Scene V: Pas de Quatre

Matt Carey-Williams, Sandy Lane, Wiltshire, June 2024

“Muses work all day long and then at night get together and dance."

– Edgar Degas

“Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and … stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to ‘walk about’ into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is ‘yes’, what more do you want?”

– Wassily Kandinsky

PART I:THE STAGE

Painting is performance. Every stroke a gesture; every mark a movement; every surface a relic. Their orchestration as compositions – be they modelled or planed into pillars of description or kindled into plumes of painterly kinesis – the result of the painter’s physical interaction with tool, medium and support. That tangible, phenomenological dialogue, in turn, tested by the painter’s own inner monologue, conceptualised then coloured by the vagaries and vicissitudes of mood or memory, that can, equally, burden or electrify each individual daub.

It is this lyricism – both agony and ecstasy - of approach and application in painting that nourishes its inevitable nexus with the disciplines of music and dance. Whether articulated figuratively or in the abstract, the language of painting often translates sound or movement much as it attempts to arrest time and space. Pattern poses as presence; rhythm beats a visual compass. Speed and direction are annotated by lines, curves and glyphs, all seeking to figure form out of and into a ground born of helices of motion and commotion that dance like musical or ballet notations.

Painting thus vibrates in its own melody and choreography and, for many artists, that pulsation of music and dance informed not just their process but also their subject. Henri Matisse’s glorious Dance paintings (the 1909 version in New York’s Museum of Modern Art; his 1910 version in The Hermitage) thrust the viewer onto a heady stage of saturated colour and agitated yet curvaceous line, inviting them to become part of the movement he so energetically described. Edgar Degas’ many depictions of ballerinas were as much an inquest into the very syntax of movement as they were the result of his desire to convey shapes of beauty, as elegant as they were erotic.

Even when the definitive eloquence of the figure is removed, abstract painters have been able to express sound in chroma or motion in delineation. Wassily Kandinsky’s tableaux – the result of his surreal take on the dynamo of expression - made manifest a kind of illogical, anti-geometric, anti-harmonious painterly synaesthesia much as Piet Mondrian’s reduced palette became the building blocks for a fundamental architecture of simple line that was able transmit a kind of primordial motion, both as exterior and interior. Painters like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns collaborated directly with musicians such as John Cage and dancers such as Merce Cunningham, with such association osmotically informing their subsequent work. Each of these artists either appropriated a performance as content or channelled the mechanics of such performance into the manner of their making, and all to dazzling effect.

PART II: THE DANCERS

LaurenBrown,Visceral Hellscape, 2024, Oil on canvas, 200 x 170 cm (78 3/4 x 66 7/8 in)

When first confronted by one of Lauren Brown’s compositions the viewer cannot help but feel like they have fallen deep into a gluey, gooey space: a sinewy tesseract of becoming that throws moment into memory and sees form flush into a fluidity of possibilities. In Visceral Hellscape (2024) line and ground heave in energetic pulses of orange, aubergine and burgundy tones, offering occasional morphological, chimerical glimpses of abbreviated faces and segregated mouths. Brown’s line acts like the muscle’s tendons, holding together the plump ooze of her pulsating planes of colours. These flashes of stretched, elongated line glow themselves with an ethereal radiation as they dart across Brown’s composition, coiling and stretching in abject oscillation and amplification, at once voicing the figure only for it to dissolve into fugues of foul fecundity. Our visceral response to Brown’s surface - so dark, so deadly, yet so alive - is the result of her embrace of several influences. In Brown’s universe biology meets horror films; entrails throb with the fantasy of science fiction, leading to a searching, seductive yet sanguinary composition that morphs as it diffuses, accumulates and then sloughs between micro and macro as if by a painterly tropism. The byline of Ridley Scott’s film, Alien, was ‘in space no-one can hear you scream’. So it is that Brown’s marks offer but the muffled, unspeakable hum of panic and fear, whilst still hopping and hustling across her stage in agitated arabesques of mucilaginous, meaty movement: a new, punchy take on the danse macabre.

