Mike Walker runs the BA Fine Art course at Todmorden College and recently reviewed Petra MCarthy's exhibition.
Petra McCarthy: Recent Paintings
Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London
One of the first things you notice about Petra McCarthy’s latest paintings is their physical format. She paints on canvases laid flat on the floor then, whilst the paint is still wet, takes an exact impression of the image onto Perspex. At a later point the Perspex is bolted to the canvas so that it is exactly in front of it, a few centimetres clear of its surface.
Whatever we make of these paintings, we have to take account of that process, of the physical presence of that second level of image both echoing and obscuring the image on the canvas surface. We have to decide what is added by that second layer and how it alters our experience and why McCarthy should want to interpose this barrier between our eye and its normal target, the picture plane.
To do so, it may be useful to start with the canvas rather than the Perspex. The artist uses acrylic paint in various states of dilution, dropped or poured onto the canvas from above. There is both an immediate evocation of Jackson Pollock and a clear sense of difference: her compositions have a different rhythmic structure, with greater shifts between space and activity so that the composition contains islands of density; crucially, she has discovered a different repertoire of gestural marks, exploiting the liquidity of acrylics to generate intricate meshes of paint; and her colour is at an altogether higher pitch, moving the paintings away from the evocation of landscape.
In her analysis of Pollock’s poured paintings of 1947-50, Rosalind Krauss identified the significance of his move onto the floor as not simply a technical innovation, but rather the opening up of a wholly new matrix of possibilities that she termed horizontality-as-medium. This new medium comprised both the materiality of paint and the implications of horizontality taken together, cancelling out the illusionism of the vertical axis and making some previously ignored factors, such as the effect of gravity, highly significant. Krauss extends this argument in several directions, examining ‘critical misreadings’ of Pollock by other American artists that pick up on this horizontality in various ways; a similar reading could be made of certain contemporary British painters.
Callum Innes, for instance, in whose Exposed Paintings areas of pigment are steadily dissolved and re-figured through the action of poured turpentine: or the monumental arcs of emulsion in Ian Davenport’s work, created by a movement from the horizontal to a vertical axis: or even those calcified drips along the bottom edges of Torie Begg’s Apparently paintings, evidencing innumerable layers beneath the monochrome surface. These works not only reveal the process of their own making, but also the temporality of that process: they freeze a moment of transition, when paint moved from one physical state to another.
If their use of process can be linked to Krauss’s reading of Pollock, they differ hugely in intention to the earlier painter. They all seek in differing degrees to distance themselves from any idea of authentic gesture or to repress transcendental or self-expressive associations. Torie Begg goes furthest in this regard, using computer-generated systems to dictate the sequence of colours in her paintings, applying her method across a range of objects, such as shoes and chairs as well as canvases, and installing her work in ways which emphasize its seriality and object-ness. Brian Muller has used the term reflexivity in relation to Begg’s work, seeing its principal function as provoking in the viewer an awareness of their own cognitive responses as they attempt to locate meaning. Both Muller and Begg use the word real to describe how the paintings aim to avoid readings and associations outside of their structure, materiality and process.
Perhaps the Perspex in Petra McCarthy’s paintings represents a similar distancing procedure. Compared to the intuitive virtuosity of the image on the canvas, the imprint onto Perspex reveals a mechanical process whose instantaneous nature is more akin to photography than painting: it catches every last detail, a form of exposure, and has the effect of freezing in time the liquidity of the dilute acrylic. Each canvas/Perspex presents two different forms of temporality: the canvas evidences all the pictorial decisions, with their related physical actions, that have gone into the making of the image and in its stilled formations of paint we read that activity back and understand its duration; the Perspex evidences a single moment in time, a snapshot, and is the trace of a single act, the taking of the impression from the canvas. In the former, we can potentially read all the heroic ambitions of abstract expressionism. In the latter, in opposition to those ambitions, we find an act of appropriation, a calling into question of the singularity or originality of the image, a simulacrum.
