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.
