REFLEX
JUNE 1988

three gestalt painters
PAINTING AND EMOTION

By Jae Carlsson

TRAVER SUTTON,
LINDA FARRIS,
CLIFF MICHEL GALLERIES
MARCH, 1988

Neo-expressionist Gregory Grenon is, by consensus, the hot artist in Portland right now. A couple years ago Andrew Keating, now a New York resident, would likely have been so named in Seattle. Tim Bennett's pertinence derives more narrowly from the fondness and critical attention given to his work by former Seattle curator and critic Gary Reel in the mid-1980s. By coincidence these three painters all had shows in town this March, which prompted me to take a hard look at how emotion is transmitted through paint, how psychological meaning can be made to formally endure.
Grenon does this through an "emotional frontality," Keating by building "emotion tableaux," and Bennett through "emotional viscerality." They seek a unified meaning-effect (like all emotion-centered art), what Reel called an "emotion gestalt." But what ties these artists together is the existence of two voices embedded within their works. The paint, like words made concrete wafting through space, reaches out toward the viewer; its brush-battered idiosyncracies jabber their way into our awareness. These voices mesmerize us, and dialogue with us. Emotion in painting, then, is gotten at through dialogue.
Michael Fried, in his theoretical writings from the 1970s, has done the best job of describing this phenomenon. Emotional states are triggered subliminally as the optic nerve shares information with the rest of the brain. Paint speaking to us is transformed into tactile or heat information, or motor-reflex; the eye, for example, is dragged across scumbled or textured paint-work, is coated with colors shifting from translucent to opaque, and curls through shapes open or closed. Metaphorical salivation or gut-response takes place; eye information becomes "psychic content," which can be re-invested in any other nerve center II there is a similar psychological end effect.
This metaphoric ability-called synesthesia -provides a concomitant, subjective sensation, namely that of a voice ("sound") stimulated by paint (color, texture). The artist sees a tension, a calm, an uncertainty in the muscular attitude of his sitter-he feels it in his own sinews. He "beholds"; he is "absorbed: Hand and eye bring this feeling to canvas; canvas brings it to the receptive viewer-kinesthetically drawn forward-likewise "absorbed”.
Fried never talked much about the 'psyche," but this is the zone of translation: we can communicate emotion because the psyche responds empathetically to anything in the world. Our emotions are always searching for meanings from which to build an identity, to articulate a system of values. Art speaks to us with a multitude of meanings which only emotion can sort out-which only the psyche can spin. Consider, in this vein, the impulses behind these three "gestalt" painters.

ANDREW KEATING:

Andrew Keating, Tim Bennett, and Gary Reel were central to Seattle's mid-'80s neoexpressionist turn. Reel insisted that emotion based painting intrinsically has to be figurative, and more specifically, to include the human form. Since figurative art - seething with psychic content - is a "figurative language" (i.e. metaphorical), it needn't necessarily contain the literal human form. The European notion of the "sublime" is a case in point: even pure light can become a figurative expression of the disembodied transcendent "spirit”.
Reel's pronouncement has had a curious effect. The European anti-empiricist tradition subscribed to the theory of one meaning, expressed with a singular voice. Reel agreed that painting should seek a singular, poetically concise meaning - again, an emotion-gestalt. Contrary to this tradition, however, the presence of Reel's human interlocutor - the equivocal, dialogically tuned voice of a protagonist - almost guarantees that two voices will be found in painting.
You sometimes feel an almost convulsive loneliness in Andrew Keating’s work, perhaps the old sociological “alienation” which Keating now places in its natural, psychological landscape - a closed, inner world. A bumpy, ridged landscape, a moisture-striated sky. No sun, moon, stars, or celestial blue dome. This is a seamlessly organic, subterranean world. That is one voice in these paintings: the murmurous region which St. Augustine, the first great explorer of the inner life, called a "limitless wilderness, full of unexpected trials". The other voice is that of Keating's mauve pink humanoid, featureless and obtuse. This protagonist - a little like a limp penis mangled in a surly vagina - is the very image of vulnerability. Working, sleeping, contemplating, it is a small, inconsequential incarcerant within this turbidly undulant, leviathan cavity. These contravening voices engage in a drear dialogue.
In the mid-1970s Keating painted flattish, open, geometric interiors, compositional studies which contained self-revealing, emotion charged imagery. Circa 1980, the imagery is presented with less emotional frontality but is still vaguely sexual-surreal in content (e.g. body knifing through rippling pool of water). He had graduated to the problematics of painting, such as pasteling the paint mix in order to establish a surface and create a natural-to-the-eye "visual" flatness. The artist habitually spent more time thinking about the whole formalist synopticon than about his imagery.
What we saw in the mid-'80s, however, were his dimply, neo-expressionist, subconscious mindscapes, presenting a more sanguine and exuberant protagonist. So, with this show, we may be seeing the last of Keating's current style - particularly since the artist has moved to New York. One of the three canvases completed there, Thaw, is sans a visualized protagonist. We feel the vertigo of being in an airplane tipping its wings, the earth below climbing up over our heads. The vertigo of being in New York, but also the single-voiced delirium of the "sublime”.
So it may be prudent to take a last look at how Keating was able to formally create these two-voiced emotion-tableau. The key is edge versus contour. In traditional paint handling, both fall in the realm of "modeling": creating solid figures existing in 3-D space - a kind of physics nobody believes in anymore. Keating had effaced modeling per se in his early 1980s work in order to establish surface. By 1983 he reversed this, using modeling specifically to breach - to contradict - surface. He no longer wanted to be true to the physics of external experience. But this modeling forks into two distinct, mutually irreconcilable tactics.
Each mound and post and bank of clouds is built of minute gradations of tone. which stop at the crest. The tone shifts suddenly and the eye jumps, rather than flows, to the next hillock. This sudden high contrast in tone. after all that subtle gradation. is what creates the sense of "edge." The eye does not move liquidly around the surface of the canvas, but jumps and skips, awakening little bursts of energy in the psyche. So there is always a slow, constantly igniting burn going on - a rippling subliminal fervid agitation. In an unabating replication of the same tonal progression, each ridge the eye crests rhymes deep in the subconscious, suggesting the rhythm of one utterly consistent, tireless voice speaking to us.
This routinely canting voice is wearying, like life itself. The only node of rest in these paintings seems to be found in the protagonist. Rather than modeling that is mostly directed at edge, we see modeling here that invokes the particularity of "contour." Keating's brush offers us a bulbous, rounded figure - the rondure of the modeling turning in on itself, isolating the figure from its surroundings and yet giving it a cunning visual integrity.
Unlike all the sincere but feckless neo-expression which has materialized in this decade, Keating's painterly intelligence demarcates human vision. Formal and psychological, his is a wry grasping of the contradictory dynamic that animates our emotional lives.

