Mark Titmarsh Weather Boutwell-Draper
Gallery, 19 June - 6 July
What is Conceptual
Painting? To accompany his exhibition of paintings at Boutwell-Draper
Gallery, Mark Titmarsh provided his own written notes on its history.
The moment of greatest clarity in this paragraph (which included
the priceless description of Conceptual Painting as "Interactive
Stillness in Real Time") was a quoted observation by Ian
Burn that "'painting is about seeing as a medium for consciousness'".
The truth of Burn's statement lies in its acknowledgement that
visual perception is central to any understanding or experience
of painting. For although the conceptual has been cast as the
enemy of the visual ever since the early twentieth century (thankyou
Marcel Duchamp [1]), it manifests in painting as a visual property.
One only has to read that most readable of art historians, Ernst
Gombrich, to understand that painters and sculptors have invoked
concepts since time immemorial. Not through verbal posturing,
but through the intelligent use of the basic visual elements (line,
tone, shape, colour etc.)[2].
Titmarsh's
use of the proper noun - Conceptual Painting - indicates that
it is not Gombrich's idea of the conceptual that he has in mind.
Rather, his work invokes Conceptual Painting as the investigation
of what painting is, as physical medium and cultural idea.
Measuring
80 x 100 cm, Titmarsh's paintings typically consist of a base
coat of bright acrylic colour followed by some thick, multi-coloured
smears of paint, large in scale. A final coat of clear resin creates
a perspex-like gloss over the whole painting, rendering any textural
variations in the paint surface invisible (very much like a laminated
photograph). The paintings announce the presence of paint without
delivering its familiar materiality. One is led to ask: why does
this painting look like that? How was it made? Is it actually
a painting? And by implication, what is painting?
All painting
that succeeds as art addresses these concerns; they are implicit
in the activity of making art. Something more is required if a
painting is to at least entertain its audience. Thankfully, Titmarsh's
paintings are a visual and tactile delight. It comes as no surprise
that the artist refers in his writings to 'Conceptual Expressionism',
for he loves colour and gesture. Furthermore, where many conceptualists
intellectualise creative play out of the equation, Titmarsh's
work and writing indicate that he understands its importance:
"If I
set out with serious intentions to get the job done it doesn't
work. It's only during playtime that it actually happens and in
turn something quite 'serious' takes place. In the spirit of play
a space is held open for painting to show itself and in return
painting holds open a space for 'being' to reveal itself for a
brief and fleeting moment".
This quote
is extremely telling, suggesting that for Titmarsh the interrogation
of process does not constitute an end in itself. It is a means
of attaining the elusive 'moment of being', presumably that moment
of creative surprise in which a material like paint can suggest
more than its own brute materiality. But does this not point away
from the conceptual back to the more traditional terrain of figuration
and abstraction? Titmarsh's work leads me to think that the possibilities
of painting are encompassed in the space between figuration and
abstraction, and that in painting Gombrich's idea of the conceptual
is the most substantial one.
1. In an extensive
interview by Pierre Cabanne (Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp,
Thames and Hudson, London, 1971), Duchamp defined 'the conceptual'
as the cerebral appeal of an art work, as opposed to its 'retinal'
(i.e. visual) aspect. While it was his stated aim to rid art of
the retinal, Duchamp's work and verbal statements evince an understanding
that it is not always possible or necessary to separate them.
Nevertheless, one of Duchamp's legacies has been a tradition of
aesthetically impoverished, concept-driven art.
2. In Art
and Illusion, Gombrich observes: "All art originates
in the human mind, in our reactions to the world rather than in
the visible world itself, and it is precisely because all art
is 'conceptual' that all representations are recogniseable by
their style" (p.76, Art and Illusion- A study in the psychology
of visual representation, Thames and Hudson, London, 1996
- first published 1960).
-Ernest
Foster
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