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LAURA MURLENDER:
Collins Fine Art Water does not cause waves; neither does air. Air does not create storms or any event of weather. Waves crest and pass; a floating log nonetheless remains in place, no matter what its ups and downs. For each of us, patterns come into view, disappear, and then return. They do so beneath forms, shades, even colors -- Appearances. Something within it all persists. But, "For now we see through a glass, darkly...." The sixteen canvases by Laura Murlender, now at Collins Fine Art, are not a consciously spiritual art, certainly not like that of Piet Mondrian or Vassily Kandinsky, but each work has an inner sanctity. "Laura Murlender: New Works" offers guides through what we intuit before our words and logic assign it forms and names. From May 3 through June 30, 2002, gallery visitors may join in visual contemplation. Artists travel different roads. Van Gogh sought a spiritual art renewed within the images and colors of his time. Paul Klee once asked what were the shapes and forms we knew before our actual birth. Mondrian and Franz Marc also sought a basis for the eye's delight and the mind's perplexity at appearances that suggest far more beyond themselves. Laura Murlender has cited her admiration for artists such as Mondrian, Malevich, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, but has a particular interest in the work of structural anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, who questioned human experience and how science put it into words. That was Murlender's prompt. Levi-Strauss sought patterns, dynamic interplay: the inborn animal awareness through which we build our world. Carl Gustave Jung assumed a repertoire of primal archetypes; Claude Gustave Levi-Strauss observed that throughout all human cultures, certain common threads wove different tapestries. Jung was a psychologist; Levi-Strauss an anthropologist; but artists had left tracks on that beach before them all. In viewing this exhibition, "Laura Murlender: New Works," an immediate question arises. Other artists have turned to abstraction with geometric fundaments and shown an impressive skill. What brings Murlender's art alive and sets it far apart? This is not art for the sake of doing art: an exercise in sight or a pleasure in art materials. Here, the artist seeks; the paintings are a record of her search: landmarks of a human need to understand. This art has its roots in curiosity about our hidden selves: what flesh endows; and where we go from there. The subliminal supplies a raw material. Claude Levi-Strauss noted innate hierarchies and boundaries:
The American neurologist, Antonio Damasio, some twenty years ago confirmed: "I believe there is a kind of nonverbal sense of self. He concluded: "language creates the I of that sense of self." Whether it is born of spirit, or material flesh, the human has a deepest life, some internal ordering which differs from the animal. Murlender's art commits to unveiling those events that lie hidden and within, whatever its conscious manifestations and patterns. That commitment gives it life. As early as 1914, artist Franz Marc declared:
In Murlender's art, there is an essence to each painting. This current work is bolder than earlier pieces and although the artist calls each painting a struggle -- an entity fighting to be born -- a new progression here has developed rapidly. Some stages are discernible, which lends this show added interest. An orderly geometric grid underlies these paintings. However, a viewer vacillates in deciding what is ground and what is imposed and subsequent. White (78"x62") is a large oil and mixed media canvas which gives the impression of a moon seen through a watery surface. Her richness in handling the paint leaves a visual ambiguity: It may equally be a reflected form, a surface echoing of light. White seems a looser analog to Grid I & Grid II (each 39"x50"), a set of mixed media canvases. In this pair, the visual forms emerge as an alien or encrypted sentience. Rectangular contours of varying shades combine and build larger configurations, much like crystalline molecules, genetic scripts, or the peculiar forms of early morning dreams. In Reflection (Oil on canvas:35.25"x51") four faint pillars precipitate in series out of a subtle interplay of off-white squares; at bottom center, the artist's palette gradates into steel blues and greys interspersed with a delicate, diffused scumbling of earthen reds. This painting's title, like its image, suggests limited concessions to materiality. The image itself darkens toward the lower edge, as if tone had a weight all its own, a tendency to filter out from hue.
