by Vittorio Colaizzi

“A picture lives by companionship.” (Mark Rothko)

Pluralism reigns in the art world, but some artists are more plural than others. Although painting has been declared dead throughout the twentieth century, one look at the galleries, magazines, or blogs will confirm its vitality. Unlike at other times when both representation and abstraction were by turns suspect as decadent and escapist, today a dizzying array of styles and methods coexist on the same walls or even on the same canvas. Moreover, painting has assimilated new media and integrated found imagery from numerous sources, thus broadening its aesthetic and conceptual possibilities. While painting never did become obsolete, its five-hundred-year dominance as the central avenue for aesthetic discourse has effectively ended. One could call this a death of sorts, but it is nevertheless a great gift to painters, freeing them from any singular critical paradigm.

And yet something else may have died with painting’s reinstatement in our radically permissive art world. This is the expectation that art should operate critically upon its own conventions, not in order to demolish itself, but to perpetually resuscitate and enliven our experience. This task remains necessary because orthodoxies constantly solidify around any new idea. Even hedonism can become puritanical. When art is defined by play and evaluated in terms of sheer visual ravishment, there arises an impatience with work that seems to burden viewers with ponderous visual abstinence and is not sufficiently lustrous, overtly fun, or otherwise accommodating. But while some artists merely depict the plurality of our present climate with rampant hybridization of images, styles, and media, others put this plurality to work, obtaining from it the license to pursue their own specific concerns.

These painters create space, both pictorial and abstract. But more importantly they create a space, or a gathering place, a site for us to be with the painting and with each other.

Brett Baker, Kayla Mohammadi, and Carrie Patterson each work within a set of carefully circumscribed parameters in order to advance the discourse of abstract painting. “Advancement” here is not meant to suggest an inevitable linear path, but rather the urge to continue, deepen, and reinvent their practice, with full knowledge of previous developments but no sense of obligation to them. These three artists have recognized an affinity between their paintings and given it the name “Placing Color,” thus articulating the two key factors they hold in common. One of these, “color,” is the familiar building block of modernist painting, the element that, at the beginning of the last century, was freed from descriptive responsibility. Forty-odd years ago it became apparent that this freedom had been inverted into an academic and authoritarian prohibition against numerous questions of identity, context, and narrative. After a necessary if zealous backlash, color is being revisited, which brings us to the second term in their title, “placing.” Here the placelessness of autonomous modern color is revoked, and color becomes situated: in history, in inhabited space, and in personal associations. These painters create space, both pictorial and abstract. But more importantly they create a space, or a gathering place, a site for us to be with the painting and with each other. Unlike certain strains of mute and imperious abstraction that bestow their meaning only to the initiated, these paintings need us. Not in a cloying, sycophantic manner; they do not appeal desperately to convince us of their hipness. Instead, they require the viewer to set them in motion and to activate their spatial resonance.

Brett Baker’s work is full of dualities that are not exclusive of one another; not either/or, but this/and. The most obvious of these is the distinction between the easel-scaled high-impasto paintings consisting of repeated bars of dim but saturated color, and the room-scaled installation paintings, in which a monumental canvas is propped a few feet from a gallery wall, creating a long corridor of color, painted on one side and reflected from the other. Together these two bodies of work signify his simultaneous commitment to the materiality and immateriality of color.

