September 29, 2003

The New England School of Art & Design
 at Suffolk University
75 Arlington Street
Boston, Mass 02126

Three from the Royal College of Art, London: Arturo Di Stefano, Estelle Thompson, and Andrzej Jackowski

Curated by Jane Deering

Courtesy of Purdy Hicks Gallery, London
October 3 through October 29

Opening Friday, October 3, 5 to 7 PM

Ghosts, Memory, and Abstraction

By Charles Giuliano

Director of Exhibitions, NESAD at SU

The special exhibition, "Three from the Royal College of Art; London," brings together work by distinguished contemporary British artists who have an unique and complex relationship. The artists all describe the importance of Peter Di Francia, the head of the department of painting, as a mentor. He is widely respected in  Great Britain but less well know here. This exhibition includes Andrzej Jackowski, Estelle Thompson, and Arturo Di Stefano. They exhibit at the prestigious Purdy Hicks Gallery in London, where the guest curator, Jane Deering, an American who divides her time between Great Britain and Annisquam, Massachusetts, is an associate.  

The artists represent different generations and experiences but are relatively close in age. Jackowski, the oldest of the three artists, was born of Polish refugee parents in a hospital in Wales, in 1947. He is Welsh by birth but spent his influential early years in
a camp just over the border in England. Di Stefano, born in 1955, is just eight years younger, and Thompson, born in 1960, is 13 years his junior.

The mature work of Jackowski was formed by poverty, damaged youth, the aftermath of war, and the trauma of divorced parents. His work is evocative, poetic, and intensely personal. Di Stefano, an Italian of British birth, using a variety of media and approaches, from figuration through abstraction, often works with concepts of memory and appropriation. Thompson, while of a somewhat younger generation and zeitgeist, evolved away from figuration and narrative. Like some artists of her generation she explored the very concepts of abstract art, from which, Jackowski, ironically, had
himself rebelled. During Jackowski’s student years art schools were primarily focused on formalist abstraction.

Seen together the work of the artists evoke a polarity between the art of the Dionysian, as represented by Jackowski, work formed by a voyage through the nine circles of an inner hell. That spiritual quest as a precursor to achieving a respite from the torment of experience and memory. And, in the rejection of the visionary, expressionist, or
narrative, Thompson strives for the sublime of Apollonian abstraction. The work of Di Stefano represents a conflation of the extremes from implications of narrative through purely aesthetic appreciation of material and medium, particularly in his prints.

The disparity of the work of these three artists, representing such a dichotomy, was a challenge initiated by the selections of the curator. The project resulted from a visit to the home/ gallery of the curator, in the summer of 2002, in which she displayed a selection of work from the Purdy Hicks Gallery. I was immediately struck by the
quality of the work and initiated this project.

The time spent in London with my wife, Astrid Hiemer, last May, was fruitful and I published several reports of that experience. For reasons that are not entirely clear to me I put off writing this essay. With time, I wanted to extract it from the connection to
other experiences. To let it sit and simmer.  

Last weekend, I set aside for writing. To clear the decks, read the catalogues, look over the notes, and barrel into the topic. But nature rebelled against that. I became violently ill. This forced me to postpone and continue to dwell on the topic. This delay
had an uncanny result. The other night, despite being still quite ill, I drove to the Montserrat College of Art, In Beverly, Massachusetts, where Andrzej was a visiting artist for the week. In the gallery, where there was a selection of his work in a three-person show, he was offering a slide show to a packed and attentive audience.

There was a second chance to see a range of images and hear him speak about the work. And, to examine a cluster of small prints arranged, salon style, on one wall. Once again, as had been the case earlier in London, I found them daunting, haunting
and enigmatic. They are reductive images of such elements as beds, tables with a variety of objects on them, generic chairs, and nude figures all in a very simple and unique style of drawing. He employs limited but resonant color. The  furniture, I would
learn, evoked memories of the rustic barracks of his youth. The beds, he would later explain, were metaphors for a life lived. There is a profound difference between house, which describes the huts in a refugee camp, and home.

During the reception that followed the lecture the artist greeted me warmly, and asked how the essay was coming along. I offered a muddled response. He suggested that we have dinner and, at a nearby bistro, we made a foursome with the Montserrat curator,
Katherine French, and my artist friend, Harry Bartnick.

