CONTENTS / NEW WORK / PAINTINGS / SCULPTURE / RESUME / BLOG / ARTDEAL MAGAZINE / CONTACT |
Paco Lips, 1982. Oil on canvas, 20 "x 16"
ADDISON PARKS
Addison Parks' "Flower Heads" are beautiful paintings. Because of their beauty, they are difficult for some to see. Current taste has grown accustomed to ugliness-even enamored of it. While so many of the tenets of modernism have been abandoned in the 1980s, a certain modernist distrust of the Beautiful which dovetails neatly with an entrenched American Puritanism seems to persist. This distrust translates into the conviction that the ugly is difficult and true while the beautiful is easy and deceitful. One is virtue, the other is vice. One embodies the vigor of the New World, the other signals the dissipation of the Old. Some of the pejorative connotations of "Old World" or "European" in this context have been blunted by the recent production of younger Italian and German painters (the French remain degenerate). But, to be honest, what the current taste approves about these painters is that they look so "American": aggressive proportions, trashy color, crude drawing. This climate of attitude regarding the Beautiful applies even to the so-called decorative artists and pattern painters whose low-life materials carry with them an aroma of the vulgar which ironizes their pursuit of pleasure, or who circumvent the European and the Beautiful altogether by turning to primitive and Third World motifs for their models.
Parks' paintings contradict these tidy formulations. Although born in America he spent much of his youth in Europe, Italy in particular. The Flower Head paintings are horticultural hybrids com pounding European and American attitudes in much the same way that the images themselves are compounds of plant and animal. The European constituent is immediately evident in Parks' commitment to and mastery of orchestral painting and more subtly at work in what I would call the figural veracity of the paintings, an issue I'll return to. Although small in size, in keeping with the dimensions of traditional portraiture, these paintings have a complexity of surface analogous to a Mahler symphony. Every possible combination of qualities is deployed: slow surfaces and fast surfaces, thick and thin, wet and dry, flat and dripping, etc. "Good painting," declares Parks, " i s material pai n t i ng. " Allergic to turpentine, Parks has abandoned brushes, squeezing paint directly from the tube, applying it with his fingers, troweling it on with a palette knife. Again, the emphasis here is not on process but on results-the orchestration of material effects to produce a convincing physical presence. The nearest equivalent to this sort of painting would be Hans Hofmann's work.
The American constituent of the Flower Heads is felt most strongly in their anti-naturalism. The adroitly fashioned freshness of surface, the combination of plant and animal, male and female characteristics, the evocation of personality types cleverly telegraphed in titles like Pinkat, Mickey Rose, Wolf-Brain, Tiger Lilly, are completely artificial constructions relying more on signs and semiotic elements then on mimesis. Direct observation of nature has been rejected in favor of a continuous inquiry into ideas about nature.
"I don't eat meat and I wouldn't eat vegetables if I could think of an alternative," says Parks. "These [the Flower Heads] are portraits of my friends. Sometimes they are amiable, but they can also be a little nasty." Undoubtedly they are also self-portraits, for the effort to dispense with dutiful description is paralleled by an effort to work with greater spontaneity and lack of inhibition. In both cases the impulse is to strike deeper--deeper into the matrix of connections between things, deeper into the unconscious.
The happy irony in all of this is that by rejecting nature, Parks has found it. The ap pearance has been shucked in order that the substance can be seized. Nowhere is this more evident than in Parks' color. The most striking feature of these paintingsis their color and the most striking feature of this color is its unnatural intensity. This is American color at its unnatural best. This color has nothing to do with light or atmosphere, but is instead the concoction of animated cartoons and advertising, more compatible with Warhol than color-field painting. It is color that obeys only the imagination, wholly invented. Parks takes this hyped-up color and pitches it even higher, loading it almost to the breaking point, using physical thickness to create a blanket of color so voluptuous that at times it stops just short of asphyxiating - a lethal beauty. You won't see this color in any garden, but you can feel it everywhere.
The human figure has always been a touchstone of European art. There is an instinctive grasp and knowledge of the figure which one isn't likely to find in American artists. I'm not talking about anything so literal as an academic command of anatomy, but rather the way in which Europeans have traditionally understood the world through the figure. This is surely part of what is meant by the humanistic tradition of European culture. American sensibility is both more abstract and more pragmatic. Figures are used as convenient repositories of information, as signs and emblems or else as metaphoric landscapes, but rarely as lenses through which the world is focused and comprehended. It is this latter use of the figure that ultimately informs Parks' painting. It's the reason why his investigation of nature is expressed in terms of portraits and it's what endows those portraits, despite their artifice and invention, with such a vividly communicating life.
Parks' Flower Heads are beautiful paintings. At the height of the humanist tradition in Europe, truth and beauty were held to be synony mous. The eye was not simply an organ of hedonistic pleasure but the portal to the soul. Beauty was the right and proper expression of right and proper ideas-the educator of the soul. Parks' paintings through their quality and integrity, reassert Beauty's lapsed claim to such substantial tasks. (Andrew Crispo, September 18- October 9, 1982)
Jon R. Friedman
Reprinted courtesy of ARTS Magazine
CONTENTS / NEW WORK / PAINTINGS / SCULPTURE / RESUME / BLOG / ARTDEAL MAGAZINE / CONTACT |