Journal of Contemporary Painting - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2016

Kaye Donachie’s paintings pay tribute to a cast of historical female figures. Modernist performers, futurist actresses and non-conformist poets become protagonists connected by their unconventional beliefs and preferences. The paintings recognize the allure of these individuals and the extent to which they have stimulated Donachie to illuminate their specific histories, posing questions such as what it is to be present, to be active, to have a voice, and to assume ultimately, some measure of control over creative and emotional labour. The narratives within the paintings are given structure by the visceral sensation of light, outline and intensity of surfaces that evoke images surrounding the various subjects of her investigation. In this visual essay Donachie shares recent pictorial research that focuses on the writings of Marguerite Duras. The images do not dwell on Duras narrative but attempt to capture the writer’s strange ability to show how one space and time can dissolve into another through the form of an elliptical poem. Using painted cyanotypes Donachie draws directly on an illuminated source, with Duras novella providing a painterly alchemy for overlaying figural images and condensing time.

Alongside recent knowledge of her schizophrenia, Agnes Martin’s lesbianism and its relation to her extraordinary achievement as an artist needs to be better understood. Anterior to activist Monique Wittig’s infamous 1978 public statement that ‘lesbians are not women’ (Wittig 1993: 32), in 1973 Martin (refusing compulsory heterosexuality’s sex and gender dimorphism) humorously protested that she ‘was not a woman but a doorknob’ (Johnston 1998: 300). Ultimately, Martin’s liberation was a liberation through identification with non-human being: a painterly practice of queer becoming that can be thought of as the Foucauldian creation of life as a ‘work of art’ – a desubjectivization of the self or ‘death of the subject’ enacting a Barthesian ‘desire for the neutral’ (Barthes 2005) to become one with the vitality and vibrancy of matter itself.

My specific focus is the relationship of figure/ground segregation in painting to the pressures of impermanence, non-differentiation and non-duality. Figure/ground assignment depends on the mind’s ability to establish, process and stabilize clear contrasts or dualisms within the visual field, which then become the basis for all cognitive binaries. The flat, framed format of painting makes figure/ground assignment a central issue. Normally, when we perceive an image we also consign a background to imperception, but blurring out of fine detail, softening of sharp edges and contrast sensitivity frustrate this perceptual activity, undermining the distinction between presence and absence, and bringing to light an undifferentiated foundation. I discuss the physiology and phenomenology of vision, and research in the neurosciences, and focus on the paintings of the American artist Agnes Martin (1912–2004) and the challenge they pose to stable figure/ground assignment. Within her work I identify the shifting shape of non-normative subjectivity.

Luc Tuymans’ paintings are often heralded as exemplary of contemporary painting’s historical dilemma. This article argues that a discourse of failure has been formative in shaping Tuymans’ critical reception: a discourse that has drawn heavily on the postmodern critique of painting in the 1980s. Further, this discourse has been formative of Tuymans’ own practice. However, this article argues that despite the productiveness of the discourse of failure – especially with regard to the relationship between Tuymans’ painting and the technologically mediated image – such an approach runs up against certain limits. This is especially apparent in Tuymans’ recent work, which exemplifies a more pronounced ambivalence towards modernism and its legacy.

This article offers a critical account of ‘painterly explorations’ at the second Kochi-Muziris Biennale (which under the curatorship of Jitish Kallat took the title of ‘Whorled Explorations’). Painting at the Biennale in 2014 was surprisingly conspicuous, particularly when understood in its expanded sense. Following an account of some of the different painting practices on display, the article draws upon the term ‘social gestus’ (the critical demonstration of gestures) to suggest a reading of global, contemporary art that is concerned with the coordinates and situating of gestures as an entire form, and which is critically revealing of itself. The productionist site of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale provides a fitting example of what social, critical meanings painting can reveal.

The article introduces Jeff Gibbons’ painting within the context of a public conversation held during his exhibition IN Signific Landscapes at Take 5, Norwich (29 September–18 October 2014) between Jo Melvin and Clive Phillpot. The term ‘conversation’ was deliberately chosen to indicate the discursive informality of the advertised gallery discussion. The edited transcript below preserves the performative quality of live exchange. Melvin curated the exhibition, which was accompanied by a publication devised for the occasion. This included a pseudonymously authored introduction by Melvin (Leo Manjivan), ‘Signific Landscapes for Jeff Gibbons: A play on authorship, expectation and significance’, and essays by Gustavo Grandal-Montero (senior librarian, special collections manager Chelsea, Camberwell, Wimbledon, University of the Arts, London), ‘Signific Landscapes’, and, by Gibbons, ‘Signing Significantly’. The conversation situates the way in which Gibbons takes his cue from the autodidact philosopher, Victoria, Lady Welby (1837–1912), who coined the term ‘signific’, using it as the starting point for this particular body of work.

As an antidote to reductive tendencies in much psychoanalytic art criticism, this article takes up the writings of the English art critic, Adrian Stokes. The great virtue of his criticism is that, rather than deciphering images, he responded to the handling of materials and the qualities of the medium. His key critical terms, carving and modelling, although derived from sculpture, are more generally illuminating. They are not just techniques but attitudes to the world informed by Melanie Klein’s ‘paranoid–schizoid’ and ‘depressive’ positions. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the painting and writing of one contemporary British artist who has a high regard for Stokes, Merlin James.

‘Dexter Dalwood, London Paintings’, Simon Lee Gallery, London, 18 November 2014–24 January 2015

‘Jasper Johns: Regrets’, The Courtauld Gallery, London, 12 September–14 December 2014

‘The Forever Now: Painting in an Atemporal World’, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 14 December 2014–5 April 2015

Aura on the cutting room floor: Matisse Live From Tate Modern

Studio Talks: Thinking Through Painting 2009–2014, Kristina Bength, Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Jan Rydén and Sigrid Sandström (eds) (2014) Stockholm, Sweden: Arvinius + Orfeus Publishing, 418 pp., ISBN: 9789187543548, h/bk, 32 Euros

‘Albert York’, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 8 November–20 December 2014