Paul Chidester at the Linenhall
Artist's Statement:
With a particular kind of scrutiny, one can happen upon sights while walking that offer themselves up as arrangements. Since my walks usually take me to places where I'm likely to find wildflowers and modern ruins, these arrangements often seem to convey a kind of proverbial truth. Proverbial in their humble origins and vague familiarity. Truthful in that when contemplated, they appear to be strange and infinitely variable.
Paul Chidester
Essay : Kevin Moist:
One of the most deceptively simple ideas to come out of 20th Century philosophy is the seemingly obvious observation that a map is not the territory it represents. The menu is not the meal. "This is not a pipe." On the other hand, while the image may not be the thing, it is A thing, and an extremely revealing one at that. As a culturally-situated representation of the world, a map often reveals as much or more about the worldview of its makers than it does about the spaces it describes: the map as a site of symbolic interface with some larger projected/imagined space. Much of Paul Chidester's work for the past decade or so has shadowboxed with the obtuse nature of these issues at the nexus of map and world.
Facetiae: witty, tongue-in-cheek, vernacular, proverbial. Not, however, cynical or nihilistic. The various strands of Postmodern-ism were often all too Modernist in the crusading certainty of their universalized insistence that neither the map nor the territory "really" "exists." A genuinely post-Modernist engagement, however, seems to call for a response that transcends simple dismissive irony, an engagement with a range of modes of seeing and knowing and symbolizing that were written out of the Modernist script as insufficiently progressive. Of course, Modernism was always interested in the "primitive," though mostly as formal raw materials to be mined in the drive toward universal purity. The larger-and much more interesting-question of what worldviews (cognitive maps) went along with those styles was also generally written out of the equation. A re-examination of the construction and representation of those conventional worldviews, however, forms the heart of much of our best contemporary art.
One of Chidester's favorite sites for the exploration of vernacular and institutionalized worldviews has been the unfashionable genre of landscape painting-one of those vernaculars excised from the march of aesthetic progress. He has commented on his interest in "how the idea of 'nature' is constructed in ways that either uphold or to subvert certain myths that are central to our cultural metanarratives." Representations of nature, questioned creatively, can provide deeply symbolic clues as to the nature of a society's view of itself and its relationship with a larger ground.
In working through these reconstructive views, Chidester has for the past 10 years been fascinated with the possibilities of the quite old medium of egg tempera, most often associated with wall panels in medieval churches. It is a fluid medium that allows for a large degree of control as layers are built gradually; its quick drying time also impedes the subtle transitions associated with oil painting, and thus has the tendency to flatten perspective. In Chidester's work, this provides the opportunity for the development of spaces that are hardly un-real, but perhaps are trans-real, a heightened state of sidewise engagement. Spaces that are properly "mythic" in nature, as befits the notion of a symbolic landscape.
There is clearly some juxtaposition going on here, but it goes beyond merely that of objects or forms. Rather, whole genres and modes of expression are problematized, taken apart and played with, not a simple combination but a layered dialogue. Here a form so often associated with the sacred in Western art creates a highly different set of overtones through its use in depicting the entropic margins ("ruins," if you will) of industrialized society.
If this all sounds somewhat surreal, that's probably well and good. The "original" Surrealists were generally all too Freudian, neurotically obsessed with their own obsessive neuroses. Chidester, however, recognizes that the sur-real is in no way necessarily tied to Lovecraftian monsters from the submerged Id. In fact, the strangest spaces are in many cases right in front of us, the unmappable corners and fractured spaces of a walk down the street, the ordinary mystery of the everyday unconscious. The oddest and most revelatory juxtapositions may appear perfectly commonplace at first blush, the slippery nature of our conventional maps of reality only becoming clearer through a more sidereal engagement with those paradoxically fantastical spaces.
All this description can make these paintings sound too dry however, especially given the playful impact of the work. Contemporary Japanese musician Kawabata Makoto, whose work also explores and reconfigures various vernacular forms, says that "the instant when cosmos accepts consciousness can only be described as Magic." This concept is nowhere near as abstract as it is often taken to be-in fact, it is extremely concrete (a substance, incidentally, that crops up in a number of Chidester's paintings, alongside fire hydrants, ladders, buckets, and other quotidian items). Cosmos need not be vast: whole universes exist in the cracks and hidden corners of our naturalized reality-grids. It simply refers to a particular relationship between mind and space, one that arises when our conventional patterns are seen for what they are, a sudden flash as to the workings of our perceptions of the world. For such a moment to occur, both mind and space must be consonant.
With consciousness so aligned, Paul Chidester's paintings do indeed have the potential to reenchant your particular ordinary. But conjury rarely works best via brute force-it is much more sly and aloof. It does not club one upside the head as a route to enlightenment. Rather, it creates spaces for consciousness to roam, spaces in which conventional charts are destabilized and new associations lurk, where seemingly familiar elements come suddenly to suggest something quite other.
|
