Selected Essays & Reviews
Galerie Jean-Luc and Takako Richard Catalog
California isn’t what it used to be. Neither is its art,
which happens to be one of the few things that has, over the
last forty years, developed as fast and as furiously as the
more commonly chronicled indicators of what life is like in
the Golden State. Such signs of the times include sweeping
demographic shifts; real estate developments; high-tech
breakthroughs; advances in all forms of telecommunication;
and last but not least, the air quality index, which records
the emissions, toxins, pollens, contaminants, chemicals,
spores, dust, organic effluvia, and other invisible
substances that make up every breath of air in California –
while accentuating the legendary beauty of our fog-shrouded,
smog-choked coast.
Back in the 1960s, things were different. Such artists as
Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Douglas Wheeler, and Larry Bell
made names for themselves by making works that defined the
Light and Space movement. This Southern California school
was dedicated to clarity of perception, clarity of thought,
and a sort of Zen fullness that became apparent when viewers
entered big empty spaces in the right frame of mind: not in
order to see something spectacular or dazzling, but to bear
witness to infinitesimal shifts in the environment. Light
and Space works featured emptiness, and required
considerable durations – and long stretches of silence – for
their perceptual nuances to become palpable, visible, and,
ultimately, moving.
Today, time has accelerated and space has shrunk. More
people are packed into bigger, more cacophonous urban
sprawls, especially in California. Constantly bombarded by a
historically unprecedented onslaught of visual stimulation,
attention spans seem to be diminishing. Put simply, the
emptiness with which the Light and Space artists began their
attempts to find a place for human consciousness apart from
the rapid-fire machinations of modern life’s image glut has
been filled up. Like the American West of popular mythology,
the wide-open, untrammeled spaces at the heart of Light and
Space art have been crowded out, replaced by the incessant,
invisibly transmitted communications made possible by a
plethora of wireless technology, including cell phones,
instant text messages, e-mail, and the Internet. Today, to
imagine that the space between things is empty is to ignore
the global world of instantaneous interconnectivity in which
we live.
To accurately picture the airwaves is to picture a vast sea
of swirling activity – a fecund stew of molecules,
particles, light rays, sound waves, magnetic forces,
electrical currents, and digital impulses criss-crossing one
another’s paths with mind-boggling simultaneity. To these,
add the weather systems that make up the Earth’s atmosphere
(and include hurricanes, tropical storms, droughts, holes in
the ozone layer, and global warming) as well as everything
accounted for by the air quality index, not to mention
airborne viruses and invisible contagions, like SARS,
anthrax, avian flu, e-coli bacteria, and other
terror-inspiring microbes.
This is the world Darren Waterston paints in his multivalent
sky-scapes. The Fresno-born, Los Angeles-educated, San
Francisco-based artist’s new oils on panel are not
conventional landscapes because the horizon, which in
traditional landscape painting divides terra firma from the
heavens above, almost never appears. In Waterston’s
fantasy-fueled Realism, what ordinarily anchors viewers in
the familiar here and now of the physical world is pulled
out from under our feet. This pushes viewers into the realm
of the imagination, where associative free-play and
unpredictable intuitions take precedence over step-by-step
logic and the undeniable laws of physics. But Waterston
never lets viewers escape into a dreamy world of
romanticized fantasies, pleasurable reveries, or
inconsequential idealizations. Instead, he begins with the
immanently reasonable idea that contemporary reality is
significantly more complex than what immediately reveals
itself to the senses. His deliciously sensual paintings are
grounded in reality because they consistently and
convincingly suggest that the horizon is just below the
bottom edge, out of the frame but not out of mind. This
simple physical feature requires viewers to look in two
directions simultaneously: outward and upward, to attain a
big-picture view of the whole (which often turns out to
include the cosmos), and inward and downward, toward the
interior space of self-reflective contemplation (or good
old-fashioned soul-searching).
The dual, non-contradictory movements invited and inspired
by Waterston’s paintings match the multiplicity of
perspectives, modes of representation, and painterly
techniques each embodies. None presents anything like a
singular view. Instead, scale shifts from the microcosmic to
the macrocosmic – and back again, initiating a potentially
infinite cycle. Space contracts and expands, creating the
impression of a living, breathing organism, often of vast,
inconceivable dimensions. Light melds with darkness,
implying long durations. And time simultaneously folds back
on itself, gathering memories and recollections as it cycles
around to partake in an ongoing process of birth, life,
death, decay, and rebirth – or creation, destruction, and
everything in between, without end.
The painting from which the exhibition’s title is taken is
"Hyle," a fourteen-foot-long diptych which is itself titled
after the ancient Greek word for matter or substance: the
very stuff that makes up the universe. For Aristotle, "hyle"
is ripe potentiality, the possibility of being. Without it,
there is simply nothingness. Waterston’s painting brings the
idea of potential full circle, wrapping it around the idea
of devastation to bring ancient Greek thought into the
present, where movies, video games, and other such
spectacular extravaganzas have far more sway than the orally
transmitted reflections of itinerant philosophers.
