fixtures, fittings, and features that appear—doors, staircases, railings, hallways, and especially windows—resonate as archetypes in spite of their exclusively modernist cast, there is no obvious symbolic logic to what is foregrounded and what fades away. Yet this is hardly the rich, Freudian dream world of the Surrealists, more something that might distinguish the REM sleep of Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA. It is a world constructed from numbered parts in which specific associations give way to a generalized sense of contemporaneity, an atmosphere in which the nostalgia so often associated with memories of place is unsustainable.
Untitled (stairs), 2006, is a typical entry in the series. From the center of a large white canvas, a broad staircase emerges and extends to the picture’s bottom right-hand corner. What looks like a slim, waist-high glass barrier runs down one side of the set of steps, flush with its edge. This has a subtle filtering effect, altering their tone from a pale brown indicative of concrete to a colder grey. Just as it emerges from nowhere, so the structure comes to an end just above the base of the panel, one corner also cut into by its right-hand edge. Like the proverbial stairway to heaven, it hovers in mute invitation, suspended like a rainbow between two points that remain forever just out of reach. Appropriately enough, it looks unused, indistinguishable from a scale model or digital mock-up. The artists have compared the image to a film still—a stand-in for an unattainable “complete” experience—and frame (perhaps with tongue in cheek) the whole project in “painterly” terms: “What we originally experience with the breadth of a landscape,” they write, “breaks down in the memory to the focus of a still life.”
In Untitled (door), 2007, this allusion to genre is taken further via a curious and unnerving fusion of interior and exterior. Through a set of frosted glass doors left slightly ajar we glimpse a mass of tropical foliage. Yet there is no real sense that we are looking out, more just into another room, perhaps a greenhouse or other controlled environment. The light is too cool and flat to be anything other than artificial and the foliage too immediately dense to be unplanned. The scene is suggestive of Star Trek’s “holodeck” in that the “reality” it presents is entirely self-contained and dependent on the viewer or participant, stopping dead the moment one quits the scene. The treatment of the doors’ glass, which in certain areas transforms our view of the plants into a green aquatic blur, also connotes memory’s imperfection, in particular the fading to which it is inevitably subject. While some elements of the scene retain their focus, others lose definition to become little more than vague or simplified impressions.
While “After” flirts with Photorealism, it holds it at arm’s length through certain concessions to the painterly medium. Careful to avoid obvious markers of “expression” or even individuality, the Gilmans exploit the warmth of oil on canvas over the impassive surfaces of photography, thereby emphasizing habitually overlooked details. They exploit and draw attention to the process of selection inherent in painting, as well as to its inherent limitations, in order to initiate a conversation about the movement of an image from eye to mind to hand to eye to mind (a journey that one might compare to making a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, with all the potential for progressive degeneration that that action implies). Paintings like Untitled (window), 2007, clearly omit a great deal—a glimpse of landscape, for example, fades out almost to white—but seem to heighten our awareness of other elements (even when these are extra-visual [one can almost smell the floor polish]).
Another of the series’s art-historical reference points is Minimalism; while the paintings depend on the conventions of naturalistic representation, they also make liberal use of white space in a way that has a clear precedent in the tendency’s reduction of form to essential elements and its corresponding activation of physical context. Untitled (floor), 2006, is perhaps the most extreme example of this; an image of a strip of wooden boards runs along the bottom right edge of an otherwise unmarked support. The division of space is almost comical in its extreme imbalance; a few inches of painting to several square feet of nothing much. That the painted floor is positioned on the canvas such that, when the panel is hung, it hovers just above the real floor, also betrays a certain self-aware wit. Employing a focused range of visual and ideational allusion while remaining sensitive to the interrelation of diverse media, Untitled (floor) and “After” in its entirety examine the construction of memory by imaging that which it leaves behind, and allowing us to fill in the gaps.
—Michael Wilson
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Frantiska + Tim Gilman
129 Pioneer St
11231
New York, NY
Brooklyn
New York
North America
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