PETER FRANK
"ONE YEAR AFTER" - 2003
DAENA TITLE: PICTURES PAINTED (IN MEMORIAM) AND PERCEIVED (IN VIVUM)
Catalogue essay for the show
June 2003
"ONE YEAR AFTER" - 2003
DAENA TITLE: PICTURES PAINTED (IN MEMORIAM) AND PERCEIVED (IN VIVUM)
By Peter Frank
The pleasures of painting, and of paint, present themselves readily in the recent work of Daena Title. But Title’s paintings provide such pleasure secondarily. Their intricacies, compositional and optical, point at the painter’s concern with graver issues, issues of perception and precognition, subject matter and the subjectivity of both artist and viewer. Still, these issues are fundamental not just to seeing, not just to art, but to painting in particular. Indeed, Title feels compelled to acknowledge the history of painting along with the sensation of seeing, giving neither realm of experience more significance than the other, but demonstrating once more how the two realms mesh.
Painting is a remarkably persistent practice. Perhaps it is the formidable history of the practice that gives painting its seemingly inexhaustible momentum. Perhaps it is the irresistible sensuality of the medium, a sensuality the eye appreciates, and enhances, even when the touch cannot. Perhaps it is the very human need to look at something – or, better put, the need to look at something else. Most likely, painting persists because of all the above reasons, to which can be added the need of painters to paint. But does that explain how, at a time when human perception is being reshaped by new technologies, a technology dating back to the 13th century can continue to attract so many adherents, and so wide and faithful an audience? Yes, it can, at least in part. And in part, the very fact that digital media is overwhelming every aspect of our cognition makes painting that much more compelling. Painting is as un-virtual, even anti-virtual, a medium, not to mention tradition, as we have on hand. It comes to us now as a visual, and tactile, palliative to the distant flicker of the computer image and the glassy, ionized surface of the screen behind (behind!) which that image quavers. And yet, painting is the ancestor to that image, the once-supreme realm of both illusion and information, visual reportage and visual propaganda. Sight is the prime human sense, the one each of us and each of our civilizations rely on first and foremost; both painting and digital media answer to this fact, but cybernetics can and to a certain extent does undermine this primacy, while painting reifies it. This is neither good nor bad, it is simply a condition of painting.
In the digital age – and after close to two centuries of mechanical media replicating the world with seeming faithfulness and dispassion – the metaphysics of painting are its raisons d’etre. That pertains especially – and ironically – to representational painting. When photography released painting from its indexical responsibilities, painting slouched and tumbled towards abstraction, finding justification in its own properties and in the relationship between those properties and the human hand and eye. The seen world recurs in painting no longer because painting is the only place to record and re-see that world, but because that world and painting both are phenomena we see, and, as seeable phenomena, are eminently conflatable.
Given this, the realm of representation in painting provides ever-fertile ground for a painter to fib, edit, compress, and otherwise confabulate the real world into a world that is real for however long the viewer looks at it. Daena Title’s approach to representational – specifically figurative – painting bespeaks this condition, this faith in fracture, febrility, and falsehood. In the body of work Title has painted over the last two years, she has mastered the art of building the truth out of a thousand little inventions. She does not paint the world she sees; she paints from it, effectively taking it apart and putting it back together differently from the way she has seen it – but not the way she has known it. Elision, non sequitur, and optical instability pervade Title’s work (her use of mirrors demonstrates this symbolically as well as visually) and, after having ridden and broken these slippery qualities in the spiritual rodeo of her studio, she now commands them rather than simply admiring them.
Especially elusive in Title’s art is the double quality of identity. Is this work of art a painting or a picture? Modernist values stress the identity of painting; and, if one subscribes to the teleological arc so many commentators and theorists have derived from and for modernism, depiction – pictorial identity – is an impediment, a reversal of modernist deliberation. But, tellingly, most modernist painters did not abandon the picture. (Indeed, even most modernist non-painters did not “leave the earth,” choosing to ground their formulations in, and even out of, what we see and know.) Title’s approach clearly does not address such radical notions of, for, and against pictorial presence, but it does restate the basic argument that birthed the question of picture-versus-painting: what is the relationship of the picture to its painterliness? That is, are we supposed to look at the subject, or how it is painted?
