The Birth of Form

Immanence

Several artists since Turner have tried to picture energy in the birth of form or in its return to the elemental. This could be the mark of Kate Palmer’s work if she did not also refuse the demiurgic point of view of a god: she does not simply materialise in the deepest of inks and in paint the heart of oceans or darkness, glaciers in suspension or, sometimes, astonishingly precise architectures moving along vertiginous lines or flight, like an external chaos offered to a playful or puzzled gaze watching the emergence of forms and meanings through these vast expanses of gloomy-green translucence. Through the endless transformation of this substance she also restlessly creates the experience of a gaze which cannot find bearings, which cannot detach itself, in space or in time, from what it sees.

No horizon, no end, no vanishing point, no bound space or recognizable place here. It is not simply that the fresco-like dimension of these great canvasses makes it impossible for the gaze to encompass them as a whole. Peripheral vision is in fact crucial to the experience here. But wherever a shape, a depth or an acceleration appear, the eye also notices some work on the surface: scratches, rubbings, incisions, circular traces of labouring through the thickness of the paint, which part the space differently. Moving closer, local events and new lines of force unfold, to the point where one almost touches the surface and the image becomes tactile. Thus the painting is never offered to any single gaze, even that of a god. It destabilises the eye or it multiplies its perspectives, and, in the contrasts between form, depth and surface, it keeps on producing pure events, sudden, detached, never to be organised into a whole.

This effort to manifest and to cope with the singularities offered to sight, the massive in-between which can never be fully synthesised into forms, this effort of the painter is also each time a new experience in the viewer. It is not that a pre-existing interiority would be revealed or expressed in these works. What is experienced is rather, precisely, the obscurity or the materiality of pure interiority, for instance the specific textures of fears and abysses in the dreams of childhood: a dark ocean in fury under a cold and intense light, the disproportionately elongated hull of a black submarine plunging at an oblique angle like a blade against the surface of the canvas, trying to gauge an indefinite depth, images which, in the prehistory of these works, determined their tone and format. Sometimes, the memory of a fascination for a sudden contrast or reflection, for ripples of light in their specific intensity, on a floor, a mirror or an armour – whatever the personal cause for the pregnancy of such images. And in the end what counts is not what is shown but what is done, so that life is bent or shaped by the effort of vision enforced upon it, as it is by the learned improvisations of some musicians.

Time is thus essential to these paintings precisely because form and narration are constantly interrupted here. An absolutely short story which both takes and gives time, as the Bartleby of Melville (another ocean-lover), and the world is given as wild, uncharted, impossible and still tangible abstract spaces, beyond the gloss of the humanly expectable. Whoever sees these works agrees that they force upon the spectator a specific presence to the world: a breathing as one sometimes says that one ‘breathes’ when one’s consciousness is no longer directed towards a future by a plan, towards a past by a worry, but freed to concentrate on the granularity, the multiplicities and asperities of the real as it is given, pure and purposeless mass of singularities, as in Michaux or Dubuffet. No story, no family history, no familiarity here, but no meaning, no concept, either, no pretext for these ideas one would never take as serious thinking if the label in the museum was separated from the work it is supposed to explain. We are offered the freedom and hard work of a painting which not only does not mean but constantly attempts at defeating the easy coagulation of meaning and which does not simply aim at recording the specific intensity of gesture, the trace of an existence, even if, importantly, it does not fear signalling the random events that first constituted it, as in those paintings by Franz Kline where the texture and movement of a black stroke on a white surface defeats the tracing of a shape.

Exhibiting the true shapelessness of the given as it is, as sequences of purely local events, when it is so obviously easy for such a gifted artist to capture and fascinate the eye with images, this requires a tremendous effort and a great rigour. The remarkably and paradoxically finished nature of these works should not mask the frailty and danger inherent in the endeavour though, the danger of losing the painting whenever the tenuous balance between lines of force and matter, a balance Kate Palmer restlessly works on for large expanses of time, is broken. Only then, and not at the beginning of the painting, are the drawings truly needed as she always begins by reacting to textures randomly imprinted on the canvas when it is inked against a sheet of plastic. It is the drawing of the drawing which counts here: it is always instantaneous, like thinking, it reveals and generates energy, and as such suggests manners of dealing with matter rather than drawing shapes. They may be as different as single neuronal lines, multitudes of ripples, nervous clearings in dense blocks of ink, but these drawings are life and movement throughout, constantly revealing the surprising power an incision in the visible can have. Thus they go again well beyond the decisions and tendencies of an individual. Energy and direction seem to get born from the texture of the ink or the paint as if the object of these works was simply to explore life through a work on the visible. These drawings in turn are like ideas of movement, ideas which can then be implanted back in the texture of the paintings and generate the surface tension able to constantly move the eye from fascination to action.

Rare are the painters who have so powerfully released the tremendous energy of the radically unknown.

©Jean Khalfa 2002