A catalogue represents the meeting place for two interrelated systems of signification - the visual and the verbal texts - an uneasy relationship as language operates to regulate and contain the surfeit of meanings generated by the image. This relationship, (at times a battleground, or, at least, a field of conflict), of language to the work of art defines interpretation - the struggle for meaning - as an operation of restraint (the 'law') upon desire- (the 'body'); a mediation between the stages of production (the private- the studio) and consumption (the public - the gallery).
I am not wanting to set up a false antagonism between artists and critics - paint on canvas/words on the page, (or an unbridgeable divide between intention and interpretation), both are textual practices of symbolisation, convention, structure and imagination. Both, to employ Rothko's metaphor, are attempts to 'end the silence', although this is also the necessary condition for initiating the pwcesses; Painting is a social act - that is, it exists within a history, or histories, a culture, or cultures - a tradition of making and formalising that provides the point of reference for each journey into the shadowland where knowledge, technique, and experience coalesce in the search for moments of vision and realisation.
It is this jumping-off point that has been described as the re-enactment of our original experiences of separation and loss, rights of passage from one context - familiar, protected, secure, to another strange, transgressive, unstable:·a movement out into the world essential for the growth and development of subjectivity and identity. And I think that this is a particularly appropriate analogy for the history and aesthetic discourse that the paintings of Ian Brown allude to, of ‘Post-war Abstraction' or 'Colour-Field', (the categories are approximate and generalised); combinations of areas of colour and form structured initially according to predetermined parameters - scale, a grid, a chromatic field - but then built - up, altered, reworked as a result of decisions made, both intuitively and calculatedly, at each stage of the formation of the image. Consequently, the works express relationships between, on the one hand, the configurations of tone, intensity, light, volume, centrality to edge, border to image - and, on the other, the conscious and unconscious intentions articulated throughout the complex evolution of the painting; and this involves a process of conceptualisation.
At one level this isn't saying much more than the simple assertion that, on the whole, artist's know what they are doing - that they work within a theoretical framework that is dominant for their area of practice at any given historical moment. And for the period of Modernism in the West (putting aside , arguments for the ending or exhaustion of this paradigm: that we are now in the post modem) the connotation of 'physicality' has been a major determinant - to be specific theways in which the painting draws attention to surface as a material fact. However, having stated one of the 'truisms' of art in the modern period, it seems to me that our understanding of, and affective response to painting is partly determined by the extent to which particular works imaginatively redefine this principle, or, alternatively, undermine it by strategically operating 'against the grain’.
Ian Brown employs a number of devices in his paintings to assert their physicality: the flatness of the border and its continuation around the edge of the frame making an object; the trace of the brush in the application of paint to canvas; the lack of clearly identifiable reference for the marks on the surface other than the trace of the body. These are the pictorial conventions of modernist painting, and according to their operation within any artist's work, bring into play relationships of colour to field or ground, line to plane, flatness to depth, decoration to structure, etc., a visual rhetoric that is infinitely rich and variable. The tradition which maps the historical context for this work is provided by those artists previously engaged in the exploration of these possibilities: Rothko and Newman of course, but also Richard Diebenkom (an earlier suite of Brown's paintings - the Weston Park Series - invokes Diebenkom's 'Ocean Park' series) and a figure who represents something of a bridge between Abstract Expressionism and the severely reductive imagery of the 1960s/70s - Brice Marden.
In the paintings in this exhibition it is the variations and modifications within these conventions that help to create a distinctive resource of expression. Based upon a three inch grid as a starting point, Brown builds chromatic relations of remarkable depth and luminosity held within a finely toned border that both frames the internal configuration, and orders the transition from the extemal world of the gallery to the inner space of the image. By either modulating or reinforcing the tonal relations between centre and periphery, the 'zones' become separated and distinct, or partly dissolved, creating sensations of containment or spread that also alter with the position of the viewer: close-up or at a distance. This formal syntax - pictorial technique - immediately engages another level of signification. The juxtapositions construct spatial configurations and binary oppositions: areas of complexity contrasted with simplicity, freedom and constraint, movement and repose, intensity and stillness, intimacy and distance, the'image holding to the surface or breaking from the surface - patterns of clarity and uncertainty that shift perception to another register and return us to the question of meaning. For example, as we approach each painting we are subject to its scale, a feeling of increasing intimacy as the image occupies our field of vision and becomes the sole focus of our attention. The border defines the relationships of colour and line, occasionally conveying the evidence of precise measurement and alignment. Acting as a barrier between the luminous inner rectangles and the wall, (and in Western culture light has always been a metaphor for the human spirit and its potential for transcendence), this framing device suggests a conflict between pleasure and its denial - a flat field enclosing the optical expansiveness of the image, (although in some cases the aura of colour erupts to suffuse the entire surface).
All of these readings are suggested by the expressive qualities of the works themselves and are, I believe, deeply social and experiential. That is, they draw upon and make reference to cultural knowledge - of how to look at paintings - and are also suggestive of deep structures of feeling and subjectivity. Clearly there is no simple or evident correlation to be made between an area of coloured canvass and an emotional state, although abstract forms frequently, and intentionally, stimulate memories of the natural world, (sunsets, light on water, horizons, figures, etc), or evoke patterns of order, traces of reality and lived experience; all these combine to urge the viewer to seek beyond the phenomenal forms for a deeper and more fundamental meaning. When this occurs we are engaged intellectually, emotionally and physically - held fascinated by the object of our gaze and subject to its imperial demands for concentration and absorption.
There is, then, another important respect in which these paintings demand to be read against the grain. They proclaim their independence from todays characteristic patterns of consumption; of the 'three-minute culture’, of immediate accessibility and instant feedback, of experiences commodified, packaged and delivered to order. Contemplative objects, they reveal their meanings and delights gradually and reward the generosity of the viewers attention, turning pigment on canvass into a meditation upon being and identity, self and 'other', that reaches towards the roots of consciousness.
Jon Bird
January 1991
Mars Violet and Ultramarine
oil on canvas
183 x 198cm
