Demetrius Manouselis: Towards an Architectonics of Painting
Raul Zamudio
Whenever painting
purportedly dies, it seems to always return with a vengeance. Its most recent
“fatality” concerns its possible eclipse with what has been fashionably
termed new media; for the supposed waning of painting has been the curatorial
impetus of recent painting exhibitions. With titles such as Trouble Spot Painting,
Panting as Paradox,
and Urgent Painting, for example, these shows evinced a slight apocalyptic tenor,
to say the least One focus of the latter two shows was the threat posed by new
media. Yet this threat is not new; in that painting has dealt with its possible
“eclipse” in an earlier historical moment. After the birth of photography
circa 1839, painting needed to assert itself in the face of a medium that claimed
superiority by virtue of its historically unparalleled mimetic faculty. The argument
goes as follows: photography could reproduce the world in a realistic way that
painting never could, hence why would there be a reason to paint a picture? But
after this reductive formalist salvo was launched, it was understood that painting
was never really about reproducing the world with naturalistic exactitude, rather
it was really about the subjective artist’s vision that was translated onto
the inanimate canvas, transforming into an embodiment of creativity. And since
photography originally claimed objectivity, abstraction became the ace up the
artist’s sleeve. It is in this register of subjective vision that the work
of Demetrius Manouselis resides.
Manouselis’
recent paintings and works on paper trope earlier styles of pure abstraction,
yet they cite other genres as well: architecture, stained glass, block-printing,
mosaic, cartography, and Design. What unifies all these different artistic and
cultural endeavors into his work is its architectonic foundation, subsuming everything
that comes in contact with it. Manouselis’ paintings have solidity yet are
equally ethereal. The architectonic is fleshed out not only from a perspective
as if we are looking at some topography from above, but we can shift our point
of perception as if we are looking out the sides of stained glass windows, from
some elegiac religious environment. These tropes have been acquired by Manouselis
over time; the cultivation of his artistic practice comes from many sources both
professionally and experientially. As a practicing architect, Manouselis is in
line with other artists who have worked in architecture as an extension of their
projects, as well those originally trained as architects, who then explored other
avenues of artistic expression. In the former category is Vito Acconci; an artist
who first began with performance and photo-text art, moved into sculpture, and
now creates public projects and architecturally-based works. On the other hand,
there are architects such as the duo Diller & Scofildo who have worked in
sculpture and installation as evinced in their recent Whitney exhibition. Manouselis
is part of this trajectory, and like the above mentioned artists/architects,
his formalism is rigorously infused with conceptual qualities that push the parameters
of painting in myriad directions.
To begin with,
Manouselis’ paintings and works on paper are all titled Composition, and
the paintings are, in fact, works on paper that are then mounted on canvas. The
act of mounting a work on paper to canvas raises many interesting questions.
One of these concerns the deliberate conflation of genres that have traditionally
been kept at bay from each other. Yet by directly engaging both, where there
is no difference between the two, there is an attempt to cancel out the hierarchy
of one over the other. This strategy also has the effect of troping recent and
historical vanguard traditions of painting. Artists such as Moholy-Nagy and his
“telephone paintings,” works that were not created by the artist himself
but through a person on the other end of the telephone receiver, or Jackson Pollock
and his technique of painting on the floor, or Damien Hirst’s circular spin
paintings, works that can be hung in a variety of ways since there theoretically
exists no top or bottom, or Miguel Angel Rios “digital paintings” that
are an extension of his DVD projections. Manouselis subtle, yet literal and metaphorical
enveloping gesture is partially rooted in Manouselis’ conceptual spin on
painting.
We can detect,
for instance, a call and response between abstraction and representation: forms
shift in the pictorial field from the slightly anthropomorphic to clusters of
curvilinear and geometric shapes. This dialectic is further enhanced by the tension
between figure and ground, just as soon as there is a hint of illusionism in
Manouselis’ paintings it seems to fold into abstraction. There is also a
strong push and pull between his muted tones that are paradoxically in sync and
in contest with slightly saturated passages. While these colors help delineate
forms and keep them apart, they also create a dialogue between them. The cohesive
quality of what seemed to be random placement of forms, not unlike a mosaic or
a kaleidoscope, creates a type of factura where forms have a refracted quality
and chromatic flourishes seem to vibrate in a multiplicity of ways. Manouselis’
handling of paint can sometimes be more like drawing. Sections of his paintings
are brisk in their execution yet remain subtle on the surface. But not all of
Manouselis’ works on paper are so profusely inhabited with dichotomies of
figure/ground, abstraction/representation, geometric/biomorphic, and so forth.
Some of his works are slightly Minimalist in composition. The color range is
reduced, shapes are distilled into the essential, and there appears to be an
overall, wash-like effect that unifies pictorial space giving it a hazy, almost
pastel-like formal and conceptual anchor in which the composition feels more
like its musical counterpart.
For Manouselis’
work has a musical sensibility through the rhythms of color and line that are
at once in visual harmony as well in discord. Thus their titles are an apt description
by virtue of being both a literal referral and metaphor. Oscillating between
the gesture of the brush and gesture as semiotic play Manouselis’ paintings
are purely visual and symbolic, concomitantly physical and intellectual. And
it is through sight and tactility, emotion and rationality, stasis and dynamism,
and surface and depth that Manouselis presents us an aesthetic that pushes towards
what can be described as an architectonics of painting.
