Jonathan Forrest |
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The following article was written by Helen Marzolf, The Dunlop Art Gallery, for the brochure for the exhibition Jonathan Forrest: Recent Paintings.
Jonathan Forrests recent abstract paintings depart radically from his previous work. The new ones are soft, luminous, ethereal, and lyrical at first glance; fugitive, troubling and weird after youve spent time thinking about them. They remind me of the work of modernist painters such Jack Bush, Morris Louis, Jules Olitski, Helen Frankenthaler and Jackson Pollock, yet they resist being corralled by historical abstraction. They seem contemporary and alive at a time when painting, particularly abstract painting, has been pronounced dead for years. The historical allusions which frame Forrests recent project amplify something disquietingly non-fixed about his work. For more than a decade, Forrest has persistently made very unfashionable abstract paintings. Whether his work is pegged as modernist or not is really not an issue for him. He sees his work as another development or permutation of modernism.2 In addition to the artists mentioned above, regional colleagues, including Bob Christie and William Perehudoff, all influenced by international modernism of the 1950s and 1960s, were his mentors. In Saskatchewan, the Emma Lake Artists Workshop (1956 to 1995) along with the activities instigated by guest artists and critics, were the mechanism for the modernist influence.3 Now another wave of artists (Marie Lannoo, Reginald Hamilton, Janet Werner, John Noestheden, Forrest and others) are re-inventing abstraction, and related forms, framing the idiom in a contemporary culture constantly re-shaped by technologies of representation and communication.4 Non-objective painting resonated in Saskatchewan, in a lively way, for a long while. I see Jonathan Forrests modernist inheritance as an operative element in and around his paintings. In my imagination, it re-surfaces as persistent ideological pentimenti, Or, perhaps I should say, painterly ghosts, which manifest themselves in the appearance of the paintings, the process of their construction, and in how they are interpreted. Lets start with appearances. This series is colourful and diffuse, in contrast to Forrests earlier, darkly pigmented paintings which were formally resolved by forceful, simple design elements. These were the outcome of process: the gravitational pull of the paint flowing through a single canvas trough, or the steaks left from pulling pigment across paper.5 New Day retains a similar process-conscious structure and self-referentiality. In contrast, when I look at Orbit or lattice, I sense, rather than see, a barely perceptible structure an idea starting to coalesce, suspended a nanosecond before language and design solidify it. The latest works, Glide, Broadcast and Billow appear to be indeterminate, inchoate, almost undesigned. They simply mark, or occupy, a territory of ambiguity. Instead of delivering order and clarity, Forrest uses his considerable skill to offer quizzical inconclusiveness. How are we, as viewers, to make sense of such deliberately indefinitive data? And more importantly, why bother? Forrest offers nothing with which to map theoretical, historical, or conceptual allusions. As viewers, we are left with the pleasure (or problem depending on your perspective) of constructing meaning by responding to the corporeal presence of the paintings, as that meaning is re-shaped by the contemporary critical, theoretical and socio-political contexts within which each of us operates, and which we bring to interpretation. Forrest has an insouciant confidence in the viewers autonomy and ability to read his paintings. Homi K. Bhabhas precisely drawn analysis of the relationship between author and interpreter is applicable to work such as Forrests:
The interpretation of abstract painting demands much of the reader or viewer. Rather than force a singular conclusion, or illustrate a theory, Forrests project re-activates a space for playful (I use the word playful in a considered sense, not to diminish the work) contemplation space that invites the translations, metaphors, reinventions and re-inscriptions which characterize the slipperiness of contemporary culture. The significance of Forrests work lies precisely in its apparent randomness and inconclusiveness. In a milieu of sound bites, statistics, e-mail, and unrelenting literal consumerist media, abstract painting, undead, continues to exert a subtle and potent power.
© Helen Marzolf Regina
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