Robert Bordo, Serge Charchoune, Martha Diamond, Sam Fisher, Glenn Goldberg, Rodney Harder, Clive Hodgson, Thomas Nozkowski, Amy Sillman, Tony Swain
Exhibition from 3rd April to 23rd May 2009 Opening Thursday 2nd April from 6 to 9pm
Galerie Les filles du calvaire is pleased to present the curatorial project by the Welsh artist, Merlin James, Primitif Compliqué.
Painting's sense of its own history is essential to its development. In this exhibition, works by some contemporary painters are juxtaposed with those of an earlier figure, the Franco-Russian artist Serge Charchoune (1889-1975).
Serge Charchoune's achievement is one of the least recognised in twentieth-century European art. But as time passes his work looks more and more interesting, and highly relevant to aspects of current painting. What recognition he has had tends to be as a minor practitioner of major modernist styles - Dada, Cubism, Purism, informal abstraction. In fact his best work is that which is least dependent on those 'schools'. Like many artists of his time he spoke of parallels between music and visual art, and alluded to matters mystical. But the characterfulness and specificity of his works save them from theosophical platitudes and pretensions, as much as from dull formalism. At once abstract and figurative, formal and informal, radical and modest, he never lets us forget the synthetic means by which he creates visual meaning and mood. Charchoune called himself 'un primitif compliqué'.
The other painters in this show all have affinities with him, in particulars and/or in principles. I think they are all about a disabused reaffirmation - both of painting and of that which can be painted. As Charchoune did, all the contemporary painters in this show have worked consistently yet exploratively alongside (through, under, over) the various phases, fashions and fluctuations of art in their time. They have been fully aware of, open to, sometimes influential upon all the current and recurrent currents. And fully independent of them. If anything can be said to unite this selection of artists, and oppose it to other likely representations of contemporary painting, one could propose this: Modernism has been understood as a progression of influential geniuses and radical avant-garde movements. Postmodernism in turn has become terminally stuck in an endless co-dependent subversion of the notions of genius, originality, progress, radicalism. If one sees Modernism instead as a diverse field of individual explorers, achieving advances and sustaining failures each in their own (testable) terms, across wide fields of research (painting being a major one), then the unique achievement of a figure like Charchoune is thrown into sudden profile. (Alongside, certainly, some of the more familiar names, but perhaps to the exclusion of others). And the 'successors' emerge also, understandably sharing much in common with each other and their predecessors, on the surface or at the level of deeper motivation; but with as much diversity.
The blatancy of Clive Hodgson's break-through abstractions a few years ago was perhaps a function of the sheer urge to make painting 'difficult' again, in a time when almost anything seemed assimilable into the open field of contemporary art practice. It was hard to imagine any painting creating the sort of unease that Hélion's or Guston's style shifts had done in heir time. Yet Hodgson's refusal of 'touch', his ultra-thin application straight onto white primer, and his use of ornamentalism, are all truly disconcerting. Amazingly, the pictures come alive; and the mysterious terms in which a painting succeeds or fails (or both simultaneously?) are themselves partly the object of the work's investigations. His most recent work, often playing with signature, has become increasingly beguiling without losing any of its sang froid.
Almost the inverse of Hodgson, Robert Bordo seems a lot to do with touch, sensibility, a tradition of belle peinture (Watteau's fêtes, Courbet's seas and skies, de Staël's surfaces and distances). Grounding his ethereal poetry is the physicality of texture and application, and the specificity of the optical moment. Like all the painters here he qualifies, as well as indulges, reverie. Bringing humility to artistry, and humanity to intellectuality, he distinguishes himself increasingly from mainstream American minimalism and post-duchampian painting. And increasingly the paintings reach beyond the American tradition to a poetry of the easel painting, with affinities stretching from classical Chinese poem-paintings to nineteenth-century plein-air oil sketches.
The objects in the emblematic diptychs of Sam Fisher are, in several senses, painted from memory. The impression is that they are things he knows, once knew, or of which he knows the 'type'. Yet they are also things that emphatically exist with a specificity beyond the generic. We are a world away from the references to sign, logo, mediation and spectacularisation in so much recent art.
We are rather in a territory arrived at (via much else) through Chardin, Morandi and Bonnard, and through a language of 'things' related to the poetiics of Francis Ponge or Wallace Stevens.
Rodney Harder is one of a strata of painters (one thinks of Joe Fyfe or John Zurier in the States, Stuart Cumberland in the UK or Sergej Jensen on the Continent) who determinedly resist the notion that a certain mode or manner in painting can be inherently passé, (or indeed 'current'). Harder by turns plays the effete aesthete and the 'outsider' artist, putting pure process against rude perception (or remembered perception), minimalism against genial allusiveness.
