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Praise it; bury it; much of the less subtle discourse around contemporary painting rehearses circularly the tension of an unfathomable desire to constrain the practice to limited domains and an inverse pathology to dethrone and destabilise, to throw it along with many other concerns into a void. Both strategies are essentially blinded by their own rhetorical determinism but, twenty years on from the publication of Yve-Alain Bois’ essay “Painting: The Task of Mourning”, they remain, bewilderingly, at issue.

Conservatives continue to rail against painting’s perceived marginalisation, especially in the minds and work of contemporary curators. Its stability and centrality as a conduit of aesthetic meaning is set up against the venal or passing fancies of contemporary practices. Painting is essential; it is the central achievement of human visual culture; it is universal in the meanings conveyed; it is lively and beautiful. Progressives still attack painting’s perceived hegemonic authority, its embodiment of a closed suite of exclusive assumptions. Its dismissal is necessary to the establishment of a broader array of pertinent practices. Painting serves an elite; it is defined by an outmoded suite of prescriptive conditions; it cannot affect agency; it is anachronistic.

All or none of which is possible; but if all, then all simultaneously. Painting is an unsettled practice, a contingent practice – well, aren’t they all? Only, I can’t recall a claim that sculpture is dead; that the formalism of moving image is a manifestation of its redundancy; that performance is merely semiotic, its experience singularly readable. Yet such bombast is not infrequently visited upon painting, as if overthrowing the medium has any real meaning or significance

for us or for our understanding of art. Hence its assassination, its denunciation, its erasure from the new Pantheon of contemporaneous values – the target of any one of a number of purges.

There’s little to disagree with in many of the formative declarations of painting’s sudden, irrevocable or teleological decline. Painting did indeed suffer in the aftermath of the Sack of Rome in 1527; cut loose from a definitive condition it was unruly, ill-judged, mannered. Delaroche’s response to the announcement to the Academie des Sciences of the advent of the Daguerreotype in 1839 was fair; representative accuracy had a new, scientific champion. Duchamp’s remark about the “stupidity” of painters was not untrue; they didn’t paint mindfully – wasn’t this the point of the Fauves against whom he must be understood to stand? And Reinhardt, the ego of the man, “the last paintings”; only he was remarkably prescient as the Greenbergian formulation of the art drew to a seemingly irrevocable internalisation and repetition, an ending.

Endings; conclusions; deaths; cul-des-sacs. It must suggest something about the importance of a mode of practice that its demise is declared with such regularity or that much-fanfared countermoves fail to impress any more than shock refusals ring hollow (the Saatchi Gallery’s The Triumph of Painting, for example). Still, the fact that painting continues or, rather and more helpfully, that there continue to be interesting and pertinent paintings made and painting undertaken undoes the rectitude of declamations for or agin.

Hence, “after” as a comparative modifier is capable of inferring many different and contradictory conditions. After as succeeding; with implication of a change effected – whether of improvement

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or decline. After as subsequent to; a crowded or vacated space for continued or continuous action. After intimating rejection or passing beyond constraining ideological presumptions; frequently with the imputation of driving forward, asserting new paradigms. After as a prefix of derivation; often of homage but also as means of subtly indicating the limitations or inapplicability of the original – the back-handed compliment of the Oedipal practitioner. After as simultaneously retrospective and predictive; reflecting on what has gone before as much as looking to chart ways out of particular current situations – here not so much how to act after painting but subsequent to the multiple declarations of the cessation of painting as a valuable cultural project.

Referring to Robert Musil (after Musil) Bois repeated the suggestion that were painting and painters still to come they would arrive unexpectedly. While I’m not sure that’s necessarily been proven the case as both retain useful relationships with educational institutions, it is prescient in terms of a different, unexpected turn-of-mind that has occurred over the past two or three decades – a rise of systems or ecological thinking.

At its heart, this change signals a refusal to isolate and compartmentalise discrete operations but to recognise them as inter-related and emergent. What this has meant for painting and painters

that have come is that they are less and less motivated by confirming historically recognisable approaches to painting practice but simultaneously are not neurotically driven to reject and refuse their key transformative possibilities. New tensions emerge, of course, notably around the craft of painting practice set beside a free take-up of it as a method, specific concerns with the intellectual properties and affects of painting as an object along with broader or less medium-specific matters and tensions derived from specificity and generality and the perceived positioning of these with respect to the contemporary.

Rather than be caught up in the parrying of attack or defence, a generation of painters (a generation after Bois) have critically observed the limitations of both laudatory and dismissive claims of the practice. Essentially they have witnessed and/or understood a series of afters – after representation; after expression; after abstraction; after concept; and so forth. Rather than render these paintings and painters empty or cynical, they have taken a stance that evades the intellectual and material closure of assuming one or other central characteristic. Rather than an end (object, mode, activity) these painters understand painting as being continually emergent, constantly becoming. Not a-historical nor constrained by its multiple and contradictory legacies. Not

After Titirangi, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 800 x 1200mm

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about thought nor lacking the capacity for thought or to stimulate thought. Not constrained by fashionable assertions of what is contemporary nor aloof from current concerns or demands.

