Abstractions Remain Organic

    1 of 1 2 of 1

      Gordon Payne

      Selected Works

      At the Evergreen Cultural Centre until Sunday, January 9.

      Gordon Payne is a senior West Coast painter who deplores the use of his medium as a vehicle for concrete meaning, a conveyance for cultural theory, literal representation, or narrative. And yet he infuses his art with intense philosophical inquiry. A long-time resident of Hornby Island, Payne longs for the uncomplicated modernist belief in the abstract painting as an autonomous object, representative of nothing but itself. At the same time, he is immensely knowledgeable and has arrived inevitably at the postmodern practice of making art about art. The apparent spontaneity of his gestural abstractions is contradicted by the almost geological accretion of their heavily textured surfaces over months and even years, by their direct references to art history, their indirect references to philosophy, and their subtle but pervasive evocations of the natural environment.

      The latter is hardly surprising: Payne, born in 1933, came of creative age at a time when lyrical, landscape-based abstraction dominated the local art scene. Yet his work is complicated by his ideas about what is "true", the impossibility of painting, and the troublesome correspondence between the means or marks by which an artist represents a subject and what those means might or might not signify. "The marks are form," he writes in his statement; "they are energy paths rather than conventional signs".

      Evident influences include symbolism (with direct homages to Odilon Redon), surrealism, the European school of gestural abstraction known as Art Informel, and the group of Québécois modernists called Les Automatistes. (An untitled painting here is very reminiscent of Jean-Paul Riopelle's mosaiclike abstractions.) Payne's aesthetic, semiotic, and phenomenological speculations on the nature of painting and perception are revealed in his statement, printed in the exhibition brochure along with a series of quotes and aphorisms and an illuminating essay by Annette Hurtig.

      The nine large abstractions on view at the Evergreen Cultural Centre are dramatically thick and textured, often with sand, beads, metallic pigment, and wax emulsion folded in to the acrylic paint. Many are deeply slashed and scored (some right through the canvas) and some are framed with unexpected materials, such as lumps of coal. The paintings are complemented by five small landscape studies (with an emphasis on dense networks of dashing lines); a videotape meditation on Payne's own sculpture garden (filled with his assemblages of found materials); an automatic ink drawing; a giclée print; and 17 "landscape fragments" or "skins". Payne creates these skins by pouring acrylic paint onto plastic sheets; he then manipulates the paint, dries it, lifts it off the plastic, and reinforces it with cheesecloth. These rumpled and organic works represent a serious attempt to achieve a painting made entirely of paint.

      Despite Payne's longing to believe in the painting's self-sufficiency, it's hard to ignore the correspondence between his landscapes, aspects of his natural environment revealed in his video, and the marks, textures, and scoring of his abstract paintings. Tangles of branches or thorns, lashes of sea grass, rocky shores scored with cracks and crevices--all are evoked here. Autonomy? Perhaps, to paraphrase Joni Mitchell rather than Jacques Derrida or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that was just a dream some of us had.

      Comments