The reflexivity Muller finds in Torie Begg’s work might then be relevant here, for in the tension between these two modes of production McCarthy sets up a situation in which the viewer must decide where meaning is located. This might not be as easy as it seems, for although the import of the layer on Perspex would seem to cancel out the canvas-image in various ways, in front of the works themselves this is not the case. The viewer is drawn into the relationship between the two layers, constantly checking how they match up and entering an ambiguous pictorial space. This is further complicated by various strategies McCarthy has developed as the series has progressed.
In ‘Three Days’, for example, she offset the Perspex when taking an impression off the canvas so that when re-aligned the upper layer shifts to one side, leaving a strip of blank Perspex at one edge and a dislocation between the two layers, as if some seismic event has forced the image apart: the exactness of the Perspex simulacrum seems all the more bewildering and impossible.
It is as if the whole process of painting has been taken apart and reconstructed in the wrong order.
The Perspex-image complicates and enriches our viewing of the canvas-image; it both throws into question the single surface as authentic evidence of the artist’s expressive activity and creates a more complex viewing situation for exactly such a surface. If the physical format of these paintings is only one of the first things we notice it is because we are equally compelled by how McCarthy paints. These are bright, vivid, joyful paintings. It’s hard to imagine an object more celebratory, more full of the pleasures of colour and paint than ‘New Delight’. As viewers, we are seduced by the delicate veins and deltas of paint, the intricate webs and meshes and pools of colour. Whereas in Pollock we are always aware of the accumulation of marks, of the repeated strands that build up into the image, in Petra McCarthy’s paintings there is more of a sense of natural process (as noted of Callum Innes’s work), as if the image simply evolved of its own accord. And as with all great painting, it is done so well that it appears not so much effortless, but rather as if the artist wasn’t involved at all.
There is, then, a balance in these paintings, a negotiation of the terrain that lies between modernism and later developments and critiques of modernist ideas. If it is difficult for a contemporary painter to make images that are to be taken at face-value, to make paintings uninflected by irony and knowingness, Petra McCarthy nevertheless takes her place alongside those contemporaries who attempt such work and find various strategies to re-invigorate the language of non-figurative painting. Principal amongst such strategies, I would suggest, is the endeavour to make images that allow for evocative and associative readings but then pull the viewer back to an awareness of process and materiality. This duality, rich in possibilities and interpretations, is intriguingly explored in these works.
Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London
One of the first things you notice about Petra McCarthy’s latest paintings is their physical format. She paints on canvases laid flat on the floor then, whilst the paint is still wet, takes an exact impression of the image onto Perspex. At a later point the Perspex is bolted to the canvas so that it is exactly in front of it, a few centimetres clear of its surface.
Whatever we make of these paintings, we have to take account of that process, of the physical presence of that second level of image both echoing and obscuring the image on the canvas surface. We have to decide what is added by that second layer and how it alters our experience and why McCarthy should want to interpose this barrier between our eye and its normal target, the picture plane.
To do so, it may be useful to start with the canvas rather than the Perspex. The artist uses acrylic paint in various states of dilution, dropped or poured onto the canvas from above. There is both an immediate evocation of Jackson Pollock and a clear sense of difference: her compositions have a different rhythmic structure, with greater shifts between space and activity so that the composition contains islands of density; crucially, she has discovered a different repertoire of gestural marks, exploiting the liquidity of acrylics to generate intricate meshes of paint; and her colour is at an altogether higher pitch, moving the paintings away from the evocation of landscape.
In her analysis of Pollock’s poured paintings of 1947-50, Rosalind Krauss identified the significance of his move onto the floor as not simply a technical innovation, but rather the opening up of a wholly new matrix of possibilities that she termed horizontality-as-medium. This new medium comprised both the materiality of paint and the implications of horizontality taken together, cancelling out the illusionism of the vertical axis and making some previously ignored factors, such as the effect of gravity, highly significant. Krauss extends this argument in several directions, examining ‘critical misreadings’ of Pollock by other American artists that pick up on this horizontality in various ways; a similar reading could be made of certain contemporary British painters.
Callum Innes, for instance, in whose Exposed Paintings areas of pigment are steadily dissolved and re-figured through the action of poured turpentine: or the monumental arcs of emulsion in Ian Davenport’s work, created by a movement from the horizontal to a vertical axis: or even those calcified drips along the bottom edges of Torie Begg’s Apparently paintings, evidencing innumerable layers beneath the monochrome surface. These works not only reveal the process of their own making, but also the temporality of that process: they freeze a moment of transition, when paint moved from one physical state to another.
