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Gianfranco Mantegna The Sign of the
Intellect
Vibrant certainty James Nares is an explorer, but more interesting than the course he has set for himself is the method he has chosen to follow in order to proceed. He has willingly elected to take "the path of most resistance." Like one of the polymath naturalists of the past, he devotes himself not only to elucidating the geography of his peregrinations, the rivers, lakes, mountains encountered along the way, but also the geology, flora and fauna, and meteorology. The entire physical realm. Of late, his discoveries have been materialized via the brush, on paper or canvas. In these notations there is no limitation or simulation but rather a signification of Nature. Attempting to explain this impulse, Nares evokes the child's first attempts to draw (i.e., to represent the world as he sees it) a house, a tree, a human being. "Well, I guess some of us never stop doing this," he says, having worked in sculpture, photography, performance, music, film and video, and, finally, for many years, painting. Nares's résumé, in fact, "reads like a minihistory of the avant-garde scene from 1970." Yet all these activities are united by a strong common thread: movement and gesture. The dynamic of the universe is perennial; we can never grasp more than an infinitesimal fraction of the whole. Yet that is precisely what Nares strives for: more. From the oscillation of a pendulum rendered in patterns of light on photographic paper, to the movement of the sun projected "in real-time magnified camera obscura," a long-term installation in his loft in 1977. From the gestures of a musician playing an instrument (Nares was a musician in The Contortions and the Del-Byzanteens), to the gestures of the possessed performer inventing a new language with his whole body. From the movement of the camera and the action recorded by it, to the gesture of the Zen archer hitting the mark even with his eyes shut. From the endless flow of billions of events we can bring to light only a few brief instants. Fragments that we hope may contain the essence of the whole. Nares speaks of "skidmarks," or "collisions." As in the collision of high-energy beams of protons and antiprotons, at times we have the chance to observe the traces of the most elusive and elementary particles constituting the "building blocks" of the physical universe. The artist as medium is traditionally credited with the ability to disclose universal truths. But how is this to be achieved? By now we may have begun to realize that it comes only through discipline, spirituality, and an extension of our awareness beyond the confines of Western culture.
Thanks to the sinologist Ernest Fenollosa's pioneering investigations at the turn of the century, Ezra Pound first recognized "The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry" (the title of Fenollosa's essay later popularized by Pound). From here Nares found stimulation in the concept of sign/symbol as the device that allows us to visibly render the universe, seen or unseen, physical and immaterial. Progressively, Nares has moved away from abstract painting, or paintings where human form could still be recognized, as in Nubian Dancer (1983), toward a more distilled, purified, and absolute calligraphic manner. In this sense , it is unfair to call his work simply "abstract." On the definition of Human Culture we read in Encyclopedia Britannica that "the existence and use of culture depends on an ability possessed by man alone. This ability has been called variously the capacity for rational or abstract thought, but a good case has been made for rational behavior among subhuman animals and the meaning of the abstract is not sufficiently explicit or precise. Thus the term symbolling has been proposed as a more suitable name for man's unique mental ability - symbolling consisting of assigning to things and events that which cannot be grasped with the senses alone." With extreme simplicity and elegance, the calligraphic brushstroke can make tangible our understandings of the world. The hand, the arm, are nothing but extensions of the brain. Each mark represents an actual discovery of events or activities taking part in different parts of the brain. (My paintings are photographs of my mind, said Malevich.) Nares calls his work a depiction of "details of the EKG of my life." Devoid of any cultural baggage and the delusional appearances of the maya, the sage follows a precise ritual. He sits meditating, then rises and swiftly makes his mark. It is effortless and final. The personal "collision," the firing of a neuron, carries an inner truth that is manifested as an absolute. There is beauty and truth in ancient calligraphy: symbolic signs become means of communication - language. In this serene limpidity there is no lack of emotion, although Nares says he likes "to step back, to stand back and allow to unfold the natural forces that have so much influence on our lives. The moving forces that connect everything, invisible natural forces, particularly light and gravity." Elsewhere in his notes he stresses "the embodiment of the unseen [whether] forces, structures or spirits." The emotion springs from a tactile sensuality, "the sensation of the brush's handle between the fingers. The works are about touch," he says, "but a very gentle one, very delicate." On the material level this statement can be corroborated by the very brushes Nares uses: most are handmade by himself. One resembles a cow's tongue; another, with a very long handle, has bristles nearly two feet long. Semiotics is defined as the study of the natural relations between the sign and its meaning, as in the example of a human cry and pain. As every sign is a metaphor, every movement is also a metaphor. The language of sign comes from the body. In his work Nares sees "traces of a body language, formed in movement and repetition." Images of the mind enacted by the body. Although deeply committed to spontaneity of gesture, it would be wrong to associate Nares with the '50s school of action painting. It is not a matter of the control exerted by Nares, but rather of the reiteration of the gesture, which is occasionally repeated hundreds of times - in other words, the performance of a task. Patiently, always exactly the same, with no accidents, just laborious accumulation: from hair-thin line to a pattern of labyrinthine intricacy.
