Selected Essays & Reviews
Night Flowers: Darren Waterston's "Last Days"
Darren Waterston has entitled his latest group of paintings Last Days, thus signaling to his viewers that his creative impulse in these works is none other than the urgent question - the urgent perplexity - of how we picture genuine completion. He proposes his response on several scales, from the minute perfections of the artist's brush composing the work of art, to the existential dilemmas of how to compose something meaningfully final out of an individual life. Then too, in a further leap, Waterston gestures towards the sublime magnitude of endings in history, the dissipations and fall of those rich imperial civilizations that fill the history books - and also, however much we might not wish to acknowledge it, the approaching closure of our own historical age. Hovering elusively between figural and abstract visual motifs, between the intent to narrate and the desire to convey a symbolic or conceptual content, his new works imagine for our insecure present the secrets of last things and the processes by which these may be, when we least expect it, revealed. Or more accurately: these works hesitate on the threshold of pronouncing their revelation. Instead, withholding vision, they dramatize our failure to keep in mind the coming end, the problem of our even imagining some completion to this yet-open moment in human time.
Admittedly, even in an archaic age supposed to be more mythological and god-ridden than our own, the problem of conceiving and communicating the end-time loomed large. In the biblical texts foretelling apocalypse, the heavenly mediators and interpreters who appear - such as the archangel Gabriel who explained the wise man Daniel's troubling visions and who today returns in the title of one of Waterston's large-scale canvases - forbid the sharing of the prophetic vision until the final moment has arrived at last: "But you, Daniel, keep the words secret and the book sealed until the time of the end" (Daniel 12: 4). Apocalyptic visions test the very powers of human representation, as the sheer sublimity of change threatens to render meaningless any means by which such change's measure might be taken: "'My lord, because of the vision such pains have come upon me that I retain no strength. How can my lord's servant talk with my lord? For I am shaking, no strength remains in me, and no breath is left in me'" (Daniel 10: 16-17). In part, what is revealed in the moment of vision is an uncomfortable secret about prophetic speech itself, which even more decisively characterizes its modern afterlife in art: the prophet's incapacity for the task assigned him by his inspiring angels; the all-too-human limits of his expressive means. The apocalyptic seer returns from the encounter with his tongue bound and the strength drained from his body, having passed personally through the darkness of the end in which he is nothing, back to the ground from which all creation originates and to which all returns.
Upsetting and blurring elemental signs of the hierarchies of being - high and low, surface and depth, shadow and light, large and small - Waterston's Last Days depict the uncontrollable mingling of things once kept apart, mixtures that traditional apocalypses described in an anguished language of confusion, chaos, the suspension of the rites and sacrifices, the temporary reign of the anti-kingdom, the "abomination of desolation." But only to a very reduced degree do the paintings lay claim to that divine pathos once available to apocalyptic wordsmiths who came in from the desert to pronounce judgment on the cities and their errant ways. Waterston mobilizes only the fading trace of the sacred left to the contemporary artist after the long disenchantment of the world, which, over the centuries dividing us from the first apocalyptic prognostications, has supplanted prophetic whirlwinds with actual freeway traffic, global warming, and clouds of acid rain. Yet despite the secular, even technological horizon upon which his artistic worlds are installed, Waterston's oil paintings and related works on paper suggest for us the possibility that this could all become radically different, almost without warning. In their technical vocabulary referencing a tradition of symbolically-engaged, expressionistic painting that stretches from Kupka and Kandinsky through Newman and Tobey at mid-century to Kiefer's landscapes and Richter's abstractions, these apocalyptic "inscapes" stand before us as abstract visual graphs of the tensions at major turning-points around which natural, spiritual, and historical worlds drastically change.
Indeed, in developing his lexicon of motifs and images, Waterston has not shied away from the traditional accoutrements of allegory. As with several of his artistic masters, we find titles that evoke historical and theological meanings; allusive references to the history of art and to literary texts; figural and stylistic motifs used so insistently that they have become like a graphic alphabet to him, enabling a "scriptural" dimension to arise within the paintings - a mysterious infra-text written in a nervous cursive hand, made up of tangles of bird-like characters and botanical arabesques, punctuated by drifting dust, diatoms, grains of pollens, starlings, and seraphs, and partially reabsorbed by the layers of color rising up from the gessoed wood bases. Yet despite this profusion of script-like elements amidst his image-world, only to a limited extent does Waterston seek to communicate a determinate "literary" meaning, a story to be "read." His paintings appear instead like the force-diagrams of a world in sudden alteration. At once celestial and sub-atomic in scale, they leap up structural rungs and energy states from particles and cellular geometries to the living body, and from crumbling cityscapes up to the very vaults of heaven.