The splitting of the modernist trajectory in the late 19th century into “subjective” pictoriality (e.g. symbolism) and “objective” painterliness (e.g. impressionism) was never complete, nor meant to be. For every Monet or Cézanne hanging a visual style and method on an armature of real-world motifs, for every Symbolist and Art Nouveau artist applying exacting academic verism to the invention of fantastic worlds, there was a post-Impressionist like Gauguin or van Gogh animating the seen world with unlikely interpretations and outlandish techniques. For them, and for contemporary painters like Title, the seen world is not just a reason to make a picture, nor just an excuse to paint. For such painters the world around us is the readiest, most comprehensible, most dependable yet most flexible visual discourse in which to discover and define one’s own visual sensibility. It is where the what and the how already co-exist in mutual generation.
Thus, Title’s figural subjects maintain their often-imposing presence in her pictures, despite – and because of – the rich, sensuous, but carefully molded and modulated way she has rendered them. In each canvas, Title’s manner of painting is a crucial part of that presence. Her figures, seemingly built out of paint, are not portrayals of individuals, but they do individuate themselves one from another. If they are not portraits, neither are they mere bodies. Title could give each figure a name, and the name would logically limn the specificity of each one of them. But the figure would ultimately slough off its moniker, fading back behind the tussle of brushstrokes and the dogged and exquisite harmonization of colors.
Color may be a subtle factor in Title’s painting, but it is a powerful one. Indeed, in her compositional rejection of a hierarchic focus, she depends on a shifting rhythm set up through a choreography of color. This point hits home in the two tondo-triptychs, wherein the pictorial panel is flanked by two equal-size pendants whose monochrome amplifies the central panel’s predominating hue. The loamy red of one triptych and the elegant gray-blue of the other (the vivid opposition of these hues itself determining an almost erotic complementarity) pervade Title’s recent work, however, brightening the intimate, even claustrophobic scenes that preoccupy her. The red that blooms into the velvet upholstering of an old couch, for instance, or the cool, slatey blue-white that defines the workaday corner (complete with sink) of the artist’s studio, echo the triptychs’ palettes, either underscoring the cozy atmosphere or opening it up with the visual equivalent of a cool breeze through an open window.
There are no open windows here, however – only mirrors. In several pictures Title pretends to expand the space with elaborate reflections, mirrors facing mirrors into infinity, mirrors multiplying figures and, from the standpoint she provides the viewer, giving them a vertiginous multivalence. Even the glass doors at the nether end of the studio conspire in this (literal as well as – in several senses – figurative) hall of mirrors: the glass gives onto a blurred view of the outside foliage, but it is a view that also reflects back into the well-lit atelier.
Interestingly, this elaborate play of space and object takes place in fictive spaces that admit to their shallowness. Even where Title sets up mirrored infinities the redundant reflections bend downward, soon cutting off our access to any deep visual space. Furthermore, in other paintings, Title renders her studio scenes on – not against, but quite literally upon – a seemingly collaged ground of notations. On a subjective level this cascade of banal calendar entries and memos to housekeepers slyly introduces a harried dailiness into the otherwise contemplative life of the studio. On a purely compositional level this forces us to read Title’s arrangements of bodies and objects as arrangements at least as much as bodies and objects. All pictures, of course, are undergirded by purely abstract construction; but not all pictures bring that construction to the fore, and fewer still exteriorize the arrangement of space as well as object.
Title’s pictures, as the above would infer, betray an architectural comprehension of space – and, as the notational grounds and reflective plays indicate, an architectural comprehension of time as well. This latter comprehension regards time from both quotidian and metaphorical standpoints. We note this in those figures whose sketchiness suggests dynamic movement, and equally in those whose incompleteness bespeaks decay and the erosion of bodily (and perhaps other) faculty. Made in the wake of the death of her father, these paintings are strongly impelled by Title’s response to physical deterioration, personal loss, and spiritual rescue. They affirm life at once by accepting degeneration and asserting the durability of the everyday. Beneath and beyond that, these memorial paintings reiterate and celebrate the primacy of visual response in human experience, and the painter’s unique devotion to this primacy. These paintings need to be pictures; and these pictures could only be painted.