It has often been written that Nares's work is process-orientated. Perhaps this can be applied to the earlier work, as in the photograph of light traceries produced by swinging a pendulum or the circles etched in walls with the help of a special self-built device (again, the self-built tool and an action repeated over and over countless times). Throughout a multiplicity of activities over the years, there has been a singular coherence in Nares's work. With gesture and movement, light and wave dynamics are explored in many varieties. The Irish traditional gesture of Throwing Stones (in an early performance of 1975) is repeated in one of his surprising Luminagraphs (1990-91). The "waves and furrows" of many of his paintings and drawings can be found in the arrangement of his sculptures in Lenses (1987-88): lenses that "contain light inside," even if made of hydrostone; lenses also pictured in a series of prints; and lenses of still, motion and video cameras, or projectors, ever present in Nares's studio. |And still more, the swinging of the pendulum and the vibration of the tuning fork (as in some sculptures of !988-89): in physics, both instruments are known for producing "harmonic movement." The pulse of music. "I just go out there and try to get the rhythm down," Nares is fond of saying. This does not refer to music, but to his approach to painting. The quote comes from Wally Whiterhurst, a Mets pitcher. "The unfolding of the making of a painting [is] not unlike the unfolding of a baseball game (or any other game0," he says: "unlimited possible variations of progressions or successions of events, within set parameters." The possibilities multiply and branch out. They grow out of the "practicing of a very limited set of movements within a rigid structure." In this refinement Nares sees an analogy with the process of thought itself. Another quotation favored by Nares: "Timing is everything." This one belongs to George Burns. Timing and gesture are the "keys to the heart." Suddenly there is no effort, scrolls and ribbons unfold like flowers, the wreathe like vines and revert back like Möbius strips. Sea waves, waves of light. The rhythm is all-pervasive, it cradles you, it propels you into a vortex of trance. The wave can crush you or suck you in. But with perfect timing you can ride it and fly on the thin layer at the precise boundary between sea and sky. It's both a physical feat and a fact of physics. The path leading from the elementary discovery of a phenomenon (again, as it may occur to a child), to its explanation and abstract universalization lends a potent sort of credibility to private experience. Nares says "I change the world by changing myself." This meditation accomplishes something that nothing else can; it makes tangible the artist's understanding of the world, makes it real. It becomes a "concrete denotater," as in Ashley Montagu's definition of the sign. When Nares affirms "I want to know where I came from, do not care much where I'm going," this does not make him a traditionalist, but rather a radical, as in "going to the root of things." It is Barnett Newman's desire to "attempt to discover the 'original impulse'." Thus, the all-encompassing urge to picture "ancient and modern mysteries" is reflected in representational paintings: history and myth are reexamined in the drawings and paintings about ancient Egypt (1983-84); anatomy and physics are investigated in works portraying the human body, wings, waterwheels, mechanical devices, screws, propellers, and musical instruments. Exploration as a systematic process of discovery: "Where I came from helps me in where I am going," he says, and "looking to feel that ancient pulse to catch an echo of the future." The "dialogue with the ancient spirits" finally reaches writing's most primeval source: the ideogram. The ideogram, or logogram, is a natural and absolute form of communication: it does not represent sounds, but rather the whole world. A pictorial symbol for the representation of ideas and concepts, even when it depicts an object (i.e., a house, a tree) it is not supposed to suggest the object itself but, more correctly, the idea of it. Then, with a leap of millennia, it must be noted that "...other grammars of art were indeed possible...Sergei Einstein, for one, came to similar conclusions about the unexplored linguistic possibilities of cinematic montage after studying Chinese ideograms, as witnessed by the title of his 1929 essay 'The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideograph'...contemporary with Michaux's first graphic experiments, later termed 'cinematic drawings'."
While charged with cinematic qualities, the signs in Nares's drawings and paintings seldom carry specific references to concepts. In this, they are unlike the Chinese ideograms. Neither are they empty simulacra, as one might expect from someone active in the age of the Empire of Signs. In their delicate suspension they are like clouds, in which we at times recognize figures. Languages can't lie: the body, the gesture, can't. The work is the result of an action, part of a precise ritual that Nares lately has been finding more and more rewarding and pleasurable: the preparation of the colors, the execution, the cleaning of the brushes. In their distilled abstraction, the paintings do not represent objects or forms, they are like the embodiment of forces, of mental states. The viewer is not even required to "complete the work," as in the interpretation of the shape of the clouds, or as in much of contemporary art, important and laudable as the concept may be. The viewer has only to contemplate them as objects (or as vehicles) of transcendence. In the most recent work, Nares accomplishes a further purification. Not only has the reiterative process of building a form or pattern through the accumulation of single lines disappeared, making the sign more immediate and final, but we seem to notice an ulterior overcoming of horror vacui. With fewer underpinnings, the sign stands on the canvas in bolder isolation, more suspended and more concrete at the same time. An accretion of meaning. Another level of certainty has been attained. But in facing the chaos of Nature, the artist must also challenge and disturb Chaos itself, bringing forth order. Rending the darkness, the Creator brought forth Light, the light of rational intellect. A question arises in looking at James Nares's paintings: do paintings have life? What do paintings do when nobody can see them, what do they do at night, when galleries and museums are closed? Are they asleep, perhaps, as any living creature at night? Do they softly whisper to each other in silent darkness? Do they long for our gaze to return upon them? Such questions should not seem absurd: we know well that some paintings have a special inner life. A happy and a long one. Many more metaphors also suit Nares's work, given the fact that he himself sees it as "a living breathing double open-ended metaphor." One could also speak of Nares as a kamikaze, not for any suicidal drive - even if there is a distinct abandon in his plunge towards the canvas - but in the literal meaning of the word, which is "divine wind." Such is the wind that carries his inspiration. "I've always thought of my drawings as thought plucked from the air. In a sense the drawings don't really exist. Their only actuality lies in their representation. The drawing itself remains suspended in the air, pure thought." These words, in Nares's notebooks, are followed by another entry: "Pure act (pure act)." Conclusively, this says it all. |