Indeed, a new view of painting is equanimical. It takes seriously and considers closely the material, historical, social, intellectual and experiential conditions of the practice but is neither slavish to nor dismissive of them. The practice that emerges is then neither uncritical nor ironic in its address. Rather it investigates, proposes, suggests and explores the opportunities that exist for painting as a place of engagement – an emergent network of material, artist, object, site and audience. From a certain point of view this arrives not necessarily from where it was expected but, following Musil and Bois, it is coming or rather becoming.

Jessica Pearless’ current paintings are, in this respect, rather more restless than may have been the most recognisable characteristic of her work previously. They are less representationally bounded than previous works – meaning they are less obviously concerned with a singular conversation with abstraction. There’s a relaxing of the project, a greater partiality or opportunity for productive misunderstanding or error. She retains a clear interest in formalism but in these works that interest is inflected by unexpected, sometimes odd or “off” palette or compositional structure. This provides them with more effective activation, allows for greater manoeuvrability in the encounters with

audiences, affords greater insight into a certain wryness situated within the precision of execution.

There’s something of a relinquishing of the drive to contain the works within a declared prescriptive schema in favour of a letting-in the slightly mis-registered, the almost awkward, the gently off-kilter. This is not wholly new. The Field, Series 1.01 – 1.10 suite, for example, was in some degree an investigation of the interrelation of formal constraint and slight compositional twisting. But what changes in the recent works is that they lack a master against which they are then understood. Lack but don’t require. There’s an escalation of confidence in the project such that it moves away from a central tension of rule and its flaunting towards a freer, lighter, more open-ended and suggested series of conceptual and phenomenological possibilities in the paintings. They are more generous.

To be clear, this is a careful turn; a re-pitching of the project rather than a comprehensive revision. The paintings are not objects of misrule much as they appear as somewhat unruly or less likely to be contained than might be the norm for such crisp geometric abstraction. They reveal a more subtle, more

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physically engaged and more materially responsive grasp of the inter-relation of elements of painting and pictorial elements. This may account for what enlivens the work, reorients it from an institutionally representational focus to a more domestic or rather homely one.

This, the notion of the homely, is not necessarily an expected characteristic for this mode of practice. It resets Pearless’ project, suggesting that whilst these remain objects of contemplation and formal consideration they are more porous, more inviting of modes of engagement that are not strictly defined by the edge of the pictorial plane nor situated within the space of the gallery. Though it may be mistaken for a reductive suggestion, this shift in the practice may be described as “feminine”.

I have in mind Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s useful critique of Johann Winkelmann’s analysis of antique Greek art. Pearless considers and investigates beauty and attractiveness in her work, feminine and passive as opposed to the masculine sublime after Winkelmann. The specific attachment to Gilbert-Rolfe is his recognition that the formal aesthetic characteristics of Winkelmann’s division of rising and declining sculptural practice present angular geometry as masculine and curvilinear as feminised. Gilbert-Rolfe wittily contrasts Barnett Newman’s right-angled sheets of weathered steel Zim Zum I with Richard Serra’s massive curvilinear corten steel sculptures to deflate the reliability of the central assertion of gendered conditions of the sublime and the beautiful.

So here, angularity is not to be mistaken for a presupposed suite of aesthetic consequences or intellectual assumptions that excise attractiveness or visual pleasure from the experience of the works. Indeed, the reverse is the case. By concentrating the visual and intellectual engagement to individual and compact clusters of works Pearless gives greater allowance for the beautiful

on its own accord and this grants her more manoeuvrability in teasing out or testing an engaged response to beauty and attractiveness and their value for aesthetic experience. She doesn’t abandon formalist concerns but the turn here is that they are more obviously phenomenologically-oriented solutions for the value of formal qualities than cooler, more reductive and recognisably formalist pictorial statements.

There’s a subtle but distinct shift in her aesthetic relationships at play. In broad terms it moves away from canonical figures and what they stand for as intellectual progenitors of the work and suggests instead greater proximity to actual works, an increased intimacy of encounter and engagement. After Malevich, for example, is more reflective of direct engagement with specific works than reference to what he and his practice may be asserted to stand in for. While Pearless doesn’t isolate and fetishise the object nor does she reiterate confirmational or representational apprehensions of what the earlier artist means art-historically. These, like the actual experiences of any audience, are more personal engagements with paintings and subsequent reflections on and working through the consequences of attendant considerations for her own work. A valuable or pertinent activation of

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her own thought and practice of painting rather than a reflection back of the exteriorised conditions of the preceding practice – stimulating and activated not simply quotational.