His splendid, panoramic image is riven by eighteen jagged,
steeply angled lines that suggest a pine forest through
which a hellish conflagration has raced, consuming
everything in its path except the thickest trunks and
branches of the tallest trees, which it has reduced to
charred, skeletal remains. The vertiginously receding
perspectival illusion suggests that each viewer is lying
flat on his back looking up at the night sky, having just
awoken from unconsciousness to discover the aftermath of a
mysterious cataclysm he has somehow survived. A pair of
translucent mountains thrusts skyward, but their roughly
concentric silhouettes could also be the irradiated
afterimages of a world that has recently vanished – yet
still lingers, in the mind’s-eye, like a phantom limb. Red,
white, and blue orbs – or rose, snow, and aqua disks – glow
in the vastness overhead. Like planets in an undiscovered
galaxy, they might be the symbols of patriotism, possibly
faded from overuse or renewed in a more effeminate,
decorative palette. If you squint, these circles of light
resemble tiny droplets of blood or even tinier tears on the
retina, which are not really visible but leave floating,
ghostly shadows for the eye to see when it looks elsewhere.
Such peripheral intimations of mortality, the vulnerability
of the flesh, and the spirit’s incommensurability with
physical facts are subsumed by the fluidity of Waterston’s
painting, which also seems to depict an underwater world of
silent sumptuousness and weightless tranquility. A bolt of
lightning, flashing impossibly in 360-degrees (like Fourth
of July fireworks), adds an electrifying jolt of danger and
beauty. This part of the painting also resembles a
spider-web crack in safety glass, which drives home the
point that the image is under great pressure, and that the
illusionistic window that representational art has
traditionally opened onto the real world is cracking under
the strain of what it is up against. This is an apt metaphor
for painting’s place in the modern world: neither an escape
nor a panacea but a momentary stepping away from everyday
chaos that allows viewers to see things more clearly.
Waterston provides no easy answers or final resolutions to
any of the evocative narratives his ambiguous image
engenders, instead keeping viewers anxious, engaged, and
essential components of the ongoing drama, in which
confusion and clarity swirl around one another in a dizzying
dance.
"Blue Field," "Gorge" and "Threshold" similarly locate
viewers in the middle of things, possibly staring skyward
through dense mists, or from beneath the surface of azure
seas. Each image conveys the impression that you have
suddenly come upon a momentous event that is not only well
underway, but well beyond the point of no return. Unmoored
from the past and the familiar, you have no choice but to
squint and to struggle and to strive to make imaginative
leaps in order to make sense of what has gone on, what is
going on, and what is likely to happen next. "Vault"
abandons the sky and the sea for the subterranean world.
Using a palette of earthy browns and loamy blacks, it
suggests an interior world both cavernous and
claustrophobic, where Gothic horror and Art Deco delight are
equal parties to Waterston’s fusion of Symbolist intrigue
and Futurist menace. Nature and culture – or the organic and
the synthetic – dovetail even more dramatically in
"Hypertrophy." Above the crests of three silhouetted
mountains, a city of ethereal skyscrapers floats through a
smoggy sci-fi sky. The translucent forms resemble a fecund
cluster of bulbous mushrooms adrift, like a wayward
space-station, in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Waterston’s
painting is also a psilocybin-induced vision of a fairyland
for world-weary Romantics, a pleasure-dome for hedonists who
refuse to let go of their dreams – utopian or otherwise.
The human body takes most explicit form in "Gravity" and
"Rush." In "Gravity," ghostly tree branches and drifting
smoke rings recall the circulatory system’s complex network
of veins, arteries, and capillaries. In "Rush," the neural
network is evoked by rapidly splashed skeins of baby blue
paint. These lightning-swift bolts of color trace the
contours of an abstract, translucent brain that Waterston
has created by suspending various pigments in rapidly
evaporating liquids – and letting nature take its course.
"Fractal" is among the most abstract of Waterston’s
paintings, a masterfully composed layering of transparency
and opacity, line and shape, color and atmosphere, pattern
and accident, geometry and randomness. It is also among the
most thrilling. And physically stunning, with an icy white
ground bleeding over a layer of blood-red underpainting, and
transparent puddles of smoky brown and soft gray obeying the
laws of gravity while still following the zig-zagged
contours of pixilated imagery. If digital impulses had
bodies, or if the invisible transmissions that fill the
airwaves suddenly became visible and turned into inhabitable
landscapes, this is what they might look like.
Although Waterston’s paintings do not share stylistic
similarities with classic Light and Space works, they
similarly make room for experiences of tranquility amid the
cacophony of modern life. But rather than building temporary
refuges from everyday reality, Waterston’s works tap into
the pulsating rhythms and disconcerting chaos all around
them to make sense of our place in a world that is by turns
terrifying and beautiful.