All these works, but especially the two large Last Days canvases and the five-tondo panel cluster Five Oblivions, dramatize an encounter between the human body, with its peculiar dimensions, and another order of being radically different from human scale, whether cosmic, angelic, or crystalline. Last Days: Seraph and Last Days: Gabriel, which confront the viewer in the format of a full-length portrait or mirror, most clearly evoke this dissonant juxtaposition of spaces. In the former, the figure stands vertical and is recognizably humanoid; yet it is suffering a vegetative metamorphosis under the furious torments of the winged seraphs, which liquefy and flake away its body's substance. In the latter, the apparent reference to the viewer's body is still more unsettling. We might see its orientation not as vertical, but as horizontal, on a plane high "above" the viewer, as if the heavens were opening up before a viewer laid flat, its green emerald shade spreading out like a veil in the aerial depths between the ground and the circular emanations of the angelic voice. So too the two works entitled Firmament render any spatial orientation equivocal. What is "firmament" here, and what is fundament? How can we decide? In apocalyptic space, directions become reversible; the way up and the way down lead us to the same destination.
Five Oblivions similarly estranges the picture's reference to the human form. Each of the five oval-shaped panels visually materializes the metaphor of a unique aperture through which an eye might look out upon the cosmos; yet at the same time, each seems to represent a singular state of the sensitive inner surface of the eye itself, nervously fired with chemical events and electrical flares. Taken as a group of five, however, they also schematize the basic disposition of a human body, with a head and two arms and legs laid out in bilateral symmetry. Seen thus, we might go on to interpret this composed set as another body laid out flat - like an abstract Daniel struck dumb and trembling by his visions - and the five panels differentially reflecting back the mysteries unveiled above it in the heights.
Notably absent from Waterston's Last Days is any hint of the moralistic, juridical, and ethno-nationalistic aspect of a host of traditional apocalypses: the element of last judgment and final battle, the selection of the faithful from those who have betrayed their god and mingled with foreigners, lurid punishments to be rained upon historical persecutors and oppressors of the - temporary - present. If there is any last judgment lurking in these Last Days, then it is one that partakes of the generous heresy of the early Church theologians Gregory of Nyssa and Origen of Alexandria, in Greek apokatastasis, or in Latin restitutio in pristinum statum: that restoration of everything to an original state of possibility, lost from the beginning and available only at the end. For Waterston, as for these thinkers of late antiquity, the world's last days have nothing of fiery pits with devils roasting sinners naked over a hot grill. For him, each soul is a single grain of creation, and judgment is a winnowing, ever repeated. Each threshing brings more and more souls to harvest, until, in the end, all are saved. Even, Waterston suggests in the gem-colored streaks that flash out from the blacks and greys that dominate these canvases, Lucifer himself, the fallen angel of light, may soon play a role more worthy of his rank than mere contrariety and malice:
In the dark-blue depths, under layers and layers of darkness,
I see him more like the ruby, a gleam from within
of his own magnificence,
coming like the ruby in the invisible dark, glowing
with his own annunciation, towards us.
- D.H. Lawrence, "Lucifer"
It is in D.H. Lawrence's deep gem-like and Luciferian glow that I interpret Night Bloom, the final panel of Waterston's sequence of five canvases, New Eden. The sequence evolves through a series of catastrophic shifts, from the archeo-urban landscape of Ziggurat, through the miniaturized "city" of Mineral Forest, through the transformation scene of Fallen, into the celestial night of Ice and Stars. Night Bloom then consummates this sequence of spaces and genres in a last mystical "still life." Its background space is closed both through the black and black-grey tones of the whole and through Waterston's use of small, square brush marks to fill up most of the canvas. Alone conferring depth is Waterston's trimming of the edges of his flower-wing figure with a mysterious illumination, coming neither from an identifiable source in the space, nor from within the folds of the blossoms themselves, which are nested deep in shadow. It may originate in the nebulous light patch at eye-level center, which is surrounded by a black, void zone; a concentrated beam seems to emerge from this cloud, to pass around and through the bloom, setting its edges aglow.
But there remains another presence, ambiguously both angelic and demonic, hovering at the very border of the canvas, and hence metaphorically at the threshold of becoming visible. At the bottom margin of the right side of the canvas, Waterston has deposited a small streak of that same emerald green that fans out so demonstratively over the nocturnal surface of Last Days: Gabriel. But here the emerald hides, like a secret laid up in the earth, waiting for its time to announce itself - to that viewer alone who has patience to look, to wait, to read the signs.