In all of Murlender's paintings, there is a lively tension between deliberate geometricism and a painterly intuition which precedes it, and in the end, molds it as a coherent unity. The square, the circle, and the grid, are an order seemingly built from sensation and sight. Science increasingly suspects these former may in fact precede the senses. Sense and sight are rooted in an still more enigmatic order. Murlender draws on this. There is a primal and dynamic core. The human brain splits lines and edges, tones and hues, textures, even varying diagonals into parts, and then calls an image back from such shatterings. Writer, Joel Davis, observed: "It makes perfect sense, therefore, that the human brain uses the same 'divide and recombine' for storing and reconstructing all experiences as it does with visual images." Murlender's art reveals a vision born of solid insight. The artist's titles indicate a debt to appearances, but her art evolves toward universal icons. Raw Material (2001:51"x51") (the only canvas here done solely in oils) within altered whites and greys, creates an emergent papal cross with subdued reds and browns. In Inner Landscape (35.25"x47") an architectural girdering evokes not just human artifice, but the natural forms and cadences of arboreal growth which buildings mimicked over centuries. An implied equivalence of form reveals a harmony which, as it fades in our century from Modernist aesthetics to unnatural rationality, has left unease and loss. In Murlender's art, a restorative art, a primal sensibility absorbed through space and time without formulae or conscious selectivity is brought to sight in a very personal expression. Humans, much like cats, close their eyes and welcome warmth and light. For man, calculations and constructions follow afterward. Murlender's paintings offer shapes and forms we knew before we focused on the world around us. Moments from a Landscape (31.5"x51"), rich in shapes and harmonies of iron reds, is significant. As its title tells, it is not a bit of place, but a point in time. Both Jung and Levi-Strauss insisted on dynamic pattern over specific facts and artifacts. Here, there really is no time and place. They meld a unity. That may well be what gives these paintings energy.
In modern times, anthropologists have paid great attention to cultures which regard time as cyclical; that is, without a history. Levi-Strauss studied what seemed the non-historic world of the Savage Mind. Psychologists likewise observe the eerie sense of time in dreams, time as a changeable surrogate of space. Murlender's newest work opens fertile possibilities in such fields. Her The Surface of Time I (2001:47"x35.25"), incorporates strong bas-relief texturings, adding to the already strong illusions of depth inexplicably captured upon a flat canvas. In The Surface of Time I, dominated by a palette of pinks and reddish browns, three lower contours hover loosely near the central aggregate of painted forms, as if they were only momentarily drawn in by it. The Surface of Time II (2001:47"x35.25") also employs raised components, a plate-like, shingle effect. In this work, the rectangular contour in white hovers above a box outline; whether one truly echoes its counterpart is indeterminate. In Narrations of Time (35.25"x47"), the central configuration is a plaiting of black and red bands into boxes, and those boxes into a whole that seems a map or architecture for something dreamt, or about to be. This is a striking work. On the left wall at Collins Fine Art an ensemble of three mixed media canvases are hung in vertical series: Lux Metrica (2001:15.75"x23.5"); The Moon (2001:15.75"x23.5"); and Tracing (2001:15.75"x23.5"). Lux Metrica resolves into a central construct somewhat reminiscent of a Roman victory arch in off-whites and red-browns. In this work, an impression of object, potentially solid and massive, gathers form from a nebulous and undefined matrix. The Moon concedes more to a tangible outer world in its truncated circle at image upper left, but that orb seems to flee beyond the overall soft and creamy blend of whites which define the painting's basic grid. Tracing inverts the anticipated palette of this sequence with its conspicuous shadowed red-brick contours at right and bottom of the canvas. Viewers at the show's opening several times remarked that real, familiar objects seemed to be in a process of birth, emerging from insubstantial patterning. This lingering impression upon viewing the paintings may well reflect the artist's original intents.
