PAINTING, WITH THE FIGURE

"Painting seems like an impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light. Which must be because of the narrow passage from diagramming to that other state - a corporeality. In this sense, to paint is a possessing rather than a picturing." Philip Guston 1956

What can it possibly mean, in 2001, to paint the figure? How can an artist continue to engage in early modern, even premodern, concerns and practices? Wasn't the European painting tradition wrung dry over half a century ago?

To the painters in this exhibition, and their many colleagues, such questions reflect the limitations of a prevailing post-art discourse based on extra-visual criteria, a "diagrammatic" doctrine which celebrates ironic distancing and socio-political strategies, while devaluing the potential depth and wholeness of the aesthetic experience.

As the works shown here make abundantly evident, painting does not rely on grand narratives, critical theory or other conceptual structures for its meaning. It exists in its own realm - in the space between the painter and the picture surface, between the viewer's gaze and the dynamics of the pictorial environment. The aesthetic domain which painting alone can address has been present in Western art since antiquity, and transcends subject matter and local cultural conditions. It is the elemental aspect of the painting language that links the Villa of the Mysteries with Giotto, Titian, Cezanne, Mondrian and de Kooning. And it is this common thread which is embraced by the artists in the present exhibition.

The subject of a painting may be dictated by the pope, or by some private obsession; but what matters is the corporeal connection between the painter and the work. What matters is the depth of experience that can be "possessed" by the painter and embedded in the work. What matters is that the pictorial object is possessed with a life of its own.

In making the personal and historical choice to work figuratively, these painters utilize the human form, not as an academic object of observational study, but as a receiver of the artist's transposed experience, a conveyor or vehicle for human empathy and enlarged meaning, and an improvisational catalyst for dynamic activation of the pictorial arena. Through the figure, these painters gain access to the corporeal, and achieve their truest realization of pure sensibility. The figural element is inseparable from the pictorial construction as a whole, fused with ground and surface in a condition of equilibrium which ultimately embodies the artist's essential reality.

What we do not see in this exhibition is any trace of postmodern deconstruction, or of Duchampian indifference. For these painters, art history is not appropriated, it is inhabited. Their paintings are not the products of career strategy, but of physical and spiritual necessity. The barrage of media imagery that comprises our contemporary environment is, for these artists, peripheral to, or at least separate from, the solitary and intimate world of the studio. They are unflinching protectors of the tradition to which they belong and contribute. They are painters who are deeply in love with painting in all its humanity.

Steven Alexander 2001

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