  |
Drawn To Darkness, Holding Onto Light: Holly Downing’s Imagery
By Donald Kuspit, critic, writer and Professor of Art History,
State University of New York, Stony Brook
Downing is in fact a master of chiaroscuro, as her mezzotints show:
light and dark are as fundamental to her as geometry, and her
geometry is much more complex—multidimensional--than Ben
Nicholson’s, especially in her extraordinary images of drapery.
Dramatic events, they stand in sharp contrast to Nicholson’s static
constructions, which reify those of Mondrian, suggesting Downing’s
break with Nicholson. Nonetheless, her drapery is also abstract and
intellectual, indeed, even more abstract and intellectual—and
inventive--than Nicholson’s and Mondrian’s constructions, I would
argue. They seem simplistically intellectualistic in comparison to
the lively, “dialectical” intricacy with which Downing ingeniously
weaves the fluid sections of her drapery together.
What to me is most striking about Downing’s buildings and drapery is
their air of solitude and isolation, detachment and remoteness. It
makes them all the more abstract—uncannily autonomous. In this they
resemble the buildings of Sheeler and Hopper and the drapery of
Raphael and Rembrandt—acknowledged influences (others include
Zurburan and Morandi).
If the drapery works are visceral self-portraits, as I think, and
sometimes portraits of friends, they often show the body unsettled
by emotions. As Lamentation for a Palestinian Friend suggests, the
drapery is an expressive device, often used to convey unspeakably
deep suffering. Sometimes that suffering seems painfully erotic, as
Patterned Drapery suggests—in effect a reclining odalisque.
Her unconscious feeling of social alienation and conscious use of
autonomous abstraction eloquently converge in her articulation of
pure shadow. Dense with character and morbidity, yet as
transcendentally absolute as Malevich’s Suprematist black square,
the relentless shadows in Shadows, Majorca, Spain and Mojacar
Pueblo, Spain, both 2007 and Arrabal III, Majorca, Spain, 2008 have
the majesty of pure forms even as they convey complete isolation. I
am prepared to argue that Downing’s intense shadows are symbols of
the “tragic sense of life” that Miguel Unamuno said was particularly
Spanish, by reason of Spain’s Catholicism, conflict-ridden history,
and the pariah-like isolation that settled on it during the Franco
period. I may be overstating the matter—one can take Downing’s
shadow images simply as brilliant renderings of an acutely observed
reality—but her shadows have the fixity and finality of death.
The observed world is a stimulus to introspection for Downing. She
is a participant observer, not simply a neutral observer, and it is
because she emotionally participates in what she observes that her
works have aesthetic conviction and expressive power.
Donald Kuspit
Professor of Art History and Philosophy
State University of New York
Stony Brook
Excerpt, 2008
|
|