Baker welcomes the association of his smaller works with a surrogate human presence. Indeed they are the size of portraits, and their uniform thickness faces the viewer with the insistence of a visage. It is also notable that he has produced two series of drawings entitled Self and Skull that are equally abstract, as if, like the pioneers of the early 20th century, he wanted to purge representation of all particulars in order to obtain pure presence. This notion of presence has been subject to critical interrogation based on skepticism as to whether the deployment of cultural conventions (iconographic representation and/or conspicuous evidence of the hand) actually achieves presence, or if these conventional codes only signify the desire for a presence that is absent. Baker avoids any simplified affirmation or negation, realizing instead that the question itself articulates the fragility of human identity. Presence for Baker is never a foregone conclusion, but the impetus for an urgent striving. He poses the question again and again in the concretion of pigment, whose turgidity is lightened by flashes of turquoise, pink, lavender, and emerald. Texture’s vestigial function as a trite guarantor of painterly angst is neutralized through unrelieved thickness, but this neutralization occurs visibly, so that color is all the more effective for having made its way up through the murk. Baker scrutinizes the painted mark as a humanist inheritance, confirming it as something worth preserving, but only if it is achieved anew upon each occurrence of painting.

Carrie Patterson takes as her subject architectural space and the body’s perception of it. This formulation already does a great deal to distinguish her endeavor, because, while working abstractly, yet with a “subject,” she obtains for her viewers the grounding that a subject provides. Patterson’s layered and abutted colored planes are realizations of feeling in the midst of lived experience, rather than recitations of form for its own sake. For her, architectural interiors are sites of intensified awareness, where one can feel one’s being most acutely in relation to the planes and volumes one traverses. Just as the sense of self develops reciprocally within one’s environment, so do Patterson’s paintings emerge through her processes of memory, juxtaposition and overlap, and most recently through an intermediary method of video projection. She always maintains a link to her source, however attenuated, and thereby denies abstraction’s reputed alienation from life.

An important aspect of Patterson’s activity is her use of collage, both as a preparatory tool and as an occasional component of the newer paintings. Collage’s inherent quality of placing and layering remains in the paintings, but it has been virtualized, so that it is not apparent which layer, if any, is “on top.” In her finished paintings, she lets go of literal spatial layering while acknowledging it as part of the process, thereby preserving painting’s status as a fiction. But it is a real fiction, an object with its own logic, severed from our prosaic time and space, and yet always reaching back towards it as its instigator and source of energy. Patterson does not paint a pictorial illusion, nor a collection of jumpy blocks, but, in her own succinct words, “a sensation of spatial elasticity.” The paintings bestow an experience that is kinesthetic and durational, so that the viewer reconstitutes the spatiality of the source as he or she drifts among the slabs of color. The vicissitudes of life, in this case expressed as the embodied perception of space and structure, have been brought under the guidance of pigment on canvas, not to freeze or tame them, but to propose an ongoing dialectic of stability and flux.

Patterson’s newest paintings are horizontal polyptychs, whose constituent canvases sometimes vary in size. Instead of the cheaper and more easily obtainable cotton, she paints on linen, letting its characteristic brown show in a number of broad unpainted areas. In addition to adding its own voice to the color harmonies, the brown linen reveals the constructedness of the paintings themselves, affirming them as a kind of miniature architecture in their own right. The thickness of the stretchers suggests an industrial modularity which is then undercut and indeed humanized by the irregular, even vulnerable colored bands. Moreover, as rich and varied as they are, the colors themselves are strangely subdued when compared to the contemporary taste for all-out dazzle. The meaning of Patterson’s colors lies in the discord between their mellow tones and the punchy rhythm of the boxlike stretchers that carry them. Here Patterson sets up within the structure of her work a deliberate “failure” to live up to the bleak “promise” of regularized and monotonous commodity production. With brighter colors and more rigid configurations, this tension would have collapsed. The paintings’ almost-ness is crucial, because it constitutes the perpetual and self-renewing drive to catch and hold form, to actualize the dynamism of nature that defines both painting, her medium, and architecture, her source and inspiration.