If their use of process can be linked to Krauss’s reading of Pollock, they differ hugely in intention to the earlier painter. They all seek in differing degrees to distance themselves from any idea of authentic gesture or to repress transcendental or self-expressive associations. Torie Begg goes furthest in this regard, using computer-generated systems to dictate the sequence of colours in her paintings, applying her method across a range of objects, such as shoes and chairs as well as canvases, and installing her work in ways which emphasize its seriality and object-ness. Brian Muller has used the term reflexivity in relation to Begg’s work, seeing its principal function as provoking in the viewer an awareness of their own cognitive responses as they attempt to locate meaning. Both Muller and Begg use the word real to describe how the paintings aim to avoid readings and associations outside of their structure, materiality and process.
Perhaps the Perspex in Petra McCarthy’s paintings represents a similar distancing procedure. Compared to the intuitive virtuosity of the image on the canvas, the imprint onto Perspex reveals a mechanical process whose instantaneous nature is more akin to photography than painting: it catches every last detail, a form of exposure, and has the effect of freezing in time the liquidity of the dilute acrylic. Each canvas/Perspex presents two different forms of temporality: the canvas evidences all the pictorial decisions, with their related physical actions, that have gone into the making of the image and in its stilled formations of paint we read that activity back and understand its duration; the Perspex evidences a single moment in time, a snapshot, and is the trace of a single act, the taking of the impression from the canvas. In the former, we can potentially read all the heroic ambitions of abstract expressionism. In the latter, in opposition to those ambitions, we find an act of appropriation, a calling into question of the singularity or originality of the image, a simulacrum.
The reflexivity Muller finds in Torie Begg’s work might then be relevant here, for in the tension between these two modes of production McCarthy sets up a situation in which the viewer must decide where meaning is located. This might not be as easy as it seems, for although the import of the layer on Perspex would seem to cancel out the canvas-image in various ways, in front of the works themselves this is not the case. The viewer is drawn into the relationship between the two layers, constantly checking how they match up and entering an ambiguous pictorial space. This is further complicated by various strategies McCarthy has developed as the series has progressed.
In ‘Three Days’, for example, she offset the Perspex when taking an impression off the canvas so that when re-aligned the upper layer shifts to one side, leaving a strip of blank Perspex at one edge and a dislocation between the two layers, as if some seismic event has forced the image apart: the exactness of the Perspex simulacrum seems all the more bewildering and impossible.
It is as if the whole process of painting has been taken apart and reconstructed in the wrong order.
The Perspex-image complicates and enriches our viewing of the canvas-image; it both throws into question the single surface as authentic evidence of the artist’s expressive activity and creates a more complex viewing situation for exactly such a surface. If the physical format of these paintings is only one of the first things we notice it is because we are equally compelled by how McCarthy paints. These are bright, vivid, joyful paintings. It’s hard to imagine an object more celebratory, more full of the pleasures of colour and paint than ‘New Delight’. As viewers, we are seduced by the delicate veins and deltas of paint, the intricate webs and meshes and pools of colour. Whereas in Pollock we are always aware of the accumulation of marks, of the repeated strands that build up into the image, in Petra McCarthy’s paintings there is more of a sense of natural process (as noted of Callum Innes’s work), as if the image simply evolved of its own accord. And as with all great painting, it is done so well that it appears not so much effortless, but rather as if the artist wasn’t involved at all.
There is, then, a balance in these paintings, a negotiation of the terrain that lies between modernism and later developments and critiques of modernist ideas. If it is difficult for a contemporary painter to make images that are to be taken at face-value, to make paintings uninflected by irony and knowingness, Petra McCarthy nevertheless takes her place alongside those contemporaries who attempt such work and find various strategies to re-invigorate the language of non-figurative painting. Principal amongst such strategies, I would suggest, is the endeavour to make images that allow for evocative and associative readings but then pull the viewer back to an awareness of process and materiality. This duality, rich in possibilities and interpretations, is intriguingly explored in these works.