“Whatever cannot be grasped is eternal”

Edmond Jabes

At the core of Modernism is what the American critic Clement Greenburg called ‘The task of self criticism’. Within painting this meant eliminating the effect borrowed from any other medium. Art was thereby rendered ‘pure’, determined by nothing other than itself. This ‘purity’ was a form of autonomy, of self-reflexivity. For Greenberg autonomy was achieved through abstraction in which all ornamentation, irrelevance and representation disappeared. Pure form allowed space for the transcendent. For many 20th Century artists this search for aesthetic purity became a form of spiritual quest. As in Rothko’s sublime colour fields or Barnett Newman’s signature ‘zips’ that penetrated the apparent surface of the canvas through to a void or space beyond. Newman claimed “that man’s natural desire in the arts [is] to express his relation to the absolute’. To experience the sublime is to be fully aware of the here and now, to be ‘in the moment’. For Newman the moment was synonymous with the Eternal Now, which, paradoxically, embodies what is both immanent and transcendent. Lyotard wrote of Newman: ‘he breaks with the eloquence of romantic art but does not reject its fundamental task, that bearing pictorial or otherwise expressive witness to the inexpressible.

Half a century on, in the wake of Warhol’s re-introduction of the ‘impure’, the ‘profane’ – appropriations of the popular, the kitsch, mechanical images of consumer culture – where the notoriety of the artist has become as important as the work produced, the notion of ‘pure’ painting seems an ever more difficult enterprise.

I first came across Onya McCausland’s work at her MA graduate show. What stood out was its maturity, its sparseness, the elimination of all unnecessary ornamentation and an apparent seeking after both spatial and philosophical truths. As a poet I was immediately attracted to the subtlety of her mark-making, to the ‘staves’ of removed paint that hovered like the lines of an obliterated text. They seemed to conjure Beckett’s sentiments that there is nothing to express, no way in which to express it anyway, yet always the human imperative to go on attempting to express the inexpressible. It was no surprise to find that she had been reading the work of Edmond Jabes, the French-Egyptian Jewish poet and philosopher for whom the desert was an abiding symbol of the void, the blank sheet on which all and yet nothing can be written.

These early paintings were emptied of colour. Neutral greys and blacks were used and the paint erased in order to reveal the history of the picture’s making. The process seemed to have a ritualistic, meditative quality. ”The direction of the brush across the surface,” McCausland has said, “is halted by repeating its movement back over itself indicating a beginning and an end only in our formally conditioned reading of a flat surface from left to right.” I found myself thinking of the first line of T.S.Elliot’s East Coker, “In my beginning is my end” and of the cyclical nature of all creation. As in some ancient palimpsest meaning seemed to be both obliterated and paradoxically about to be revealed.

In these new paintings for gallery gf2 there has been the gradual re-introduction of colour. Yet it is subtle, hard to define or name, hovering in the interstices of the actual spectrum, as if too much definition would unbalance the subtle poetry of the painterly enterprise. In one of the most beautiful new works 6marks: pink and grey the stacked ‘lines’ hover in the pink-grey hues, so the viewer is uncertain whether they are veiled by the paint, retreating into the picture space or floating on the surface. Interior and exterior space appear to fuse and merge. The surrounding emptiness is at once both metaphysical and bodily, infinite and all enveloping, existing on the boarder line between being and nothing, the sacred and profane, between silence and utterance. The marks imply hieroglyphs or a coded language, or even the hexograms central to the process of divination of the I Ching. Subjectivity seems to dissolve, as do the boundaries between the self and the other, the viewer and the painting. Possibility and renewal are implied in the ethereal pinkness of the infinite heavenly space, a space described by the French feminist philosopher Kristeva as a maternal receptacle or chora. The smooth surfaces of these paintings have been built up layer upon layer and the paint painstakingly removed with a brush. In the highly evocative 7marks: white to grey the monochromatic marks are barely visible, the small shifts in colour and tone as subtle as shadows on snow.

In 7marks: grey on purple(dark) there is greater muscularity. The colour is stronger, more metallic. The wedge-shaped ends of the vertebrae-like column only slowly giving way to the pink ground beneath the top layer of paint as the eye progresses up the canvas. It is as if some sort of order in the chaos of the void might be achieved by the imposition of this skeletal structure, and that by deciphering the components of the whole – say the structures of D.N.A. – the particular might be understood.

In the return to and problematic interaction with a modernist agenda in an era when surface counts for more than depth, McCausland is engaged (as was Newman) in a dialectical reversal whereby the sacred emerges from the secular in a long process of painterly discovery. These works follow their own rhythms, revealing themselves and their learnt truths only slowly. They are as much about process as they are about ends, about journeys as they are about arrival.

“Night does away with colours,” wrote Jabes. “It let’s blaze the colour of the soul.”

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, art critic and novelist. She has published two collections of poetry Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon) and Ghost Station (Salt) and her first novel Depth of Field was published by Dewi Lewis. A regular art critic for The Independent and The New Statesman, she was twice winner of the London Writers’ Competition and has won third prize in the National and the Blackwell’s/ Times Literary Supplement Competition. As the Poetry Society’s Public Art Poet she was commissioned to produce London’s largest public art poem at Waterloo. Recently the recipient of a major Arts Council award she lives and works in London. Her collection of short stories Rothko’s Red are due in the autumn 2008 from Salt.
www.suehubbard.com