I'd
like to respond to David Cohen's discussion of the holes in Merlin James.
I agree that they have a formal rôle, but my interest in their
peculiar blend of illusion and concreteness leads me to more speculative
possibilities.
James
dealt unsuspecting viewers the ultimate illusion from time to time:
real space, that is, a hole in the canvas, worked into the composition
like an elfin touch of black. This marvellously peculiar device appeared
(disappeared?) in James' previous show, too. Pierced, or burned, in
dimensions ranging from tiny quarter inch up to an area of two inches
or so of removed canvas, what are the holes doing there?
Perhaps
they figure as arch elements in the teasing ambiguity of space and time
that keeps James' pastorales situated within a busy land of paradox.
Concocting a system of painterly depiction that pays homage to a European
tradition sometimes theorized as the 'prehistory' of photography, James'
imagery (as Cohen said) is actually derived from a specific source -
photographic images in the Alinari Archive, a mid-19th century collection
of 'views' of the Italian landscape. The fact that these views are attributed
to anonymous photographers reflects the Alinari brothers' business policy
as well as a widely held belief in the 19th and early 20th centuries
that the camera's operation was just like a neutral mechanical eye trained
on the lit forms and lens-inflected perspective within its frame (typically,
for landscape, a slightly wide-angle focal length). James, by importing
these views back (forward?) into twenty-first century contemporary painting
practice, excavates a dormant interlude of visual cultural history.
The holes reactivate a weird wormhole into the attenuated debate that
still - Still! - crops up when artists approach imagistic, realistic
representation. David Hockney's research into the use of lens-assisted
paintings dating from the 16th century is perhaps the most recent and
sophisticated assertion of these issues' importance for understanding
how two-dimensional visual philosophy, a mix of perceptual and cognitive
faculties, was produced historically and by extension relates to the
visually saturated present.
In
a more speculative sense, the holes in James' canvases metaphorically
refer to the aperture of the camera. They also seem to stand in for
the anonymity of the anonymous photographers - the elision of those
Alinari Archive employees' identities. I attended a slide lecture given
by James about his work at Cooper Union in the spring of 2002 [Painting
Per Se]. Seeing slides of his paintings side by side with their photographic
referents from the Alinari Archive was a revelation into his working
process. I recalled, the day after the lecture while walking down the
street in bright sunlight, that the sun's rays can be concentrated by
a lens to burn a hole in paper. I thought about the hand ground lenses
Galileo used in his telescope to discern the satellites of Jupiter,
and stories of Spinoza grinding lenses to provide himself with independent
income, the means to pursue his philosophical writing. Metaphorically,
James' gaze into the 19th century past might correspond to a lensless
burn of the imagination, a kind of time travel. His work conducts an
air of mystery when set within the Chelsea scene.