6 minute read
Marion Abraham: My Candle Burns at Both Ends
from Sullivan+Strumpf Contemporary Art Gallery Sydney & Melbourne, Australia & Singapore – Sep-Nov 2023
Over the course of a painted day, Marion Abraham’s paintings move from darkness to light and back to darkness again. Life and death is inscribed into the very arrangement of her work. In her upcoming exhibition at Sullivan+Strumpf, the paintings are placed in a precise coded sequence that function like a memento mori, spelling out a simple, yet stark, reminder.
By Tai Mitsuji
There is a conspiracy that hums beneath the painted surface of Marion Abraham’s new exhibition. The artist describes it as “the conspiracy to live”. We might also think of it as a radical plan to keep moving through our world, even after it has been indelibly altered by loss, even after its fragility has been revealed to us. “I never took into account what happens when you take something big away,” Abraham explains, reflecting on the conceptual underside of her paintings. “It's like a gravitational force disappearing. And suddenly everything is completely altered.” How do you continue on, when gravity falls away? Therein, lies the conspiracy.
The fact of death—its silent presence in our lives—is inscribed into the very arrangement of Abraham’s paintings in the gallery. The artworks at Sullivan+Strumpf are not hung randomly, but are placed in a precise coded sequence. Abraham uses space to create morse code, by playing with the proximity between her paintings: a solitary canvas represents a dot, whereas two paintings together indicate a line. When brought together these dots and lines function like a memento mori, spelling out a simple yet stark reminder: “A Death.”
Abraham uses space to create morse code, by playing with the proximity between her paintings: a solitary canvas represents a dot, whereas two paintings together indicate a line. When brought together these dots and lines function like a memento mori, spelling out a simple yet stark reminder: A Death.
In their own way, Abraham’s paintings each subtly suggest these existential stakes, which hide in plain sight, taking cover within a seemingly eclectic mix of painted scenes. Over the course of a painted day, her artworks move from darkness to light and back to darkness, and are populated with an assortment of figures from Abraham’s life and the history of art. Here, we find a wood chopper in a moment of quiet contemplation; there, two women whispering conspiratorially in an orchard; in another painting, a copse of cedars from the artist’s ancestral home in Lebanon; and, just a little further on, a girl who turns away, covering her face. Each scene carries stories and memories, which soak into the canvas below.
In this last painting of the girl turning away, for instance, Abraham borrows her protagonist from Joseph Wright of Derby’s famous 18th-century painting, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump. In Wright’s 1768 painting, an audience gathers around a candle lit table, watching a white cockatoo, which is trapped within an elevated glass container. The crowd observes as the air is slowly pumped from the vessel and the bird begins to suffocate. In the midst of this violent scene—which is dressed up as a scientific experiment—only one figure turns away in anguish. It is this figure, this girl, who Abraham takes and pulls into her painting. It is this figure whose presence recalls the idea of death, even as the spectacle of Wright’s scene recedes into memory.
There is a kind of undeniable immediacy to Abraham’s work, which emerges not only out of her subjects, but also out of the paint itself. This feeling finds a grounding in her very process of creation, as Abraham typically begins an artwork by sketching out its structure with a brush, before abandoning the formal tool altogether and replacing it with her hands. “I was a potter for a long time, so I love treating paint a bit like clay,” she says. “I'll use the brush roughly and then I'll go and find all the anatomy, all the best details, with my hands.” While every artwork indexes some element of its creator, in Abraham’s canvases there is something beyond this—an almost direct bodily expression of the artist.
When speaking with Abraham, I am struck by the fact that her paintings all seem to sit at the intersection between control and release. In the case of the former, we sense her formal artistic training in the structures that define the early phases of her painting. Yet at some point there is a shift towards the latter. As Abraham explains it, she reaches a stage where “every painting starts to bore [her].” This is the critical point of release. “I have this moment where I'm allowed to just let the image of the person slip away,” she says. “And I get to be free in the last hour of my painting.”
Yet this freedom is not without complication. The artist finishes each of her work days in the same way, by sitting and staring at her paintings. “When I'm working on something I can't really see anything,” she explains. “When I finally stop is when I get to know the paintings.” While no physical work takes place in such a moment, the act of painting very much continues. “Sometimes I think, ‘Oh, you put nothing into the work.’ And sometimes I find something awesome,” Abraham confesses. “I’m learning to go back and back and back until I find that something.” It is this search that lies at the heart of each of Abraham’s paintings. The search for that intangible thing, which brushes insistently against our unconscious, and pulls us into her conspiracy.
MARION ABRAHAM, MY CANDLE BURNS AT BOTH ENDS
16 NOVEMBER – 16 DECEMBER
SULLIVAN+STRUMPF EORA/SYDNEY
EMAIL ART@SULLIVANSTRUMPF.COM TO REQUEST A PREVIEW 53