Los Angeles
June 2003
DAENA TITLE: PICTURES PAINTED (IN MEMORIAM) AND PERCEIVED (IN VIVUM)
By Peter Frank
The pleasures of painting, and of paint, present themselves readily in the recent work of Daena Title. But Title’s paintings provide such pleasure secondarily. Their intricacies, compositional and optical, point at the painter’s concern with graver issues, issues of perception and precognition, subject matter and the subjectivity of both artist and viewer. Still, these issues are fundamental not just to seeing, not just to art, but to painting in particular. Indeed, Title feels compelled to acknowledge the history of painting along with the sensation of seeing, giving neither realm of experience more significance than the other, but demonstrating once more how the two realms mesh.
Painting is a remarkably persistent practice. Perhaps it is the formidable history of the practice that gives painting its seemingly inexhaustible momentum. Perhaps it is the irresistible sensuality of the medium, a sensuality the eye appreciates, and enhances, even when the touch cannot. Perhaps it is the very human need to look at something – or, better put, the need to look at something else. Most likely, painting persists because of all the above reasons, to which can be added the need of painters to paint. But does that explain how, at a time when human perception is being reshaped by new technologies, a technology dating back to the 13th century can continue to attract so many adherents, and so wide and faithful an audience? Yes, it can, at least in part. And in part, the very fact that digital media is overwhelming every aspect of our cognition makes painting that much more compelling. Painting is as un-virtual, even anti-virtual, a medium, not to mention tradition, as we have on hand. It comes to us now as a visual, and tactile, palliative to the distant flicker of the computer image and the glassy, ionized surface of the screen behind (behind!) which that image quavers. And yet, painting is the ancestor to that image, the once-supreme realm of both illusion and information, visual reportage and visual propaganda. Sight is the prime human sense, the one each of us and each of our civilizations rely on first and foremost; both painting and digital media answer to this fact, but cybernetics can and to a certain extent does undermine this primacy, while painting reifies it. This is neither good nor bad, it is simply a condition of painting.
In the digital age – and after close to two centuries of mechanical media replicating the world with seeming faithfulness and dispassion – the metaphysics of painting are its raisons d’etre. That pertains especially – and ironically – to representational painting. When photography released painting from its indexical responsibilities, painting slouched and tumbled towards abstraction, finding justification in its own properties and in the relationship between those properties and the human hand and eye. The seen world recurs in painting no longer because painting is the only place to record and re-see that world, but because that world and painting both are phenomena we see, and, as seeable phenomena, are eminently conflatable.
Given this, the realm of representation in painting provides ever-fertile ground for a painter to fib, edit, compress, and otherwise confabulate the real world into a world that is real for however long the viewer looks at it. Daena Title’s approach to representational – specifically figurative – painting bespeaks this condition, this faith in fracture, febrility, and falsehood. In the body of work Title has painted over the last two years, she has mastered the art of building the truth out of a thousand little inventions. She does not paint the world she sees; she paints from it, effectively taking it apart and putting it back together differently from the way she has seen it – but not the way she has known it. Elision, non sequitur, and optical instability pervade Title’s work (her use of mirrors demonstrates this symbolically as well as visually) and, after having ridden and broken these slippery qualities in the spiritual rodeo of her studio, she now commands them rather than simply admiring them.
Especially elusive in Title’s art is the double quality of identity. Is this work of art a painting or a picture? Modernist values stress the identity of painting; and, if one subscribes to the teleological arc so many commentators and theorists have derived from and for modernism, depiction – pictorial identity – is an impediment, a reversal of modernist deliberation. But, tellingly, most modernist painters did not abandon the picture. (Indeed, even most modernist non-painters did not “leave the earth,” choosing to ground their formulations in, and even out of, what we see and know.) Title’s approach clearly does not address such radical notions of, for, and against pictorial presence, but it does restate the basic argument that birthed the question of picture-versus-painting: what is the relationship of the picture to its painterliness? That is, are we supposed to look at the subject, or how it is painted?