As a warm-blooded specimen of life, the human shares a unity with the visible world; he knew its forms, textures, colors, shades, eons before he became Homo sapiens or even warm. So did birds; but chicks are 'hard-wired' with instincts -- a proper shape, size, color appears, and they beg for food. Otherwise, they don't. Humans respond subtly, creatively, with an unworldly awareness: They are often an enigma. Laura Murlender's art probes what that means. Earth (2001:15.75"x23.5") presents strong, regular horizontal boundaries, as of white mists settling on housing slats. The dominant off-whites darken toward image base. In its delicate working of color and contour, Earth evokes a visceral geometry of the mind's most immediate sense of land. It may well mirror such a sense before the vertebrate mind stood upright. At first, Aborigine (2001:15.75"x23.5") seems a deeply kindred piece. A glowing white shingle set at upper center seems to attract a series of emerging, vertical black bars at lower right. The motif of parallel bars, common to both, presents a radical reverse of order: close affinities; suggestive difference. In Aborigine, among scumbled and glazed areas of gentle colors, toned reds and browns seem warmer than in many companion pieces in this show. Two Murlender paintings at Collins Fine Art grant cadmium reds a dominating role. Red II (2001:47"x35.25") is an oil and collage on canvas. In the upper two-thirds of this work, a pulsing red ground seems a brilliant luminosity seen through closed eyes, a fetal red. (Paul Klee once asked what perceptions gathered in before we saw our birth and began the task of making sight cohere....) A well-defined rectangular contour centers the upper area of this work. The lower third of Red II darkens into greys and, ultimately, a vibrant black. In Red III (54.5"x33"), a raised board element, covered in textured burlap and painted black like its matrix, counters two bright red rectangles at its right. Above this interplay of color and relief, an indistinct orb of a more subdued red seemingly recedes into the surrounding darker greys. Murlender noted that her decisions for palette and final composition were spontaneous. In these paintings, instinct and inquiry forge a highly effective art. Although these new works at Collins Fine Art favor a low-key and sophisticated selection of color and shadow, their earthen, almost archeological palette holds a surprising vibrancy. They have life, where others might fall merely into formula. Franz Marc in his Aphorisms anticipated such renewal:
And Marc asserted:
Piet Mondrian, writing of "Natural Reality and Abstract Reality" in 1919, foresaw even greater hopes: "Modern man -- although a unity of body, mind, and soul -- exhibits a changed consciousness: every expression of his life has today a different aspect, that is, an aspect more positively abstract." He continued: "The truly modern artist is aware of abstraction in an emotion of beauty; he is conscious of the fact that the emotion of beauty is cosmic, universal." Laura Murlender's art stands out. It has technique and effect, but it draws upon this artist's commitment to express more than form and hue. Early on, Murlender dismissed the human figure from her work: It seemed a distraction, even an illusion. One sets aside the sight of air, water and a floating log -- The patterns produced by waves have their own reality. Much that we feel and know does. Beyond language and histories, specific instances, it is the fact of perception that is a puzzle, a miracle. Whether an inquiry into primal orderings, or a hunting of the soul, Laura Murlender's art has light and life, tension and repose, and offers much in each repeated viewing. "Laura Murlender: New Works," sixteen canvases, is at Collins Fine Art from May 3 through June 30, 2002. --G. Jurek Polanski Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net. Editorial Note: Books mentioned in www.artscope.net are often in print and may be purchased through this site's Amazon.com link. Franz Marc (Aphorisms (1914-1915)) and Piet Mondrian are quoted from Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (University of California:1968), compiled by Herschel B. Chipp, with contributions by Peter Selz and Joshua C. Taylor. Claude Levi-Strauss is quoted from The View From Afar (Basic Books, Inc.:1984) and is also the author of The Savage Mind (University of Chicago Press:1968). Antonio Damasio is quoted from Joel Davis's Mother Tongue: How Humans Create Language ("A Birch Lane Press Book": 1993). Laura Murlender's work was previously reviewed in www.artscope.net (June:2001). |
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