The place painting has in the pantheon of culture has always been contemplated. Plato warned against painting as a vain attempt to mimic nature. An act of mimesis which would impede on the task of natural philosophy to know the truth of nature. This challenge against art has always riddled the painter. At first, painting appears to be the most archaic attempt at mimesis as it is inherently pictorial. It is humbled by the rudimentary confinements of the canvas which set it apart from the other arts. It is pushed up against the walls of the cultural pantheon. Nevertheless, painting is often considered the most compelling of all art as it marks the most intimate impulse of the artist—the aesthetic moment. It can thus be the most sagacious to our questions of art.
During the Victorian period the antique idea that art ought to have some bearing on truth and natural representation was brought into question. Notoriously, James McNeil Whistler’s The Falling Rocketwas critiqued by John Ruskin as being as insulting as ‘throwing a bucket of paint in the public’s face.’ Whistler’s painting was nothing less than a tender and astute depiction of fireworks dispersing through the night sky over what Londoners called a pleasure garden. The combustion of gunpowder which scattered fiery gold against the pitch of black entrusted Whistler with the opportunity to abstract and blur the dividing line between art and nature. The aesthetic truth was favored over perfection. The ideological impositions which Ruskin made on the pigment of Whistler’s canvas marked a turn in the history of art. Whistler turned to Paris for refuge.
With a liberal and cosmopolitan spirit the Parisians resisted the historic expectations of the brush. At the core of the belief was the maxim l’art pour l’art—‘art for art’s sake.’ Painting would be vindicated through painting alone, rather than stoop to the edifice of the politico-theological enterprise which had always lay at the core of European culture. The doctrine of the arts’ role in society was unraveling. The truth did not need to correspond to nature as such or the moral interests of any principality. Instead, only the pigment, the linen, and the brush stroke were of importance. Only these were essential to the pleasure derived from the work, the sentiments it would awaken, the manner in which it chams a space.
As an avid reader Graeme Rowe was privy to these momentous changes that inaugurated the modernity to which he found himself. Bookshelves filled with histories and biographies of these bygone liberals and bohemians filled his home. Of all these souls, Rowe was most adoring the Dubliner Oscar Wilde. While Wilde and Whistler were disposed against each other in letters, they were nonetheless contemporaneous and championed this same belief that art ought to proceed from an origin—a vanishing point—where the politico-cultural impositions were nil.
Rowe felt an affinity to the Wilde tragedy insofar that Wilde had an Epicurean spirit and valued the aesthetic qualia of art over its political or moral task. He would cite this quote from Wilde as inspiration:
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. — Oscar Wilde
This metaphysical maxim was of import to Rowe as it suggested the most ancient practice of painting could be vindicated through painting alone and return it to its rightful home—joy. The surface proved to provide a meditative reprieve. Upon the surface the war for art could be fought as it is only there that the ideological impositions that have arced through history can be stifled. The salvation of art and the painter from the drudgery of politics and institutional expectations was now a possibility.
In Rowe’s Oscar (2021), which in its reddish hue, gazes through the window of Deven Mariner’s Helgoland we see exactly this. There is no escape. As observers we are—to use Rowe’s title of his ’92 show—a ‘slave to the surface’ as the sensuous is made absolute, while our conceptual conjectures are diffused. It is the maximal expression of the art l’pour art. Observable in Citroen (2017) is a similar disruption. The calligraphic mark speaks to just the canvas, with each mark acting like a world unto itself. Each brushstroke is an artefact of the very element which makes us human—our freedom and capacity to make an appeal to pleasure—our ability to bite into the apple and to know the good.
Nothing is discernible. Nor reducible to what Kant would call the faculty of understanding. Instead, the works are an eternal struggle for the sensuous alone. They are testaments to Whistler and Wilde. Zero Narrative (2017) speaks to boldness to defy the overlay of rational sense. Its namesake conveys the importance of returning to the image over the word. Its nakedness is an invitation to the viewer to leave their inner monologue at the door. In the ‘letting go’ of a narrative the work is free to communicate its own inherent amplitude—its own moment. While the narrational expectancies thrusted upon art are so often turned into a teleological arc, marking a beginning and end, the painting of this kind turns this archway into a passage which one can step into the atemporal.
It is with admiration that Deven Marriner brings tribute to Rowe’s legacy. Although each of these artists are set apart by generation and style, Marriner has nonetheless uncovered anthropological similarities between each of their practices. Each is centred on the moment. Each value the meditative power of the surface. Each sees infinite sculptural and poetic potential in the mark. The generational and stylistic differences which are intermediate to these two artists are thus of practical benefit to returning to the question of painting and its didactic power—if it is to possess one.
Rowe provides a visceral response to the questions which lay at the bedrock of Helgoland. Is the viewer necessary to art? Is the audience an essential catalyst to the work which makes this art possible? Rowe is archetypal of what would constitute a true artist as he continued to conjure works unconditionally. He painted with perpetual dynamism his entire life, even through relative obscurity. Upon the walls of Helgoland these paintings are artefacts which not only enhance the texture of our world but also bring us closer to the questions inherent to life and art. How can these most perplexing energies of the soul continue to inspire us to transform life into art? How can it be, that the causal activity of the moment and the surface continue to have bearing upon us irrespective of us knowing its eventual effect? How can the moment be the nexus of causation?
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