Dark Resonance
More than just pretty pictures
By Joan Markowitz, Co-Director, Boulder Museum of Art
It is difficult to remain unmoved while viewing an exhibition of works by artist Mark Spencer. At first glance the viewer is greeted by lusciously painted images. But lurking beneath the surfaces are darker offerings, a context which resonates with unfolding dramas. Spencer’s works simultaneously stimulate the senses and challenge the intellect with images drawn from complex intertwinings of historical, mythological, and psychological references. Inspired by dreamlike visions, surrealistic enigmas are rendered with neo-classical virtuosity. Born and formally trained in Boston, Spencer had access to the treasures and publications of major museums, where early on he found his artistic heroes in the glorious quattrocento artists Rafael, Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Titian. His mysterious works invoke other echoes; Goya’s response to the horrors of war, Blake’s revelations on religion, de Chirico’s explorations of alienation and anomie, Magritte’s privileging the iconic object and Dali’s romps into the psycho-sexual. A scholar of history and mythology, Spencer can discuss the fall of the Roman empire, or the evolution of Priapus to Pan, as easily as he can detail the frailties of the New Left in American politics. Combining his historical perspectives with a keen awareness of religious underpinnings and the spiritual overtones of contemporary life, Spencer’s works take on the meta-issues of past and current historical moments and reflect the panoply of human emotions and traits. Here, the primal nature of humankind seeks and finds release from its own bondage through the anesthetizing, aesthetizing, and stimulating effects of beauty.
Spencer creates abstractions and hyper-realistic images with equal aplomb. Large paintings start as tiny 2 inch thumbnail abstractions. The abstractions, like Rorschach blots, metamorphose for the artist into the imagery which forms the basis of small canvas studies, actually perfectly rendered paintings in their own right. Finally, after months, or years, the full sized hyper-realistic paintings using classical techniques combining egg emulsion and white titanium to create highly polished sumptuous old- world like surfaces are realized. In recent monotypes, many of which are in this exhibition, Spencer has returned to the more abstract forms of his thumbnail sketches. While still retaining his unique vision, the nature of monotype printing necessitates a looser and more gestural approach resulting in works which are like evocations of imagery. These highly regarded monotypes suggest that some of Spencer’s strongest works seem to reside in these most ephemeral images.
The unexpected conjunction of classical technique and surrealistic imagery replete with Jungian archetypal symbology, impels Spencer to refer to his work as neo-classical surrealism, and to recent paintings as “not so still lifes”. Dealing with life’s ineffable mysteries, complexities and contradictions, his explorations delve into human relationships, relationships between humankind and the universe, life, death, destruction, as well as the nature of nature and submission to the sublime. Not claiming to have the answer, he views himself as one who asks the questions. With O’Keeffian resolve he reacts to some commentary by admitting that people sometimes see their own neuroses, fears and desires in his paintings.
Spencer’s intriguing visions and impeccable technique have served him well. His works grace the walls of major museums and private collections. In 1996, the Albuquerque Journal proclaimed the two best shows of that year in New Mexico to be a Rodin sculpture exhibition and Spencer’s first one man painting exhibition at the Gerald Peters Gallery. Most recently he was featured in a retrospective at the Frye Museum in Seattle.
Spencer says he does not paint to entertain. He views the problems of our time as arising from a” lack of a coherent narrative”, and sees his art attempting to explore a collective mythology. Not a religious man, he sees God as life, and religion as the politics of morality. ( telephone interviews- May 2003) His belief in positive progression is indebted to Jungian psychology.
