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Maura Reilly In his recent exhibition of works from 1999, James Nares again showcased his talent as a gestural-abstractionist extraordinaire. Having moved away from his figure-8 work of the 1980's and the "Luminographs" of the early '90s, Nares is now manufacturing work with a more distilled, sleek calligraphic style. Despite the shift in style, however, he continues to explore the same issues: movement, gesture and surface. Nares staples his canvases to the floor or lays them flat on a table, then covers them with a smooth, opalescent priming ground. Then, using long-handled broom brushes that he designs himself, he mops thinned-out oil paint onto each canvas in a single, swooping gesture. This action is performed swiftly, without conscious premeditation. After assessing the result, Nares invariably erases the mark with a squeegee, and then begins again, varying the rhythm and speed of the brush until he arrives at the consummate gesture. The result is a large, highly stylized brushstroke which seems to hover on the pale field. In a work titled Jack, a long, pea green, swirling stroke twists and gnarls its way down and off the 9-by-2-foot vertical painting. Take 'em to Missouri, another vertical-format work, contains a rust-coloured brushstroke that sweeps downward, zigzagging the length of the canvas from top left to bottom right, leaving splatters in its wake.
The results of Nares's trial-and-error approach to painting vary moderately. Each canvas displays one elongated gesture in a single color, with the color, size and configuration of the mark being the only variants. Sometimes the canvases are arranged in groups of three or four, such as I Stand Up Next to a Mountain, a large work (9 x 7 feet), made up of four narrow vertical elements, each containing a single sinuous brushstroke in neon blue which emerges from the top of the canvas and spirals downward, stopping just short of the bottom edge. The multiple panel works, such as this one are the more successful of the lot because the grouping create complex interactions of choreographic rhythms. When looking at Nares's work, one is tempted to compare it to David Reed's "photographic" paint strokes and to Roy Lichtenstein's Pop parodies of the Abstract-Expressionist gesture. Yet such comparisons detract from Nares's otherworldly, oddly disembodied, feathery forms. Insofar as his gestures epitomise a controlled spontaneity, Nares's new paintings are visual paradoxes. Like Boccioni's striding figure in bronze whose clothing flutters in the wind, these works manage miraculously to freeze movement itself in paint. |