The conversation bounced around a bit until I reminded him of how moved I had been about the story of his father’s stamp collection (some five albums) which had so influenced him when he was child. Memories of the raw physical surrounding of childhood would, particularly in the past decade, be the focus of the work and its
somber iconography. I told him how I had thought of him often, in the past months, as I have been working with stamps, some inherited from my mother, others bought, and the currencies of the era from 1914 through the 1940s. I have been working with the theme of war/religion/art and propaganda.

Astrid has conveyed how deeply moved she is by Jackowski’s work. It is interesting that, although the three of us are of the same, Post WW11 generation, our experiences are so different. I grew up a child of privilege in the US, while she played in the rubble
of bombed out Hamburg, and Jackowski lived in a refugee camp. His work has become a poignant focus of dialogue and emotional response for us.  

In a confessional manner, during dinner, I blurted out to him that initially I had found his work to be an enigma. That its intensely private, reductive, simplicity had been difficult to comprehend.

In London, he had addressed the issue of narrative in the work. In response to the suggestion that, every picture tells a story, he replied that, "In a way, yes, but a different story for every person which is why I don’t put everything in. Just enough to
evoke an atmosphere so people can enter the space and have their own reverie and stories."

From readings he formed the habit of making clippings of thoughts and phrases, such as, "vigilant dreaming." He also compiled scrapbooks of found images that get into the
work after much alteration. Poetry became important to him as a means of dealing with loss and memory. He quoted from Seamus Heaney of, "dropping the bucket inside you." To draw to the surface the deep well waters of art.

There was a warm and reassuring smile as he slowly, deliberately and clearly responded to probing into a very private domain. Perhaps one becomes an artist because they can’t, or won’t, talk about their traumas. The story of the stamps, proved to be the key.

They were the only objects of value that his father had managed to hold onto in their flight, first to Hungary, and eventually Great Britain. He discussed, as he had earlier in London, how his father had been a man of position and social status in pre-war Poland. In England, he had been reduced to the dole and common labor. He became a
troubled man and, by the age of 14, "My mother couldn’t take it anymore." Their divorce meant that he was shuttled back and forth. I asked if we might view him as the child of survivors. With all that it entails. There was a long pause and then a simple affirmative.

During those grim, early years the stamp albums were a window to the world, a resource of images for fantasy and imagination. "I don’t think I would be a painter without those stamps," he told me in London.

Years later, his half sister visited from Poland. He recalled her anger at being abandoned by her father. Because she had to work to support the family, she never got the opportunity for an education. Upon her departure, her father gave her the precious collection of stamps. Andrzej explained how she smuggled them into Poland, but they got water damaged while being transported in an open boat. Their loss and damage, "meant a lot more to me than to her," he stated simply.

This early exposure to the power of images, through the stamps, would be further nurtured when the family relocated to London. He got an early start with art education that led to art school. Formalist abstraction, however, then the standard curriculum of cutting edge art academies, served no purpose for him. He dropped out of school. The next years were spent unlearning the damage of that confining art education. He took to drawing left handed and admired the Tantric, primitive, and child like as directions for his work.

The figurative work of R.B Kitaj became an importance reference. Much later, he discovered the work of the American artist, Philip Guston. This artist had abandoned abstract expressionism to return to big, raw, tough figurative images. During an era dominated by aspects of abstraction the figure was viewed as anathema by the
avant-garde. First Kitaj, and later Guston, were major artists who, "returned to the figure." Their resolve would confirm Jackowski’s struggles and development.

In this exhibition we are presenting several small but powerful prints. There was a recent project, "A Drawing Retrospective: 1963-2003," organized by Purdy Hicks, where it debuted, that has traveled to University Gallery at the University of Northumbria, and the University of Brighton Gallery. It makes a strong case for him as
a master of our time. We hope that an American museum, with greater resources, will undertake a major exhibition that includes his large-scale paintings.

As we sat in the studio of Arturo Di Stefano, on the wall behind him was a large counterproof of a vaulted corridor in a church that he visited near the city of Arezzo. A counterproof is a technique of placing several large sheets of paper onto the wet surface of the painting. By gentle rubbing of the surface an image or ghost is pulled off in mirror image. The original painting may then be retouched. The result is that the artist ends up with two versions of the same work each with uniquely different qualities.

