Christine Stark – paintings
Within the history of abstract painting, it is possible to discern an ebb and flow of various tendencies or ‘tropes’ (rather than ‘styles’) that appear and reappear: the geometric, gesture, amorphous/inchoate or reductive materiality, emphases on surface or various modes of spatiality: the illusionistic and the concrete. For the sake of compactness, this rather caricatured digest might also act as a kind of compass or orientation in addressing certain works or practices. Christine Stark’s paintings are a case in point. The sketch mapped out above, can, in fact, also act as a kind of matrix-like positioning within each individual manifestation of her practice. A particular painting might incline towards surface, another towards a geometric structuring. This implies a practice of freedom (or a freedom of practice!); in this sense – a given work is never contained by, or ‘inhabiting’, the inherited protocols of these tropes: it is never simply a ‘field painting’ or a ‘geometric painting’ we encounter; but there might be connotations - or a leaning toward either - within individual pieces. The practice, therefore, proves itself both elastic and malleable in relation to both the histories of abstract painting and specific needs of a particular painting. This points to several core issues that the work addresses: a setting in play of generally simple elements, and a sense of being implicated, totally, in the materiality of making. This would include the materiality of paint: as stuff, as coloured stuff (we might note that colour is always ‘embodied’ in these paintings), sometimes clashing vivid and artificial hues, at other times closely related (different yellows for example). Here, the sense of the actual physical consistency of the stuff of paint seems inseparable from its tonality and colour. Contrast, therefore, tends to be the rule of thumb, because each colour’s tonality and its hue is indissoluble and not necessarily relational; therefore, the paintings tend to be constructed from strong contrasts between these autonomous ‘embodied’ colours. This also gives the work a strong continuity between individual pieces and the gist of the practice as a whole.
One might get the sense of an expanded palette of options (sets of colours, viscosity, fluidity etc.), and within this ‘palette’, the materials and colours being addressed afresh each time, resulting in a sense of reordering, realignment, redevelopment of form. Choice is the essence of her work, in that painting is an act within the stream of materiality itself, and the choices made within the flow of the material. The resulting painting is an arrested moment from within this flow, in the artist’s own words, “a residue” of encounters and choices. Each might also be seen as a document of previous possibilities, some taken, some erased, others avoided. In this way, the work operates between a lyricism and a more hard-nosed materiality. If we take a work like ‘Strips’ 2018, for example, with its final form of an articulated surface populated by the rhythmical strips across the surface, could suggest colour field painting (at a stretch, say, of the Jack Bush ilk); equally, it might also evoke the kind of mechanical formulations of Judd or Andre in the classic minimalist ‘one thing after another’ approach. On occasion, such figure ground relationships are reversed – where the uncontainable, informal fluid ground of a painting appears to seep over the more formal elements. But generally, blocks, strips, diamonds, stripes, rectangles – each of these become potentially neutral signs that often negate a space, they operate somewhere between blockages to a lyrical flow, rather like blind spots, or optical obstacles. In this way, they often become like surrogate objects in themselves, taking their place as presences within the visual field yet remaining resolutely ‘abstract’– a far cry from neo-Platonic reveries on the invisible ideal proportions, but rather a celebration of the imperfections and singularities of an embrace of materiality that painting can offer.
David Ryan 2019
David Ryan is an artist, musician and writer. He is author of Talking Painting: Dialogues with Twelve Contemporary Abstract Painters
Strips 2019
