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Install Metro Picture Gallery, Rene Daniels, 2014.
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In the 1950’s abstraction took up its second motivation, on a new continent, where artist such as Pollock and Newman took European ideas of abstraction further. As Kirk Varnedoe describes in, Pictures of Nothing, By eliminating perspectival space they “advanced the line, of abstractions inevitable progress, logically to it supposedly destined pure expression of the essential visual qualities of painting without any remaining extraneous literally content.”
Painting was able to record and display, process and chance, through a new bodily interaction with pictorial space. The repositioning of the canvas from a vertical support structure, in front of its subject matter, to a horizontal workspace captures the transition painting went through. Instead of constituting a self-contained entity painting shifted in its operation redefining its foundation, from a referential medium to a transitional mode of communication. Painting broke its formal language and stripped the excess.
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| David Salle, His Brain 1984 |
What I find interesting is how these two forms that bring together the majority of paintings mouldings over the last 60 years, abstraction and figuration, have the possibility to produce a third. This third agenda is not a new ‘staging’ of painting, as it has been occurring since the 80’s, in paintings such as David Salle’s, His Brain, 1984. In such a work imagery is bought together in what seems to be a sporadic and scattered composition. But what you find is a collage of fragments that present a whimsical relationship and only through their relationship, within the whole image, does a context begin to develop. In such a work the image is used through its multiplicity to produce an internal relationship that begins to shift painting from a singular self-aware object to a transmissible platform.
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| Luc Tuymans, Gas Chamber, 1986 |
Expanding further you can look to Luc Tuymans and works such as Gas Chamber, 1986. In such a work Tuymans depicts an empty, muted generic room. By calling it Gas Chamber Tuymans expands the context of the image from its exterior and charges the work with an agency that Peter Geimer defines as: “Tuyman’s paintings have a meaning that goes beyond the visible and that cannot be deciphered through mere observation. We have to search for it somewhere outside of the picture." Looking at a third, Rene Daniels, he depicts motifs that repeat through a whole series of works that flick between a bow tie and an interior space. This flickering, of one object’s potential, charges the imagery with multiple possibilities. This multiplicity of meaning decentralises the structural rigor of an image and with that charges the image with an agency that seems self aware of its own contradictions and uses it to displace the viewer’s expectation. In doing so the image in its postmodern, post-structural, habitation changes from a rhetorical medium to a platform of transmission that can not only create an agency through the multiple (Salle) but also use its exterior (Tuymans) and its repetition (Daniels) to break apart the wholeness of the image and with that create a far more three dimensional aspect to painting.
