Brown Blue – Laura Owens @ MOCA, Los Angeles
Rosanna Albertini
Laura Owens at
the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, an exhibition of five years of work.
The artist is young, fifty seven paintings in the show. They are puzzling, it
seems they can’t stand the pressure of our common sense: the more one tries
to analyze them, the more they withdraw. Deviating from the subject that matters,
they are all untitled.
The essays in the catalogue, written by Thomas Lawson and Paul Schimmel (who
is also the organizer of this exhibition) are two magnificent texts worth reading,
for they are as smart and enjoyable as the paintings. Yet, at least for me, the
puzzle remains and it is not about how good or bad all these things are, it is
rather an undefined feeling that looking at Laura Owens paintings from inside
art history and art making could be like building cages for a bird who is everywhere,
except in a cage. About ten years ago French artist Erik Samakh hung a cage underneath
the roof of an old building in Paris and invited the public to find the way to
make the bird sing. When somebody whistled the right tune, a cascade of bird
music fell in response from the fifth floor. It was about to rain and I had the
clear perception that those sounds in the dusk were bright yellow. Others left
the old courtyard holding a different clear perception: they had seen the bird.
The cage was empty and the song was generated by a hidden robot-bird with a natural
voice. What’s clear? Nothing really, though we don’t give up our wish
for meaning to the point that we “exert an unconscious pressure on other
human beings, [ourselves or cages and paintings] to turn them in something we
can understand.” (T.S. Eliot, 1914)
The way Laura Owens
paints, modulating the coats of color with watercolor, acrylic or oil, pencil,
waterproof ink, glitter, marker, felt, photos, graphite, collage, invites the
viewer to physically approach the painted surface. Up close the viewer shares
the same distance that the artist experienced, which is a lack of distance. Laura
Owens said in a recent interview that her paintings “absorb” life.
In fact they secretly suck it in to give it back, transfigured, into contemporary
fairy tales. “Though I changed my perception plenty of times,” the
artist seems to say through her work, “I am always the same person, no different
than anybody else. My images are an act of freedom.” Perhaps the freedom
to disguise her own perception, letting her hands follow her feelings. Letting
her hands go wherever the painted signs take her, and working on intensity. At
first glance some of the paintings look like perfect illustrations for a children’s
book, but only if they are regarded as naturalistic “representations.”
Because they seem “figurative” it is almost inevitable to be stuck
in these strange, seemingly clear words. We are in front of the imaginary remains
of a visual landscape. Images come to the artist from other painters, embroidery,
even from simple objects like a found pillow, and once absorbed into the canvas
they are truly deprived of identity.
Images have become
consumed objects washed out by repetition reproduction appropriation exploitation
—and in the end do not belong to anybody, much less to the artists. Our
present time is an immense recycling machine. Physically or in their meaning,
“consumed objects have been translated from mouth to mouth, from eye to
eye, from hand to hand, to be handled.” (Alexis Smith) I wonder whether
Laura Owens’ artistic conversation with our contemporary time, probably
as unintentional as the fog in the spring, might bring different hints to our
wish to understand her work, with which I haven’t given up. In a small piece,
half- painting half-collage, she handles in a funny way Van Gogh’s painted
room, a postcard: the reproduction is glued upside down, and colors seem to spread
around, underneath, joyfully leaking from the masterpiece and loosing the certainty
of form. The artist shakes her/our mind. In the same group of small works a bunch
of human faces are squeezing their eyes out. Many times Owens squeezes the color
directly on canvas, she squeezed big fat bees, I am almost sure she laughed,
maybe making fun of her own seriousness like Paul McCarthy in Painter.
The intense or
diluted eloquence of her blues, the browns that are never boring for they retain
nuances of green, pink, yellow and red, speaking a sort of different mixed language
in every piece— are captivating. These paintings come from life and bring
us forward to the obscurity of our physical perception of life. Sharon Ellis
comes to my mind, with her eccentric and mysterious landscapes generated by light
and emotion; both artists give the impression they are aware of their senses
rather than using them. In the very last paintings by Laura Owens one can see
flashes of reality transformed into a physical reflection: cactus almost dancing
by the road their painted life in flatness. Perception is diluted, becomes unclear.
Or it is confused in the series of animals jumping and flying up and down the
central line of another canvas. Geometrically their reflection does not work:
there are sheep and birds on the top and deer upside down on the bottom side;
the raw canvas in between reveals the brown texture of an horizontal strip, scratched
like an injury in the middle of the painting. A white line goes through the center.
Maybe the artist interrupted herself thinking of a discernible meaning, and left
a trace of it. You won’t distinguish this painting from another by the title,
for more than one are Untitled 2002-03. Did the artist want to disconnect her
painted images from any attempt at reasonable explanation? Will she excuse me
if I try to put words on what I saw, somehow retaliating for her secrecy? I see
a painter, a woman, unfolding the certainty of her feelings as well as the fleeting,
volatile nature of her/our perception. She lays on canvas a light field of very
detailed impressions. Obscurity, the scary unknown is not excluded, it appears
in different pieces as a spot of dark blue in a corner, or a stroke of dark brown,
also in the apparently abstract pieces. The perceptive movement that makes the
painting suggests flatness and lightness extended over an almost invisible field
of intangible density.
Her pieces, especially
from the last two years, display a disconcerting variety of themes and styles.
Jacques Derain did it at the beginning of the nineteenth century, dipping his
brush into the main artistic streams of his time; in the end he almost got rid
of colors and style as he reached his own anti-heroic poetry. Laura Owens lives
in an older world than Derain, a hundred years older: reverential patterns are
not compelling anymore. Each artist deals alone with every impulse that compels
her attention but eludes her grasp. Her beautiful freedom seems to explode from
the pressure to be forced to understand and make sense —our whole reality
is built in such distortion. In a quiet, friendly manner, she says NO, can you
appreciate a simple postcard, a children’s drawing, an old embroidery, Picasso,
a Chinese painting? Our visual life is a continuous texture in which all these
imageries and many others, for a while, are saved. We take no heed of optical
obsessions to reveal the conflict between the eyes and the most hidden part of
our mind. Surrealism had the illusion of depicting the human inside’s unique,
personalized anarchy. Not now: any image is real. Artists try to stay exactly
where they are, in this present of sharing and altering every kind of image (sound,
text). Art theories are often used to look at art pieces as if they were “transparent
things, through which the past shines”, usually a theoretical past that
has nothing to do with the arts. Vladimir Nabokov explained it as clearly as
possible, “A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and
artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on
the now, should please not break its tension film.” (Transparent Things,
1972).
Why should an artist
cut herself out of this magic surface filled with active collective unconscious
and put herself in intellectual isolation? Laura Owens attachment to an unlimited
tapestry of imagery in which every stitch has equal value —and perhaps the
very idea of masterpieces is dead— helps her put her feet without shame
into the real-like dream of simple stories. It does not mean that stories or
paintings are easy. She successfully paints the mood of each story, of course
not her own, just the painting’s.
