An artist, in her immature phase, is working towards a way of seeing the world - she experiments with a variety of styles, might even copy other, more established artists (see Gorsky) as a way of taking apart technique and learning how things come together. There will be false starts, embarrassments, threats to quit, unfinished work, frustration, but still, slow progress, until finally everything falls into place, and that first piece emerges, the one which signals a definitive break with the past, an assimilation of influences and a resolute determination to pursue her own distinctive vision.
Denyse Thomasos has long since been her own woman, an artist whose work resists both easy interpretation and overt influence, worthy of admiration and the success she’s enjoyed (a piece on permanent display at the AGO, for instance)… so why then do I feel like the new show at Olga Korper is a bit of a let down? I think a major part of it has to do with the enormous painting entitled Arc, positioned at the end of the gallery and dominating proceedings; in its composition and subject, Arc seems more like a sketchpad than a finished work, and its presence is jarring both in terms of its technical inferiority to the other works on display, and its outsized scale (eleven feet tall and twenty feet wide). It perplexes me why the piece was included in the show, since it explores a totally different set of themes from the other works on display - it is jittery, hallucinatory, a shambolic mess of a painting, neither a delightful failure nor a completed work, as I said before, more of a giant sketchpad than anything else. In its shadow, the rest of the work struggles to assert its own, more modest and often-successful authority.
Arc, 2009
Thomasos has a particular gift for two techniques, the first is the ability to model recessed and oblique shapes using a clever combination of background colours and tightly crosshatched lines, the second is to create a seamless surface that has no apparent beginning or ending - when these gifts are put in service of a particular vision and used to convey a possible reality, the work is as dynamic and exciting as anyone painting today, but when there is a sense of hesitation, as if the artist is uncertain exactly what (where) it is that she is depicting, then the paintings fall back on these strategies as a distraction from the awkward fact that there is no central conceit holding them together. I write this as an admirer of Thomasos’ work for several years now, I can’t help feeling that several of the pieces on show here seem unfinished. This feeling is intensified by the presence of Time (upper below), a piece from 2008, around the time of her last show at Olga Korper - the surface is simply much tighter, the lines lead off in more intriguing directions, the forms more finely hewn than those seen in, to take one example, Scarlet Ibis, 2010(lower below), which features large sections that seem to be just underpainting.
Time, 2008
Scarlet Ibis, 2010
Perhaps I protest too much - there are a number of solidly impressive works on show here, including Dogon Digital, whose loose jumble of off-white lines interspersed with paint drips is informal and charming, and whose relatively reductive palette of blacks and browns accented by vivid pinks creates another distinctively Thomasos strange machine world. Maiden Flight (upper below) also delights with its stunning array of colour combinations and clever in-out tension; viewed from across the room, it is a spectacular mess, held together by a combination of vertigo and shiny, plasticky sensuality. Albatross (lower below), with its nominally avian machine-creature morphing into boats, buildings and other human encumbrances, is more overtly abstract expressionist than her usual work, it is full of vivid brushwork and drippy tension, its form smashing into the upper right corner of the painting as if contained and trying to escape to its full wing span.
Maiden Flight, 2010
Albatross, 2010
At what point can an artist be entrapped by her mature style? Taken as a whole, it is clear that Thomasos is breaking new ground, politely refusing to simply reissue a new set of paintings identical to her last set - there is great use of large brushes and hot colours to drive home the point, like the tangy magenta passage in Albatross, and for the most part she resists the tendency to paint pictures ‘in the style of’ herself. Perhaps I am guilty of expecting a certain set of criteria to be met, and don’t give the artist credit for moving on, but as much as that may be the case, it seems to me a rather uneven exhibition, and perhaps all the more interesting for it - having spent the past month on a Grand Tour being entertained by retrospectives and museums full of Picasso, Gorky, and other giants, it is easy to forget that once even the masters exhibited their latest work, the good and the …less-good… alongside each other, in commercial galleries in springs and autumns past.
