Patricia Correia Gallery
2525 Santa Monica Avenue E2
Santa Monica, California
310 264 1760
July 19 to August 23, 2003
Helene Slavin Evergreens
acrylic & oil on linen, 48 x 72 inches
This and other image
courtesy Patricia Correia Gallery
In her eight large paintings
on show at Patricia Correiea, Helene Slavin creates instant patina.
Looking aged, well-used, as if they've been sitting in an attic, her
works resemble maps that mischevious schoolchildren have dipped in coffee.
Actually, they're built up from layers of acrylic, encaustic, and oil
applied via gesture, splash, and squiggle. They appear aged because
Slavin drenches her canvases with mute color.
Colors are on the brink of
strident, as if seen through a scrim. Fiery yellow skies, for example,
in Evergreens; luminous white in the Vermeer-inspired View of Delft;
the yellow-white of the sun or whatever light source it is that illuminates
the female in Stephany. With subtly she tones down these colors. Their
effect is not acerbic, as in German Expressionism, or incandescent,
as in Van Gogh. Rather, the experience is of looking at a faded Gauguin
Tahiti painting. Once-lustrous but no longer so, yet with intimations
of past lustre.
Slavin works her surfaces
to an extraordinary degree. Rather than staining the canvas like Helen
Frankenthaler or Morris Louis, she literally soaks, saturates, tattoos
the canvas. They look well-worked like a tapestry, pummeled to good
effect. As well as the surface, she applies paint to the flip-side of
the canvas where it emerges through the interstices of the linen. Moreover,
she singes the surface to melt the wax. Finally, she sands and then
varnishes the surface to preserve the poltergeist of the process. Think
of a sunset over rubbled Pompeii preserved in ambergris.
Her strategy is at once expressionistic
and conceptual. On one level, there is the sense of walking into a well-appointed
Victorian reading room and finding a comfortable chair: Comfortable
if not nostalgic. By dint of their size, they engulf the viewer. Sparse
on detail and long on lyricism, they engage slowly, they simmer, occasionally
they percolate. They induce calm, irrespective of subject matter. They
are a cocksure paean to technique and virtuosity unmediated by posturing
The Red Barn 2003
encaustic, acrylic & oil
on linen, 48 x 72 inches
By creating work that spans
abstraction and figuration and is made with an identical technique,
an identical look, an identical resonance, she abolishes historical
hierarchies between abstraction and figuration. She renders moot the
tension between figuration and abstraction, showing that they are two
sides of the same coin, painting. Her work may flirt with abstraction
but it does so the way Picasso's and Braque's did, where even their
most abstract works of Analytical Cubism still maintained a purchase
in representation, on tangible reality.
These works suggest the tension
that animates painting today is anti-painting. The real distinction
is between things that age and those that don't. Installations, especially;
performances; and also, a whole genre of work that escaped commodification,
like Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Schwitter's Merzbau, Duchamp's Fountain.
Slavin's work embodies meanings, to borrow the phrase from Arthur Danto
who extended Marcel Duchamp's conceit of retinal painting. Conceptually,
the work poses an unintended homage to painting, to its endurance, its
viability, the way the fact of its existence is the subtext behind every
painting ever produced (just as every book printed bears some relation
to each other).
As with decanted wine, time
enhances the works; their implicit longevity, their duration-made-manifest,
and their maturation, are in themselves part of their subject. That
is painting's saving grace. All the experiments of the 20th century
that changed the nature of painting could not alter one incontrovertible
fact: over time paintings (and bronze sculpture) age, they acquire a
patina. And perhaps, just perhaps, this patina sustains any aura that
was present at its conception. Does video age to good effect before
it disintegrates? What about installations and performances, how do
they stand the ravages of time?
Slavin's work shows that
one of painting's perennial themes is the acknowledgement of its own
aging. She doesn't trumpet her genre's will-to-aura; no, suave and discreet,
her work shimmers like a smoggy Milton Avery, premature, old, getting
better all the time.