M.O.L 28
HERE IS WHERE WE MEET – HEDWIG BARRY Ashraf Jamal
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n three adjacent rooms at the Tate Modern, we find the paintings of Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, and Claude Monet – three different moments in abstraction. Richter’s paintings read as electrical static, the vertical energy field is starkly gouged, the colours blindingly harsh. In the case of Rothko, the mood is somnolent, the colours, while similarly kinetic, are muted, the energy field softly subterranean. In the single painting by Monet – my favourite – it is the natural world that emits its light and soul, vegetal matter adrift on a lake. I recall these paintings while looking at Hedwig Barry’s solo show at the Nirox Sculpture Park, the fruits of her residency. Like Monet, she speaks of the impact of light and colour, green especially, which is unsurprising given that Nirox is built upon an aquifer, an underground reservoir, created when a meteor struck a lake, plunging the water beneath the earth thousands of years ago. Like Monet’s paintings, especially his monumental works at Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, Barry’s paintings, on reused canvases donated by a friend, display a similar interest in deliberately discordant mark-making. In What Painting Is, James Elkins describes Monet’s process beautifully: ‘To do what Monet did … it is necessary to make marks that have no set orientation and no uniform shape. Each mark has to be different from each other mark: if one slants downward, the next has to go up. If one is straight, the next must be arcuate. Lancet strokes must follow rounded ones, zigzags must be cut across by ellipses, thickened strokes must be gouged by thin scrapes. Any pattern has to be defeated before it grows large enough to be seen by a casual eye’. Pattern recognition is, I think, integral to the experience of the paintings by Rothko and Richter at the Tate Modern – they are formal states, no matter how electric or tremulous. In the case of Monet, however, it is the informal dissonance of energy fields, perceived in nature, which matter most. That Barry speaks
‘of things that cannot be resolved, that must be incomplete’, reveals that she, like Monet, understands that form requires formlessness, that art, after Walter Benjamin, also amounts to ‘the debris of history’. This suggests that Barry also shares an affinity with the paintings by Rothko or Richter. We are speaking of degrees of separation, because Barry adores the spirituality which she, like many of us, find to be the magical hidden ground – or aquifer – that feeds Rothko’s mysterious colour fields. While, like Richter, Barry also understands that ours is a nuclear age, an age which lives in the jaws of an inescapable existential threat. This because we are now as denatured as we were shaped by nature, as much geo-political and Anthropocene creatures as we remain tethered to a howling natural world. Tony’s Colours, a paint shop in Booysens, Johannesburg, is Barry’s grail. There she spends hours realigning swatches, struggling to understand the language of colours, their interface, congruency, discordance – dance. And it is undoubtedly the dance of colour that is omnipresent when looking at and experiencing Barry’s paintings. As one attendee at her walkabout asked – is her mark-making a form of writing? A script? After Monet, after Elkins, it is. Figure requires its ground, and vice versa, forms are shaped in-and-through nothingness, language is the subtraction and abstraction of a fundamentally unknowable world. In Barry’s case, that world – revealed through paintings and sculptures – is bathed in tones that are soft yet sheer – greens cool and warm, blues synthetic and elemental, cerulean, aquamarine, yellows and oranges that dart, are ever shifting. This because for Barry the world is never still, colour never one thing. This is especially the case in the ‘flip colours’ she uses, which alter when light, shadow, and perspective shifts. If sculpture appeals greatly to her, it is because, unlike a 2D painting, it exists in the round. We are compelled to circumnavigate, grasp the refracted angularity and softness of tones and forms.
Installation view showing the works Johannesburg, Angel of History, Arch and Marievale (LR.)
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W W W. A R T T I M E S . C O . Z A
