Cleve Gray: Contemplation

PAINTINGS 1975-1977

CLEVE GRAYCONTEMPLATION

CLEVE GRAY Carter Ratcliff

Size is one thing, scale is another. Over fifteen feet wide, Phoebus, 1977, is among Cleve Gray’s largest paintings, yet it shares its scale with every other painting in this exhibition, even the smallest. This is a matter more of feeling than of measurement, for in paintings like Gray’s there is no question of working out the ratio of image to referent.

There is no referent. Gray is a non-figurative painter and so his images do not picture any of the world’s things. Rather, they take their place among those things. They are autonomous, like the artist himself, who resisted the currents of Abstract Expressionism when they surged through the American art world. He is an abstractionist, yes, but his gestures in color—at once serene and intense—are not expressive in the manner that so quickly became clichéd in the work of his contemporaries. Gray is present in his art not emotively but contemplatively. His brushy gestures are the sudden culminations of long reflections on himself and his way of being in the world.

Meditation, 1977, shows the artist’s gesture responding to itself, not with revisions but with amplifications. Colors shift, textures modulate, with a cogency that sweeps our attention into a swirl of pictorial possibility. In each of Gray’s paintings a quiet flurry of brushwork is what it is by virtue of becoming, suddenly, something quite different from what it seemed to be at first glance. Thus our interpretative habits are challenged and vision is revivified. As in Cinnabar, 1977, for example, where we discover that opacity can be just as illuminating—as emotionally revealing—as a lushly translucent veil of color; and Cadence, 1977, reminds us that the stasis of a painting is sometimes more like a suspension, a momentary rest in the unfolding of an inherently dynamic image. These responses to Gray’s art are physical as much as visual, for his gestures engage the full range of our empathic powers. In Shaman, 1977, a tangle of black brush strokes draws us deep into a clenched state of being, challenging us to understand that this dark inwardness is alive with explosively visionary powers.

Gray did not begin as a gestural painter. Early on, he measured off the canvas with a clarity learned from André Lhote and Jacques Villon, two grand old men of European modernism. Having joined the American Army in 1943, Gray was in Paris a year later, when the city was liberated. It was then that he met Lhote and Villon and got to know their work. Impressed, he studied with them after the War. Their roots were in Cubism and both had spent their careers refining the linear subtleties of Cubist architectonics. Returning to New York, far right: Cadence, 1977 Acrylic and Duco enamel on canvas 77 x 43 inches

Mark, 1977 Acrylic on canvas 77 x 54 inches

the city of his birth and upbringing, Gray alternated between straightforward realism and quasi-abstract variations on the precedents set by Lhote and Villon.

As the 1940s ended, Gray’s line became freer, his color more intense, and then, in the early 1960s, he suddenly broke free of the armature that had, until then, structured his most ambitious paintings. His mature style was beginning to emerge. We usually try to account for stylistic changes with an appeal to inner workings of form. In Gray’s case, however, change seems to have been impelled by two external events—one horrific, the other joyous.

In 1957, Gray married the novelist and essayist Francine du Plessix. Both were troubled, early on, by the American intervention in Viet Nam. When a Buddhist monk, Quan Duc, protested the American presence in his country by setting himself on fire, Gray responded by attacking a canvas with dark, slashing brushstrokes. That same year, after watching Rudolf Nureyev’s dazzling solo performance in Le Corsaire, he filled a large canvas with exuberant surges of color.

Though Reverend Quan Duc and Nureyev (Dancing “Le Corsaire”) are both abstract, they have subjects.

All of Gray’s paintings do, though it is not always easy to say precisely what their subjects might be.

Named after the sun god, Phoebus is about light—or is the subject illumination? Recalling that another name for Phoebus is Apollo, we invoke order, clarity, and ultimately balance—this last a quality that Gray achieves throughout his oeuvre by weighing one cluster of meanings against other, possibly contradictory ones. The companion piece to the high-keyed Phoebus is of course a dark painting named Erebus, 1976, or Night.

Shaman, 1977 Acrylic on canvas 77 x 44 inches

Yet we can never simply read off a subject from a title. We make sense of Gray’s paintings by seeing our way into their imagery, by feeling in concert with the painter’s gesture—its flowering into visibility, its torque, its negotiations with the edges of the canvas. Gray often marks those edges with strips of color. Sometimes they anchor the field to the physical surface. Sometimes the strips form a portal opening onto to measureless depths. Always, they allude to similar devices in the scroll paintings of China and Japan. For Gray was powerfully attracted to Asian art. He wrote his senior thesis at Princeton on landscape painting of the Yuan dynasty, and his appreciation for the calligraphic—one might almost say, seismic—brushwork of the Chinese scholar-painters showed him a way beyond Western styles of gestural painting.

Confronting us with displays of theatrical emotions, an Abstract Expressionist turned momentary ego-states into subject matter. As we’ve seen, Gray finds his subjects outside himself, in the alternation of night and day (Phoebus), in music (Cadence), in the permutations of language (Conjugation), in ancient culture (Shaman). Never picturing these themes, he alludes to them, not for their own sake, solely, but for the further allusions his gesture persuades them to make. Underlying this profusion of meaning, pervading it, is the artist’s presence—not insisted upon, in the Expressionist manner, but powerful, nonetheless. To borrow a phrase from the Chinese discussion of individual styles, Gray is present in his paintings as a hsin-hua—“a heart-print,” as it is usually translated, which we might understand as the abiding pulse of the artist’s being.

Carter Ratcliff

front: Cinnabar, 1977 Acrylic on canvas 69 x 48 inches Hexaptych, 1975 Acrylic on canvas 36 x 193 inches

525 West 26th Street New York NY 10001 212.695.0164 www.lorettahoward.com

November 8 – December 20, 2012

Conjugation Fifth Tryptich, 1975 Acrylic on canvas 34 x 102 inches

Conjugation 4th Quadryptic, 1976 Acrylic on canvas 34 x 136 inches