Gina Kuschke, I The Willow, You The Wind, 2024, Oil on canvas, 195 x 245 cm (76 3/4 x 96 1/2 in)

From the gutsy interior of Lauren Brown’s work paintings, we now dive into the airier, lighter realm of Gina Kuschke. Kuschke’s multi-laminated work excavates a texture of impulse, rhythm and chance, pushing through the physical space of painting – as act, space and object – whilst drawing heavily on the temporal space of sound. Performance informs Kuschke’s practice to such an extent that she sees her compositions as fields (and relics) of a plurality of improvisation: motioned, sounded, marked. Her body thus becomes as significant a ‘tool’ to her execution as the brush she holds and the paint it has been dipped in. I The Willow, You The Wind (2024) powerfully betrays Kuschke’s dynamic, performative handling: a maelstrom of purple marks, evincing the figure yet retaining a malleability of motion and meaning, drives up from the lower left quadrant and into a centre dominated by fluffy yet determined striations of yellow, green and blue. The air crackles with excitement at the inexorable contest about to happen between these two passages of paint: one dark, the other light; one gathering, the other unfolding; one silhouetting protagonists, the other coalescing as landscape. It is this collision between form and space; structure and action that so nourishes Kuschke’s effervescent, animated painting. Through her own performance in paint, conscious of her movement as a painter and inspired by music as she paints, she discloses both the softness of the wind and the constancy of the tree. Act and actor thus melded together in one beautiful interrogation of self, environment, and process.

Catherine Long, Dreaming of New Mexico, 2024, Oil and oil bar on canvas, 150 x 170 cm (59 x 66 7/8 in)

Catherine Long’s Dreaming of New Mexico (2024) presents a haunting surface that glows with diffused swathes of fleshy pinks and autumn yellows and is antagonised by dark purple isobars of memory. Lines that trail across her canvas as if scribing a specific movement. Long’s practice is piqued by the physicality of paint and the poignancy and passion innate to colour but which she electrifies with searching marks that explore the sensation of gesture, rhythm and haptics. Marks that dance across her canvases, privileging experience over perception; matter over meaning, so that her surfaces eventually betray a patina of participation and resonance. Here, the artist’s reverie, remembering or imagining New Mexico, is transcribed in arabesques of melodic line, drawn from the artist’s background in contemporary dance. A line that shapes, holds, opens and then folds again, much as the dancer does, in tactile, spatial application, engendering this unbridled authenticity to Long’s marks. Motion and emotion – exteriorised then interiorised – dance together as figure and ground; line and colour; stage and antagonist in Long’s work. These are paintings that seek to unearth the psychology of gesture and, in so doing, fashion mellifluous surfaces that sing with the most beautiful palette of poetry and presence.

If Kuschke paints the sound; Long, the trace, and Brown the physical thrust of the danced movement, then Catherine Lowe announces the stage upon which it unravels. Something Struggling to be Held (2024) presents a surface segmented into passages of various moments recalled in various degrees of clarity or opaqueness. Warm, umber hazes lock in nebulous moments of becoming that never quite mature into being, separated from a more descript landscape of action in the upper right by an architecture of taped-off scaffolding that serves to set Lowe’s stage.

Catherine Lowe, Something Struggling to be Held, 2024, Oil and gesso on canvas, 155 x 175 cm (61 x 68 7/8 in)

Material, texture, form and volume thus declare themselves only to issue their own evaporation. This layering of experience and her coalition of figuration and abstraction serves to both chart and interrogate the relationship between the body and movement, resulting in the beautifully ironic immortalisation of ephemerality. The body – like the dance it executes and the platform which hosts its performance – now becomes its own effulgent vanitas as it slowly seeps back into the painted ground from whence it came.

The four painters contributing to this pas de quatre continue the exploration of Messrs Matisse, Degas, Kandinsky and Rauschenberg, offering varying degrees of seduction, style, substance and surface that move their viewer to a sort of transubstantiation of paint into passage; of mark into modulation. Seen together the work of these four women create a Scene that soothes in moments of Degas’ harmony but also fizzes with Kandinsky’s delectable dissonance. The knocked-back architecture of Catherine Lowe’s hazy phantasmagoria contrasts with the juicy biology of Lauren Brown’s volume and viscera. Likewise, the flicks and flutters of Catherine Long’s curious, spooring brush resonate with the feathery flourishes of Gina Kuschke’s wired, lush surfaces.

All four artists have just graduated from the Royal College of Art with an MA in Painting and whilst their visual accents of abstraction may offer plenty of synergy, they sound and move with equal assurance but in very different ways. Just like the ballet’s pas de quatre: a plotless performance of four dancers that may or may not offer any meaning to the ballet’s narrative but which, as an aesthetic diversion, adds another dimension to it as a performance. One that we can delight in as both a collective orchestration seen in unison yet one that thrills with the fruit of individual pursuits. Painting – like music, like dance – that chime yet confronts in time and space.

Matt Carey-Williams
12-16 June, 2024
London