Elizabeth Magill: Landscapes of Painting
Andrew Wilson
The history of late 20th Century painting describes a conflict between process and image; between a self-reflexivity that elaborates on meanings that are embedded in the act and mechanics of painting, and a criticality that finds its content within an investigation of what the activity of representation might mean and stand for. Although this position is at best simplistic, it has the virtue of clarifying the broad parameters of what might be at stake in painting today. Since 1996, when Elizabeth Magill first started this present series of landscape paintings, one aspect of her practice has revolved around the relationships that are set up around the process of making a painting where the accretion of different sort of marks on a particular surface form an image that refers to itself as a painting and, as representation, to a world outside itself. Another related view revolves around the sorts of content embedded in these images and that challenges the appropriateness of what they evoke–all of which determines what our reaction to them might be. Magill manipulates a feeling for sentiment within the painted image whilst also examining what that sentiment might mean in painterly terms, asking at what point a painting of a swan in a lake or of tulips in a pint beer glass becomes unacceptably sentimental.
Each painting starts out lying flat on the floor of her studio, and it is here that the ground for the image is constructed. Repetitive washes of different colors provide a luminous field; or, alternatively, brushstrokes cast veils over the images of rejected paintings in an act of covering-over or covering-up, on top of which a new painting might come to exist. The surface of each painting is formed out of a process which does not yet offer any representational clues, and as such is placed at some distance from the image that will later come to occupy it. Yet it is also apparent that these process-based, but otherwise apparently capricious, brushstrokes do provide a field out of which something will be revealed. It is not just that this initial process and each painting’s final image seem to be at loggerheads (a process-based form of abstraction as a canceling-out, as against each painting’s final state as a particular kind of picture) but that in this state, lying flat on the floor, the paintings encourage a looking-in and a looking-on, rather than a looking through. What an awareness of this early stage suggests is that Magill’s paintings are not simple windows out to the world or even mirrors offering a lucid reflection of life back to the viewer, they are constructed objects.
It is this distinction that makes Magill’s paintings so compelling. This reaction to her paintings is caused not just by the different representational images that are inscribed over their surfaces, but of the type of relationship that is set up between a painting as a self-reflexive object and a picture as a depictive sign identified with external sets of references ranging from the aesthetic or historical registers to the realm of politics or ethics. Her paintings exist on their own terms and also, through each image, project an idea of painting that seeks to subvert its own frames of reference; these are paintings of landscapes that are also landscapes of painting.
These recent paintings exhibit a wide range of mark making. Each mark, of course, presents itself as painted mark and as a contribution towards a picturing of something else–an awareness of which is an indicator of its self-reflexivity as practice. A painting such as Cull, has paint laid on its surface both thinly and in a feathered, almost agitated application–pustules of paint lend the painting an almost wounded appearance. The canvas is painted over and drawn on, with paint as well as by pencil, but lines are also scratched over its surface, canceling the image as a representation of something else other than paint. Many of these paintings show signs of distress–stains and blots, holes pierce the canvas, images are disrupted–a state that can start on the studio floor before any image has been applied. These troubling marks are materially present–a foregrounded reality, perhaps–but are also just as much a representation of something as is each pictorial motif.
These stains and piercings also serve to keep the materiality and processes of painting–its self-reflexivity–uppermost in our minds, even if the images might lead us elsewhere. Lodge, for instance, presents us with a building isolated in a surrounding gloom but seemingly self-illuminated with walls that appear to glow. Closer inspection reveals a series of small holes piercing the canvas and pointing towards another space. These holes are representational markers, but also disrupt a reading of the painting as wholly depictive. As representations these works consistently play with our perceptions. Similarly, colour appears to be observably real but is also an artificial and saccharine confection–of predominantly pinks, blues and yellows. Furthermore, the subjects of Magill’s recent paintings are not so much the individual images themselves but what they might imply in paint. Although virtually all of her paintings have their source in photographs, once finished they appear as if they have been summoned up out of the painted ground, rather than applied on top of it. In Land of the Dusky Sow, for instance, the copse of trees is palpably part of the ground and subject to the same forces that created it. In this, as in other ways, Magill is performing a balancing act between making a picture or a painting, just as in a similar way her work can play with a presentation of the mechanics of sentiment in a critical way (a sweetness of color, a use of suggestive luminal lighting) rather than setting out to achieve a delivery of something that might trigger a straightforwardly sentimental response in the viewer (however embarrassing that could become).
For all the suggestion of sweetness, there is nevertheless a troubling edge in the way that pictorial motifs are consistently isolated by Magill–a couple of tress at dusk or dawn indicate the edges of woodland, tree branches laden with blossom, a swan in a secluded pool, an exotic figure riding on a reindeer, a building, a still life, or individual portraits. Occasionally she explores a claustrophobia registered in the extreme depths of a wood, in a work like Woodland (with pond), or the impenetrable darkness of night in Dark Moon, which is illuminated by the moon and stars as a pictured set of piercings. Other paintings provide hinterland views of those areas where the sulphurous glow of urban street lights runs into a landscape described as much by the verges of dual carriageways, electricity pylons and telegraph poles as by more natural, if domesticated, countryside scenes. However, Magill’s use of landscape motifs over the last few years has little to do with the particularities of landscape and its representation, and more to do with different types of space that hold images in a critical way–as an open space as opposed to an interior space which has been defined by the canvas and constrains what is represented on it.
It is in these ways that Magill’s paintings consistently reveal a degree of friction that serves to keep us looking. An image of a wood is marked with scratches that seemingly cancel something out, and not necessarily the image itself, but paradoxically also reveal ways in which it might be read. The comfortable, indeed even occasionally nostalgic image is seen afresh. Between process and representation, between an image of paint as manipulated material and its use to create an image of something else–perhaps as a carrier of feeling or an examination of that feeling–Magill is not, however, making didactic or polemical paintings, instead they enact a form of open translation that is continually folding in on itself, its sources and its materials, as well as out towards the viewer offering new ways not just of seeing the world around us, but a way of looking into it and into the objects of painting.
Elizabeth Magill is based in London and represented by Kerlin Gallery, Dublin and Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, New York.