After Titirangi affords a different turn. Compositionally proximate to one of the suite of Titirangi works painted by Colin McCahon, the shifts of palette and the tweaking of discrete dispositions of quadrilaterals invite a reconsideration of not so much the paintings or painter referred to but the circumstances of our engagement with them. The choice of a suite title rather than author’s name is revealing inasmuch as it confirms Pearless’ specific attention to and consideration of this suite. It also attaches itself not just to a location where he worked but more where he and his family lived. Reminding if not introducing this dimension of a different type of daily experience than solely that of the studio practitioner invites additional dimension to how we might consider the works, including plausibly more difficult and complicating considerations of that encounter.

Further, it is pertinent to note an on-going relationship with décor and the decorative in Pearless’ work. From undergraduate collisions of modernist furniture with geometric abstraction in the late 1990s to a more expanded field of activated part-public interiors as in the Johnny

Feedback city café in 2013. These are incidents and environments of intimacy. I have in mind here After Albers and the perhaps surprising realisation that the artist so named here is Annie not Josef. This at once reveals and deflates an assumption of masculine activation of the project (not “after” the “master”) whilst also suggesting ulterior characteristics or considerations. Here it suggests an attentiveness to geometric abstraction outside the domain of the beaux arts in echo of the ambitions of Bauhaus. It also suggests an alternative to a received view of that ambition as polished, industrialised, returning attention both to the originating furniture prototypes and asserting again the importance of the domestic as an arena in which the possibilities of this mode of thinking and fashioning have considerable effect. In this respect, imputing Annie Albers counters the implication of production en masse that somehow flattens the experience of Josef’s work and is also a feature of her own practice that Pearless is reconsidering.

Thinking back to Duchamp’s bête comme un peintre, what this turn in Pearless’ practice indicates is a reconsideration of the implications of mass-production – the internalisation of which in part motivated his antagonism. The homeliness of the paintings is both intriguing and valuable in this respect, opening out the practice or possibly more determinedly inviting in. It is in this

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that the current work is most suggestive, explicitly because Pearless undertakes this investigation without relinquishing qualities of geometric abstraction. The paintings are carefully skewed (the incidents of “off”), which prompts a question of whether there’s a relationship here to the sort of “after” imputed for Mannerist painting wherein the stylistic exaggerations, compositional or colour recalibrations, exacerbated tensions or disruptions to the comparatively moribund determinations of the High Renaissance. The conditions of crisis (social, environmental, political, aesthetic) hold echoes for our current and recent history.

Mannerism’s deliberate skewing imputes a traitorous ideology as Achille Bonito Oliva’s epithet describes. A traitor such as Brutus, perhaps, determinedly rejecting the imposition of tyranny by the dictator Caesar. In Shakespeare’s telling, in the aftermath of the assassination Mark Anthony’s eulogy of Caesar commences with the call to fellows and the refusal of laudatory rhetoric in favour of articulating the contingence of reality – burying, not praising; evil lives on after, good is interred with what remains. Rather than a conclusive apogee of the narrative, it occurs just after mid-way through the Third Act signalling and warning of the civil unrest that comes to pass. And so Mark Anthony rounds on the traitor, his rhetorical upending of ambition and honour suggesting the contingency of both, rendering problematic at the very least the simple notion of the overthrow of despotic authoritarianism.

It will be apparent, then, that what I am suggesting for Pearless and her generation of painters is that they align with neither Caesar nor his antagonist Brutus. Nor are they Marc Anthony, prescient here but elsewhere undone by his sensuality, his “feminisation” in Egypt. Women are all but absent in Shakespeare’s play but one who may be useful (more historically than dramatically) to round-out the analogy is Calpurnia, Caesar’s second wife. Faithful, yes, but not blindly so; nimble and quick-

witted; pragmatic; humble; and one who shares the gift of prognostication – shadowy insights and suggestions of what is to come after.

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B I B L I O G R A P H Y

Yve-Alain Bois: Painting as Model; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.

Jan Bryant: “Snow Falls on Mountains Without Wind” in Leonard Emmerling & Jan Bryant PX/Thoughts on Painting; Auckland: Clouds, 2011.

——: “The Obscurity of the Present …”, Discipline, #3, Winter 2013.

Jeremy Gilber-Rolfe: Art After Deconstruction; Brisbane: Editions 3, 2011.

Achille Bonito Oliva; The Ideology of the Traitor: Art, Manner and Mannerism; Milan: Electa, 1998.

C O V E R I M A G E S

FRONT: After Malevich, 2014, acrylic on linen on board, 460mm x 350mm

BACK: After Malevich I, 2014, acrylic on linen on board, 460mm x 350mm

T H A N K S T OPublished by Jessica Pearless on the occasion of SNO 104, 3 May - 1 June, 2014 at SNO Contemporary Projects, Level 1, 175 Marrickville Road, Marrickville, Sydney, Australia. All images © the artist. www.jessicapearless.co.nz ISBN 978-0-473-28500-5