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Richard Kalina James Nares's new paintings speak to contemporary abstraction's continuing fascination with the isolation and depersonalization of the autographic gesture. The golden age of Abstract Expressionism is long gone, but that doesn't prevent the gestural from making its claim. For many artists, gesture is no longer embedded in the same pictorial and referential structures from which it drew its original authority. Rather than being the basis for a dynamic compositional system or a clearly labeled marker of the psyche, it has become increasingly autonomous. Nares's work is inherently contradictory: it is distanced and calculated in its conception and elusive effect, but in its execution it is emphatically direct and visceral. Nares takes a fine muslin canvas, staples it to the floor and covers it with a smooth, virtually frictionless priming ground. He then takes thinned-out black oil paint, and with a very large flexible brush of his own making lays down in one shot an oversized, bold calligraphic mark or series of marks. This is done without conscious thought and very quickly - frequently in under a second. The spontaneous effort is then judged by the artist, and most often is found unacceptable. Something is off: his balance was wrong, his attention flagged, the mark in some subtle way fell short. If this was the case then the paint is immediately squeegeed off and the action repeated for as many times as it takes until he gets it right. The results vary in form from the largely vertical single stroke of Prescript III to the long diagonal sweep of Prescript VI to the smaller broken marks of Prescript I.
The false starts do not disappear completely. Although wiped away, the warmly toned black paint stays in the weave and creates a kind of brownish gray atmosphere. The sepia tonalities and the smooth surface give the paintings a strong photographic feeling - they have the look of platinum prints or photogravure. The association with photography serves to distance the gesture (are we looking at an original object or at a mechanical reproduction?), and it also gives the painting some of the authority we accord photography as a truthful recorder of the real world. It should be noted as well that Nares's gestural process takes not much longer to accomplish than a photograph takes to be exposed. Nares's work evokes a range of earlier art: from the torque and chiaroscuro of the Baroque, to Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, up through Surrealism and the painterly choreographies of Jackson Pollock. I find the Surrealist thread of particular interest. The sense of a mysterious and somewhat ominous object floating in space, combined with the strokes' disembodied quality (they seem like shocks of hair) gives the paintings an uncanniness and a suppressed erotic charge, a welcome edge of humor and wariness. Nares's paintings are clearly flamboyant efforts, but they go beyond a mere display of physical and emotional fine tuning. They address, in a nicely oblique way, some of the pressing concerns of abstract painting today. |