GREGORY GRENON:

In front of you are harsh, brittle color-tensions. Facial images are devoured in dark leering color. Even white tones have a chalky smolder to them. Gregory Grenon’s faces of women drawn deep in their own subjectivity expose imperfectly laminated layers of underpaint that chastise any emotionally facile reading you might make of the facial attitude. With the headshots the chromatic bite and tenor of the background color holds its own, and completes the mood. With whole body shots the figure is set in an uneasily precious "separateness," doll-like - the gnawing immediacy of the color turned suddenly remote.
The face-and-shoulder images reach out with an especially persuasive, spooky beauty. Black streaks through galvanic red hair; underpainted greens and blues crust outward as counter-texture to powder-white skin, creating a stern, aggravated graphic sense. These images are too mask-like to be portraiture; a gnomish demon animates the mask. And the figure addresses you, too involving and direct to invite the detached snide glare of satire.
Formally, they are just oil on glass enclosed in a painted window frame. But psychologically, these works are a stark searing confrontation. Note the titles: Make Me, Bad Excuse, Can You Dress Like Me. Kiss Me Hard. During agitated repartee-male and female-an image wells up from the male psyche. It is a two-voiced image, delivering her message in short-hand caricature, and expressing his emotion at that moment toward it. Standing where the male stands we apprehend something of the same abrupt, phantom emotion the male psyche encountered.
As art it is this two-voiced frontality that makes Grenon's expert handling of paint so striking. The only more compelling thing imaginable would have been for the Portland artist to peer further into himself to yield the male facial presentment - the invisible protagonist - that had instigated such a female response in this abrasive, interpersonal mind game. Refusing this hubris is Grenon's only act of withdrawal from the exultant aggressiveness of his image making.

TIM BENNETT:

Some people can live with extreme levels of anguish. They find ways. Travel, seclusion, hard work, or sometimes intense creativity. Art seldom reveals what's really there, or the grace it took to keep it legible - and relatively sane. I don’t know Tim Bennett well, but I see these things when I look into his paintings. His vertical canvases from the mid'8Os were dourly monochromatic, with flashes of color. Below would be an indistinct awesome twining of color-forms pulling the eye upward toward what should have been--in the ecstatic tradition of painting-a catharsis. But by the top of the canvas this coarse intertwining differentiated into two heads: elk and artist. Animal nature, spontaneously alive, is merged with another voice, the consciously suffering human protagonist. Mystical union (poise) triumphs over life’s tragic character (guilt).
The new work is more colorful, and more varied in imagery. The active awareness which emotion has to suffer to uncover this ultimate unity-this individuated selfhood-is no longer so elegantly dyadic. But the twining duet of native impulse and eye-contact virtue reverberates throughout. Before I even see paint my eye balks at the canvases' baroque proportions: four feet wide, going 15 feet into the air. The eye muscles cramp at trying to gather in the image whole, perhaps as preparation for pain before the seeing actually begins.
Why is this work here called Homage when it's the face-and the long fingers of death, those shadows-that are reaching out toward you? It's as if the artist has some neighborly, gentleman's agreement with this figure from the cavern. A nod, and a few well chosen words now and then.
Desire-beaked birds pecking away at groin, breast, eye, and brow-is never less clear than when seeing the male figure taking this all in stride. Barely delineated, the corporeal dissipates into a field of airy, ungrounded yellow light. Energy is its substance, light its food. Alone, you are facing your own stare. You have to imagine this on a dark wall in a dark room. The shadows could knock you over. In darkness you search through it for wholeness. In green Butterfly pollination, the sweetness of the artist's face looks out at us. Sexual tenderness sometimes comes to us like an undeserved gift. Gratefully, quietly, we accept it: Green Tara, feathery bird as white fight -enclosing green body.
Bennett uses the densest of pigments, thinned to extreme transparency. He makes potentially massive opacity airy and light. Color interpenetrates color, denying field, form, or surface. The ground paint swirls. Run your eye up and down; feel the feathery purr of textures; the fiery wind; the whorl of moving, twisting paintwork. A luciferous red gliding alongside green.
No gallery lighting can do this work justice. These are emotions trimmed back to their visceral core. The canvases create a lurid prism. The light differentiates into ephemeral colors. The light - that willed guilelessness that refines a psyche - is meant to emanate outward from within.

REFLEX MAY/JUNE 1988