Tom Nozkowski is justly celebrated for his distinctive abstraction, dense with intention and meaning, yet inevitably open to interpretation. Rarely, however, have his historical affinities been discussed, beyond the recognition of a contrarian position vis-à-vis the high grandeur of the New York School. Comparisons with earlier European abstraction are illuminating however, not only with the obvious figures of Arp, Klee or Miro, but with a somewhat forgotten generation including Domela, Herbin, Magnelli and Charchoune.
If Nozkowski somehow assimilates representation into abstraction, Martha Diamond and Amy Sillman both tack freely between the two. Sillman, known for a highly individual biomorphic and apparently narrative 'populated abstraction', has recently created an on-going series of drawn portraits of friends, much as Charchoune would always make self-portrait drawings alongside even his most 'pure' non-figuration. Diamond also will draw from sculpture and paintings, or sketch architecture, as part of a practice that includes as well the most primary abstracts. An almost mystic animism energises her works, without ever compromising the pragmatism and materialism of her practice.
Working directly over newspaper text and images, Tony Swain's practice might be thought – from a verbal description – a highly intellectualised game about (re)cognition, (inter)mediation and (mis)information. That dimension may be there. But his is a very material, and very intuitive art -- an occluding, merging, extending, isolating, veiling, reorientating, and obscuring of shapes and spaces and textures. The results are disconcerting in their mix of breadth and vulnerability, clarity and tentativeness. They add up to an experiment in meaning of the most searching kind.
Glenn Goldberg has long used a kind of obsessive stipple technique and mandala-like motifs to create works that are at once naive and highly sophisticated. He too can take his forms easily in and out of depiction, or overlay imagery on his open, indeterminate fields. We move between consciousness and dream, richly exoticism and familiar, remembered patterning of childhood. Narrative may be implied or denied, and the decorative and denotive are ranged against and across each other, now with happy abandon, now dense overdetermination. Celebration and compulsion coexist.
Merlin James, February 2009
La peinture doit tenir compte de sa propre histoire pour pouvoir évoluer. Ainsi dans cette exposition, les œuvres de peintres contemporains se juxtaposent à celles d’une figure plus ancienne : Serge Charchoune (1889-1975). L’œuvre de Charchoune est l’une des moins reconnues dans l’art européen du xxème siècle. Avec le temps, on accorde toutefois de plus en plus d’intérêt à son travail qui vient d’ailleurs éclairer certains aspects de la peinture d’aujourd’hui. Si d’aucuns ont tendance à voir en lui un tenant mineur de courants modernistes majeurs, tels que dadaïsme, cubisme, purisme ou abstraction informelle, ses meilleures réalisations sont pourtant celles qui se détachent le plus de ces « écoles ». Comme bon nombre de ses contemporains, Charchoune propose des parallèles entre la musique et les arts plastiques, et se réfère à des questions d’ordre mystique. Or, par leur cachet et leur spécificité, ses peintures échappent aux lieux communs et prétentions théosophiques, de même qu’à l’aspect ennuyeux du formalisme. À la fois abstrait et figuratif, formel et informel, radical et modeste, il ne cesse de nous rappeler par quels moyens synthétiques il crée du sens, et une ambiance particulière. Charchoune se présentait lui-même comme « un primitif compliqué ». Les autres peintres réunis dans cette exposition ont tous des affinités avec lui par certains détails et/ou dans leur démarche générale. Je pense qu’ils ont tous à voir avec une réaffirmation désabusée de la peinture et de ce qui peut être peint. Comme Charchoune en son temps, ces peintres d’aujourd’hui s’attachent depuis quelques décennies à explorer toujours et encore les différentes phases, tendances et fluctuations de l’art, mais de façon inventive, en les accompagnant ou en s’en écartant. Tous ces courants artistiques actuels ou réactualisés, ils les gardent complètement à l’esprit, s’en imprègnent et parfois les influencent – sans nullement en dépendre. S’il fallait dire en quoi ces artistes se rejoignent, et en quoi ils se distinguent d’autres groupes potentiellement représentatifs de la peinture contemporaine, voici ce que l’on pourrait suggérer : on a d’abord décrit le modernisme comme une progression de génies influents et de mouvements radicaux d’avant-garde ; puis le postmodernisme s’est embourbé dans une impasse en s’évertuant à chambouler, par effet domino, les notions interdépendantes de génie, d’originalité, de progrès, de radicalisme. Si l’on considère plutôt le modernisme comme un terrain protéiforme livré à des explorateurs faisant cavaliers seuls, alternant succès et déconfitures chacun à sa manière (vérifiable), à travers de vastes domaines de recherche (la peinture en étant l’un des principaux), alors l’œuvre inédite d’une figure telle que Charchoune sort subitement du lot (tout comme probablement quelques grands noms parmi les plus connus, mais peut-être au détriment de certains autres). Et les « successeurs » se profilent également, qui ont naturellement beaucoup de choses en commun, en surface ou dans leurs motivations profondes, mais reflètent la même diversité.
Extrait du texte de Merlin James, Février 2009 (traduction Laurie Guérif)