This may be discussed as a technique of the artist but it is also a reflection on a deeper concern and sensibility. Di Stefano is a British subject whose heritage and culture is rooted elsewhere. He lives and works in London but travels in Italy.

The city of Turin, where he has relatives, is significant. This is the city which is home to the, "Shroud of Turin," which is alleged to depict an image of the dead Christ miraculously left on the cloth in which his corpse was wrapped.

The theme of the shroud has shown up in his work. The tragedies of human experience, no matter how intense, erode. This is also the process of healing. While this is welcome, we also have a longing to retrieve lost memories and feelings. We achieve this by reading, travel to historic sites, or leafing through albums of family photographs.

These are some of the issues and processes in the work of Di Stefano. While there are specific references to architecture, images from the history of art from the Renaissance through the modern era, he also discussed other sources. There are urban themes in his work and, "intriguing vacant spaces," as well as private spaces including the interior corridors and hallways, doors and windows of his studio. He suggests that his work refers to the, "anonymity of the city."

"The Shroud (one of the sources of images) happens to be in Turin but that is not the only reason that I went there," he explained. "There was also a literary connection.

There was a writer I was interested in, Primo Levi, who was living there. I never saw him, however, as it is a big city."

In 1989-90 he created a series of dark, romantic, full-length, black and white, oil and wax paintings on linen depicting; Max Beckman, Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Kasimir Malevich, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch and Pablo Picasso.

With numerous sources in literature, history and iconography I asked the artist how he received and used these materials and insights. "You have to be interested in history and literature to have it feed into the work," he commented. "That is part and parcel of
it. It’s there already in novels and literature. But one doesn’t illustrate it. You take examples from it."

His work entails being a step removed from the source. About work in the London studio involving images encountered through travel and research. It requires a critical distance that allows the work to breathe and take on a life of its own. This is very different from working directly on the site and striving to make a literal copy or
impression. It is the difference between the literal and the literary. Between fact and fiction, or history and literature.

His work is a balance between the past and the present. There is a dialogue in the work. The paintings, prints and drawings reveal a respect for traditional techniques and training in drawing, perspective, use of color and pigments. He is also involved with the
process and materials of printmaking. The woodcuts are particularly fresh and inventive in the revealing of the natural grain of the wood, which is worked in such a way as to heighten their textures. Some of these approaches leap back and forth from the application of paint to use of wax, rubbing and other virtuoso inventions.

An example of mixed media in this exhibition involves, "The Bather." The image is taken from a photo that Cezanne used for his painting in the Museum of Modern Art. First he painted the image in black & white on a linen canvas. Then he brushed melted wax over the entire surface; the brush marks are visible in the painting. He then inked a huge woodblock in black and pressed the canvas into the inked woodblock. The artist subsequently made a counterproof of it with newsprint, a material that is not archival. This piece was done when he was first experimenting with making counterproofs. Since then he evolved to use more permanent Japanese paper. This is an example, in his work, of how ideas and images evolve through technique and process.  "The making of a painting is like a journey undertaken without a known destination. A painting can be a portal to memories and feelings that change the way we view the
world to the extent that we are able to see it anew," he said. "I have reasons for making pictures but they are not necessarily the same reasons as when the images are done. There are changes. Some of them I am not responsible for."

Over time the approach to the studio has changed. "The process of making the work has slowed down. It used to be quick. Now it is more exhausting. That is a good thing and a bad thing," he said.

As we concluded our discussion he revealed the complex decisions and dichotomies involved in producing the work. "Should the work be big or small," he said. "The process is fueled by doubt. Big or small. A story or not. You think you are in control but often you are not."

The experience of being in the studio with Estelle Thompson was different on every level. The nature of the work, primarily vertical stripe paintings with bleedings edges in varying scales, and a series of works on paper produced by a unique process, demanded a different set of issues and dialogue.

As we discussed the work, Thompson became animated as she squatted on the floor showing us a pile of works on paper. Or, took us to her work table to demonstrate the complex manner in which she prepares colors, stored in a great range of carefully
marked tubes, and applies them to rollers used to make vertical lines with even spaces.

