Exhibition Review Painters mixing the past with the present
New York, modern art
‘ The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World’ contained the work of 17 artists, all of them under the age of 45 and all currently working in the US. Their work varied from colour field renditions to word art; but all, by virtue of their supposed ‘atemporality’, warranted a place in this exhibition. Atemporality is brought about by the total access we have to the past and present through the internet and other modern media. And this, by definition, almost demands an absence of context; past and present are simultaneously available to the artist. Atemporality has a problem, though: the distinct style of a time becomes irrelevant; it lacks historical continuity. But painting relies on its own history in order to advance. One style moves onto another, and that style is then built upon at a later stage, and to ignore this process is surely to abandon any meaning in painting. Much like ignoring the steps of a recipe and simply creating a superficially aesthetic copy of that dish, embracing atemporality neglects the very thing that makes painting an art. The first artist’s work I looked at did not cohere with the title. Michaela Eichwald’s Ministering to the Alien (Dienst Am Alien) (2013), was strange. Painted on ‘synthetic leather’, it looked as if a painting had been printed at very high quality and then added to again using paint, giving the effect that it was made up entirely of liquid. In this sense, it had a slipperiness, but this set up a paradox. Painted on synthetic leather, and painted with synthetic polymer paint, wax and tempera, it did not look like a plastic form – rather a wholly organic one. Its contrasts of shapes, marks and softness created a visually sophisticated painting. There is underlying structure, which reminds us that it is a created thing, but then the structure is disrupted by an evaporating white cloud of paint. So this painting seems very much about ignoring the materials. Instead of asking the question ‘what is the surface, what is the added mark?’ we should ask about the context of the shapes, forms and, most importantly, the quality of visuality – rough, smooth, soft, hard, obscure, clear. But the notion of atemporality is one which escaped me when looking at this picture; in fact, the painting seems completely to
ignore the title of the show, and is about the painting itself. The work of Julie Mehretu came as a breath of fresh air. These monochrome mark-making paintings mirror her other works – big mark vs small mark, light vs hard – but have much more painterly qualities than the rest of her more linear output. There are still the iconic sharp, harsh structures that we usually see in her work, but as well as this, there is a white mist in each of the three paintings. A kind of veil lies behind the marks, which gives them a feeling of motion, or at least buzzing, which her other works do not share. Particularly in Campaign (2014), where in the top left we see a dripping mist of paint which overlaps and underlaps with the dark marks and gives a compositional perspective. Mehretu’s work sits well with the title, it brings together Brunelleschi’s perspective with Parisian subculture of graffiti. Laura Owens’ Untitled (2013), mixes both modern printing with old fashioned style. The idea in itself is very interesting: she painted and printed on the same surface, with the painting/printing being of a spelling test or the like, and certain parts were crystal clear, and others were pixelated, as if they had been blown up on a computer screen. However, the clear parts are painted, and the pixelated parts are printed, giving us the message that the modern ways are not always the best and technology not always the way forward, and if overused and used inwardly it can lead to metaphorical pixelization. But is this idea actually relevant to atemporality? Owens seems simply to have made the point that painting is often a better medium than modern printing, hence implying that old methods are often more productive than new ones. This, however, just seems to be stating a truism; most of the time our advancements in technology come from old ideas – so Owens’ work doesn’t seem to engage truthfully with the title of the show. The final artist I have chosen is to me the most interesting, but also the one that captures best the title of the exhibition. Oscar Murillo, originally from Colombia, works in oil paint and textured surfaces. We see flat forms, squares, rectangles; and with that, the boundary of
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