The splitting of the modernist trajectory in the late 19th century into “subjective” pictoriality (e.g. symbolism) and “objective” painterliness (e.g. impressionism) was never complete, nor meant to be. For every Monet or Cézanne hanging a visual style and method on an armature of real-world motifs, for every Symbolist and Art Nouveau artist applying exacting academic verism to the invention of fantastic worlds, there was a post-Impressionist like Gauguin or van Gogh animating the seen world with unlikely interpretations and outlandish techniques. For them, and for contemporary painters like Title, the seen world is not just a reason to make a picture, nor just an excuse to paint. For such painters the world around us is the readiest, most comprehensible, most dependable yet most flexible visual discourse in which to discover and define one’s own visual sensibility. It is where the what and the how already co-exist in mutual generation.
Thus, Title’s figural subjects maintain their often-imposing presence in her pictures, despite – and because of – the rich, sensuous, but carefully molded and modulated way she has rendered them. In each canvas, Title’s manner of painting is a crucial part of that presence. Her figures, seemingly built out of paint, are not portrayals of individuals, but they do individuate themselves one from another. If they are not portraits, neither are they mere bodies. Title could give each figure a name, and the name would logically limn the specificity of each one of them. But the figure would ultimately slough off its moniker, fading back behind the tussle of brushstrokes and the dogged and exquisite harmonization of colors.
Color may be a subtle factor in Title’s painting, but it is a powerful one. Indeed, in her compositional rejection of a hierarchic focus, she depends on a shifting rhythm set up through a choreography of color. This point hits home in the two tondo-triptychs, wherein the pictorial panel is flanked by two equal-size pendants whose monochrome amplifies the central panel’s predominating hue. The loamy red of one triptych and the elegant gray-blue of the other (the vivid opposition of these hues itself determining an almost erotic complementarity) pervade Title’s recent work, however, brightening the intimate, even claustrophobic scenes that preoccupy her. The red that blooms into the velvet upholstering of an old couch, for instance, or the cool, slatey blue-white that defines the workaday corner (complete with sink) of the artist’s studio, echo the triptychs’ palettes, either underscoring the cozy atmosphere or opening it up with the visual equivalent of a cool breeze through an open window.
There are no open windows here, however – only mirrors. In several pictures Title pretends to expand the space with elaborate reflections, mirrors facing mirrors into infinity, mirrors multiplying figures and, from the standpoint she provides the viewer, giving them a vertiginous multivalence. Even the glass doors at the nether end of the studio conspire in this (literal as well as – in several senses – figurative) hall of mirrors: the glass gives onto a blurred view of the outside foliage, but it is a view that also reflects back into the well-lit atelier.
Interestingly, this elaborate play of space and object takes place in fictive spaces that admit to their shallowness. Even where Title sets up mirrored infinities the redundant reflections bend downward, soon cutting off our access to any deep visual space. Furthermore, in other paintings, Title renders her studio scenes on – not against, but quite literally upon – a seemingly collaged ground of notations. On a subjective level this cascade of banal calendar entries and memos to housekeepers slyly introduces a harried dailiness into the otherwise contemplative life of the studio. On a purely compositional level this forces us to read Title’s arrangements of bodies and objects as arrangements at least as much as bodies and objects. All pictures, of course, are undergirded by purely abstract construction; but not all pictures bring that construction to the fore, and fewer still exteriorize the arrangement of space as well as object.
Title’s pictures, as the above would infer, betray an architectural comprehension of space – and, as the notational grounds and reflective plays indicate, an architectural comprehension of time as well. This latter comprehension regards time from both quotidian and metaphorical standpoints. We note this in those figures whose sketchiness suggests dynamic movement, and equally in those whose incompleteness bespeaks decay and the erosion of bodily (and perhaps other) faculty. Made in the wake of the death of her father, these paintings are strongly impelled by Title’s response to physical deterioration, personal loss, and spiritual rescue. They affirm life at once by accepting degeneration and asserting the durability of the everyday. Beneath and beyond that, these memorial paintings reiterate and celebrate the primacy of visual response in human experience, and the painter’s unique devotion to this primacy. These paintings need to be pictures; and these pictures could only be painted.
Los Angeles
June 2003
