“The Indexical Mark” Exhibition
Life on Mars Gallery
This event has ended.
John Keats: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. ”
Supporting the dogmas of fascist ideology, religious intolerance and racism, “Apollonian” definitions of a singular notion of beauty have been responsible for tremendous bloodshed throughout history. I believe that whatever is the most essential, the most specific and unique to any medium, discipline or being; the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something, especially something abstract, to be what determines its character, its essence, what is beautiful about it.
The essence of the practice of painting, what is essential and most uniquely specific to that medium, is painting’s ability to leave a record of material transformation (via the immediacy of hand) to create a recorded act that is immediate, while it at once expands and compresses time sequences, revealing the depth of an endless pictorial space. No other medium can do this. Whether it is in the push and pull of the incredible fat paint/color vibrations of Hans Hoffman, with his constant reversal of positive and negative spaces, or the sublime, infinite transparencies found in Vermeer that build forms out of light and an angel’s touch, it’s the paint - the essence, the schmaltz of paint that creates both a physical record and an illusionistic space.
Photographers Richard Benari and Lauren Henkin first brought to my attention the phrase “The Indexical Mark” in the discipline of photography. We discussed this complex term and its definition, and this led us to a dialogue about the commonalities and differences in the intricate symbiotic relationship between painting and photography. We will explore that relationship in a subsequent exhibition.
In linguistics and in philosophy of language, an indexical behavior or utterance points to (or indicates) some state of affairs. For example, I refers to whoever is speaking; now refers to the time at which that word is uttered; and here refers to the place of utterance. For Charles Sanders Peirce (the philosopher and “father of pragmatism”), indexicality is a phenomenon far broader than language; it is that which, independent of interpretation, points to something — such as smoke (an index of fire) or a pointing finger — which works indexically for interpretation.
The artists in this show; Bailey, Davie, LaRocco, Longenecker, Olin, O’Neill, Pritchard, Rothenberg, Schwartz and Yaniv, use an indexical mark to create a record that is enigmatic, concrete, original, personal and specific, independent of a single quick interpretation. Each of the artist’s indexical marks are created using different materials to arrive at different “places”. Longenecker and Pritchard load up their paint to create thick beds. Davie and O’Neill use the liquidity of their medium. LaRocco, Olin and Yaniv push their work by combining and introducing non-traditional materials. Bailey, Rothenberg and Schwartz combine a graphic line with fields and washes of paint.
Common to all their work is the physical immediacy and the materially of their practice which combine to reveal an innate understanding of the essence of painting, the truth of painting, the beauty of painting, mediating the instant with the endless.
Media
Schedule
from March 08, 2014 to April 06, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-03-08 from 18:00 to 21:00