I was surprised that she did not use tape or ruled guidelines. Her process is both intuitive and precise.

Most of all, one sensed that, at mid career, here was an artist who worked long and hard to find an identity. Part of this was getting out from under the weight of the strong faculty of the Royal College of Art. Initially, and with great success as a student, she recalled making experimental paintings that were, "Politically motivated works conveying sexual politics. They were very big figurative paintings."

That started to change just a year before she graduated. "I made a painting with a large figure laying on the edge of a landscape. In the next painting, there was no figure and just the suggestion of a landscape. I used a lot of poured paint. I was going in another
way. I had the feeling that the figure was not a vehicle of expression for me. It was happening less and less. But it was not a rebellion. It was about the use of color, space, and light."

The artists she most admired, Carlo Crivelli, and the family Bellini, were meticulous painters who took pains to conceal the brush stroke. This became a key factor for her to limit the sense of the hand of the artist and its touch. By 1993, in works like, "Scatter," and, "Close Up Closer," she was making abstract, saturated, color paintings with plaid patterns or, in the case of, "Close Up Closer," broad bands of color separated by narrow, darker bands. By 1996, she created a series of ten, color aquatints that convey the range and visual vocabulary that she would come to further
develop and refine from plaids to stripes. By 1997, she progressed to the vertical, stripe paintings that have become her signature.

It is significant that Thompson, other artists of her generation, and more ubiquitously among very young artists, are returning to forms of abstract art that, while prevalent in the in the 1960s and 1970s, subsequently lost favor with the critical/ curatorial mainstream. The Museum of Modern Art mounted the major exhibition, the
Responsive Eye, in the 1960s, which launched the movement of Op Art. A number of artists have used the motif of stripes, targets and chevrons including Barnett Newman, the Canadians, Guido Molinari, and Claude Toussignant, the British artist, Bridget
Riley, the Washington D.C., stripe painters, Gene Davis and Howard Mehring. Also from Washington, the Color Field painters, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, experimented with stripes and chevrons. There were the hard edge painters from Frank
Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, to Larry Zox. Also, Brice Marden, who evolved from Minimalism, through the Neo Geo artists Ross Bleckner and Philip Taaffe.

In all periods and styles there have always been familiar and dominant themes. During the Renaissance, for example, consider the numerous renditions of the theme of the, "Madonna and Child." But also consider the endless nuances of individual masters
approaching that ubiquitous subject. Given the rich and complex history of the theme of stripe painting and systemic painting it is important to explore and understand how that approach to abstraction has resurfaced in the work of Thompson and younger
artists. She evolved her mature style at a time when the Oedipal struggles against the patriarchal dominance of formalism and its spokesperson, the critic, Clement Greenberg, had subsided. Younger artists were free of that  emotional epic struggle and were able to look with a fresh eye at aspects of abstract art.

Thompson was also successful in developing a style and technique that is uniquely her own. She premixes a great spectrum of colors and packs them into tubes, all carefully labeled, so that she may reuse these colors with precision. Using a marker of spacing on her palette tubes are squeezed into blobs of color and a roller is run over them to pick up the pigment. These colors are then built up in layers on the canvas with great precision. The process is as slow and as labor intensive as the Old Masters she admires. The resultant paintings, with soft edged and limitless variations on color
stripes set onto a white ground, are lively and vibrant, tickling the eye with a wonderful shimmer and shake.

There is another body of work that provides a variation on the traditional technique of marbleizing papers. These beautiful, antique papers were commonly used in hand bound books.

The traditional technique is to drop oil paint onto a water surface. Patterns are produced by agitating the water gently, running knives and combs through the surface, or making drop patterns of different color. A sheet of paper is then carefully introduced at one edge of the water trough and drawn up to and making contact with the surface by lifting off the color. In Thompson’s approach, the surface pattern is more deliberate and varied. Instead of sliding up from beneath, the paper is carefully touched to the surface to pick up the color.

She told us that it is a time consuming and risky process. Anything may go wrong and the unique image is ruined. The trough has to be emptied, cleaned of residue, and she starts over. The resultant works on paper that she showed us were truly magical. They wonderfully conflate the deliberate and accidental. The images evoke a vividly patterned microcosm.

It has been a great challenge and pleasure to present these three distinguished artists to an American audience.
 

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