Perhaps because of the above mentioned skepticism toward presence, many artists today choose to sidestep personal agency and, in order to avoid risking the appearance of naïveté, hang their work upon generating systems, such as appropriated images or well-defined methods of mediation. More than one painter has devised a way to “sample” the drip. Although none of the painters here resort to fail-safe strategies or recognizable branding, Kayla Mohammadi’s approach is the most brazenly intuitive. From one work to another, a flexible but recognizable voice emerges from her urge to savor, in painterly terms, the play of light on interior and exterior space. Mohammadi is more interested in enclosure and opening than strict measurement, so while her lines and planes hang together in a loose coalition, each seems capable of defection. Parallel colors often expand to become forms, and the resulting stripe-forms elude the viewer’s categorizing impulse to see them as “stripes.” Instead, they assert themselves as newly encountered things, and the boundary between “stripe” and “area” becomes unclear. This virtuosic fluidity exists within her brushwork as well; in some cases areas are rendered and the stroke is subsumed; in others the stroke itself becomes an explicit unit. Moments of crisp recognizability crop up here and there (flowers, bowls, chairs, etc.), but upon closer inspection, these are not meticulously detailed, but are identifiable only through Mohammadi’s studied contrasts in scale, value, and temperature. The elements of each painting are subject to constant questioning and reformulation; they are always shaking themselves up.

The interpenetration of abstraction and representation is a common trope today, but Mohammadi’s version is among the most resolved. Instead of assembling fragments of representation with equally familiar and equally truncated abstract phonemes, her abstraction emerges whole from the tradition of picture-as-window, the dissolution of pictorial space into a unified realm. The motif of the window, famously utilized by Matisse and Bonnard, allows Mohammadi to increase spatial complexity. The paintings open up from behind, and seem to envelop more space than is visible. This expansion and exploration of space is felt as much as seen, and reflects back onto her less overtly representational works, so that a play of curiosity and frustration emerges among all her paintings, as facades of color alternately block the eye and yield to it.

Mohammadi treats space with a variety of methods, including Renaissance-derived depth, modernist compression and opticality, and even Medieval/Byzantine projection, implying a leakage of the sacred into the spectator’s space. It has been suggested that there is now a new space, that of digital manipulation, which is characterized by a non-hierarchical simultaneity. Her paintings even suggests this space with some of their side by side line-ups of diverse colors, in which no hue dominates. Mohammadi does not fully inhabit, nor is she inhabited by, any of these spatial methods. Rather, she takes them all as part of her subject matter, not as a cynical expose of painting’s tricks, but because, given history’s uniform availability, she values each as an aspect of painting’s capacity to moves us. They allow her to present a wider range of feeling, because along with these various kinds of space, she also achieves sunlight, wind, fragrance, footsteps, and the hum and crackle of abstraction’s suggestion of synesthesia.

All of these artists’ works are predicated on pure singing color de-purified, or placed in relation to the additional factors of texture, process, or imagery. This dichotomy between the transcendent and the contingent recalls one of the defining critical debates in the 1960s, between Color Field painting and Minimalist objects. The former maintained a grand and classical disinterest, and above all an isolation of the visual, while the latter advocated phenomenological engagement between the body and the object. The bodily/optical divide did not spring from nowhere, but resulted from distillations of longstanding concerns within modernism. Raw materiality, shimmering luminosity, and the endlessly allusive nature of painting has been current at least since Abstract Expressionism, perhaps since Cubism. One sees these things in late Cézanne. So Baker, Patterson and Mohammadi’s re-integration of these issues cannot be attributed to historical amnesia, but rather to an astute handling of painting’s richness, once it is shorn of the duty to demonstrate a theoretical program.

Although it is necessary to locate an artist in historical context in order to fully understand his or her project, none of these painters have adopted a belligerent attitude towards an imagined foe. Rather, in their desire to carry on painting, they have carved out distinct but related territory in which they undertake the serious and unapologetic exploration of the means and effects of painting. They are formal, but not formalist, and this formal consistency separates their work from contemporaneous painters who wear pluralism on their sleeves like a party affiliation. Nevertheless, Baker, Mohammadi, and Patterson do not pretend to work in a perfect vacuum of autonomy. They recognize and nurture the fact that their work is placed within a field of references, and furthermore, that this placement is never finished.