Painter Agnes Martin has described the artists’ way as being “a different way; one of surrender to his own mind.” (Uncontrollable Beauty p.400) And it might be added, to his own desires. Like most artists, Spencer plays out his own psycho-sexual dramas in his works, and views those works as manifestations of his reality; a Pandora’s box in which the treasures within are constantly at odds with viewers’ expectations. When questioned about the numerous images of groups of people huddled together in boat- like forms in monotypes in this exhibition, he responded by discussing the “language of the hand”; the fact that the image obviously has some subconscious resonance in the confines of his brain, and that those vessels probably have atavistic relationships to emergence, birth, and rebirth.(telephone interviews –May 2003) He sees his most preternatural figures as materializations of indefiniteness, and the synthesis of the abstract and the concrete. His beasts, whether human, as in the painting Eye of the World, or of indecipherable but formidable form, as in Living with Contradictions, or of ominous phallic presentiments as in Room of the Ancestors, carry the burdens of their violence, destruction, terror, and sexual power, while residing in paintings where beauty also stakes its claim. It’s as if Spencer, concurrently aware of and repelled by the darkness of man’s inner beasts, employs beauty as an antidote, or perhaps more fitting, as a release.
That Spencer paints sublime and foreboding imagery with equal virtuosity often jars viewers’ sensibilities. Is the reaction related to guilt associated with voyeurism, pleasures taken in scopophilic reveries, or the ambiguous and disquieting effects of an amorphous apocalyptic menace? Is it shame at our titillation in viewing that which we might desire, or discomfort in acknowledging that we might have become inured to viewing what we fear? Susan Sontag has observed that “( i)t seems the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked. There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.” ( Sontag Regarding the Pain of Others,p41). Spencer’s works afford us both opportunities. We can take satisfaction in looking without flinching at seductive paintings like“Naked Launch”, and the pleasure of flinching at disturbing paintings like “Eye of the World”.
During a 1993 panel discussion, art and culture critic Dave Hickey described being shocked out of his daydreaming reverie when he heard himself say that the issue of the 90’s would be beauty. (Invisible Dragon p.11) While it might seem surprising that this would be received as shockingly new, in fact it was. The cultural climate of America during the last decades of the millennium had produced a striking phenomenon in the art world. “Beauty”, always a cornerstone of art and aesthetics, from Aristotle and Kant to Newman, Kandinsky, and other masters of modernism, had become anathematized by postmodern art world critics in whose view it was not merely retrograde, but an elitist, saccharine substitute for substance. Beginning in the 1980’s, the attribution of “formal” beauty had been ascribed to images ranging from Andres Serrano’s composition of a urine encased Christ, Robert Mapplethorpe’s sado-masochistic self-portraits, Damien Hirst’s decapitated bovines, and Chris Ofili’s dung encrusted canvases. Now at the beginning of the 21st century, new standards of beauty have been set by the malleable machinations of Mathew Barney. When, as many reviewers saw it, past definitions which correlated beauty with the moral, the spiritual, and the sacred, had become subverted to the point where the transgressive and the unseemly seemed to have become privileged, Spencer continued to position himself unselfconsciously as a painter unafraid of confronting beauty.
Art critic Peter Schjeldahl has commented that “there is something crazy about a culture in which the value of beauty becomes controversial”. (Uncontrollable Beauty, Notes on Beauty. p.54) and attempted to explain that “the current resistance to admitting the reality of beauty may be motivated by disappointment with beauty’s failure to redeem the world.” Now, as notions of beauty are being reinvestigated by critics like Hickey and Schjeldahl, in what might be referred to as a post-postmodernist gambit, new questions must be posed. If beauty is to keep a seat at the canonical table of art history, and if it offers neither redemption, nor spiritual enlightenment, what does it offer?
Spencer’s most recent painting, “Beauty and the Beast” provides clues to the artist’s particular philosophical and aesthetic proclivities. The painting depicts a classically conceived female form, nude but for the diaphanous red cloth which covers her head and the white toga which drapes her side. Her hand holds a leash at the end of which sits an ape, dressed in an oversized suit jacket. While easy to consider this image beautiful, what rescues it from sentimentality or banality, are the enigmatic and subversive possibilities in this taunting primal visual narrative. Perhaps Spencer’s works articulate the view that while we might not be able to cure, redeem, or even comprehend the world which we inhabit, a beautifully painted canvas provides pleasure and moves us to think and to feel.
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