Where Are We Going?

Mark Rothko Henri Matisse Robert Motherwell Raoul Dufy Sean Scully Julian Schnabel Sandro Chia Francesco Clemente

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Experiment with materials
What will art’s new direction be, following the onset of global economic crisis, with the inevitable effect on art production and art culture? What clues are there in the remnants of the old direction? I found positive messages in some painting shows in London. Two of them were from the beginning of the era we’re just leaving, the time of money, luxury, and false confidence: "Painting from the 1980s" at Tate Modern and "Sean Scully: Paintings of the 1980s" at Timothy Taylor. I expected them to be bombastic and they were, but they had some other levels too.

In the first one, a painting each by a handful of neo-expressionist stars was featured. A work by Julian Schnabel (acquired by the Tate in the early ’80s, but not shown much since) was partly an amazingly impressive marriage of materials (shards of china and sputtering, gloopy oil paint), and partly incomprehensible. It was a plate painting,very large, mostly blackish, with a painted image or set of images in the middle. A bloke with a sword standing on a raft; and an out-of-scale portrait of Francesco Clemente — the head hovering on the raft, maybe, or just hovering and the raft being somehow in the same space.

The indeterminate illusionistic space, together with a total lack of visual association between it and the overall formal elements of this work (the jagged surface and stuttering edge contours, the spatters and drips of the paint), amounted to a difficult experience, but not something you could easily dismiss. A sort of central impenatrability meant that you had to stand there, impressed but baffled, even though — if you thought about it, and were of a certain age — there was a rationale.

The generation born in the ’50s grew up in an artworld where abstraction reigned; for them the use of figures in the late ’70s was iconoclastic. The presence of representational imagery in paintings that showed sophisticated awareness of recent abstract traditions, but ambiguity about the rules, communicated a lively aggressiveness.

This central visual oddness — whose resolution depends on insider knowledge of certain introverted ideas about the history of style — hasn’t stood the test of time. But Schnabel’s fresh approach to materials definitely has.

Risk ugliness
A painting by Sandro Chia in this show was exciting too: an expanse of undulating linear abstract shapes, and a cluster of vaguely comic — not comic like clowns, but comic-odd, like Surrealism — male figures. Two of them pointed into an unknown distance.

One was sleeping. The decorative color field was something like the color of carpets. There was no real narrative but the figures weren’t meaningless; they were vaguely antique, like cherubs, or vaguely heroic, like Mussolini-era mosaics, and they stood for an ambitious, deliberate clash of differences: like Surrealism meeting Raoul Dufy. The smaller sleeping figure was stoked-up with layers of color giving it a tawny redness that jumped out of the register of the rest of the painting in a slightly horrible way: the horribleness seemed part of the experiment. In this work Chia risked ugliness and the unknown, breathing unexpected new life into visual traditions that were simply too taken for granted for anyone to ever bother thinking about them in a fresh way.

Be earnest
I walked into the Scully show: chunky, boxy, rectangular structures, large scale, with muted color and a format of broad bands echoing the outer edges of the painting. The feeling: loose and congested at the same time. The marks all go in the same direction, echoing the sides of the band. The grain of the canvas, the texture of the paint, heavy substance and hardly any substance: he keeps them in play. It looks like fast, fresh, simple, enjoyable abstract art.

There were different approaches to the outer edges of the paintings, which were of course invisible from the front but, since the stretchers were so deep, highly noticeable at any other angle: they were painted in different ways or left unpainted. One of the edges of Heat (1984) had a free, careering broad swipe of gray about half covering the edge-area, with the rest just white-primed canvas, while the other edge on the same painting had nothing but the white primer: Did the main painting surface just skid over on one side and not the other? Yes, but he made the decision to leave it. He draws attention to the edges, making you think about them. In an art of limited means everything is a decision, even the apparent arbitrariness of two edges on the same painting having a different treatment.