Helen Garber

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HELEN GARBER: REAL PAINT

By Peter Frank

In turning to abstraction, Helen Garber has given up nothing but the image of the figure. Her sensibility maintains intact, manifesting now in another language. Her virtuosity also perseveres, applied here to a visual realm no less demanding than the previous. Her identity as a painter redoubles as she investigates the nature of paint for its own sake – not just for its own physical sake, but for its own metaphysical sake, that is, for the sake of what paint reveals to the eye when allowed to be itself.

Having been labeled a “realist” (perhaps one with “lowbrow” connotations), Garber will now be classified as a “gestural” abstractionist. Contemporary gestural painters are regarded as the at-least practical, and optimally spiritual, inheritors of the abstract expressionists, and Garber clearly evinces the legacy of De Kooning, Kline, Mitchell, Resnick, Guston, Pousette-Dart, Krasner, Goldberg, and even Pollock. But her painting is driven not by the aspirations professed by the abstract expressionists, much less the popular (mis)conception of their goals, but by their methods and the palpable results of their practice. That is, Garber concentrates on all that is urban, modern, physical and reasoned in abstract expressionist painting and has left to the viewer the discernment of “expression” per se; emotion is at best merely a by-product of her approach to painting – the emotions we feel on viewing these paintings are ours, not hers – and the “gesture” is not a dramatic act but a formal unit, the basic building block of Garber’s abstractions.

To be sure, these paintings are full of heat and passion. But this passion issues not from meaning, but from being: if the visceral sensation conveyed by these works resembles that of any other artistic medium, that other medium is not theater, but dance, a physical rather than discursive modality. However pictorial any of these canvases might be (and many do admit imagistic associations), they all inevitably awaken somatic and kinesthetic responses. Rather than depict the human presence, these paintings at once embody it and remember it, every mark a record of its own making – and its own devising.

However inevitably attributed, the “gestural” label is misleading in its inference of rational abandonment. Garber does not slash and slather her way through these paintings; rather, every brushstroke she lays down results as much from exacting calculation as it does from spontaneous attack. While she has no exact prefiguration in mind when she starts a painting, Garber sets out with a sense of what the painting’s formal components are to be, components that present themselves as the structural and even imagistic fundaments of the painting. And note that, in all cases, Garber has constrained the selection of those components, those linear (or, less commonly, clotted or pooled) strokes, to a few choice shapes and colors. She weaves these components together into mats of rhythmically recurring incident, loosely determined patterns which pulse through what otherwise seem inchoate, impenetrable forests of paint.

The use of the term “forests” here is advisable, as Garber’s aesthetic resonates at least as much with the rhythm and density of cities as it does with that of nature. If anything, she finds in these works a point of analogy between natural and social aggregation, between the agitation of city life and the energy of the biosphere at its richest. Neither metropolis nor jungle evidences overtly in Garber’s art, of course, but both can be imagined in the tangle and throb that constitute these large canvases, paintings that could impose themselves upon us but instead envelop us, swallowing us whole because they make us feel as though we were already in them. (In this, Garber conjures not only the abstract expressionists, but earlier American abstractionists such as Mark Tobey and John Marin.)

It should be noted as well that, having painted abstractly for a relatively brief time, Garber has already generated several discrete bodies of non-objective work. All of them conform loosely to the above description, but distinguish themselves from one another in the variation Garber effects on her modus operandi, exploring markedly different formats and structures in a lively struggle against the formulaic. As a result, consistent as it is, Garber’s abstract oeuvre is remarkably light on repetition. The most striking departure Garber takes in those abstractions alternate from her basic approach is in what could be called her partial recourse to imagery. As opposed to the dense, expansive, all-over compositions now comprising the leading edge of her abstract work, Garber’s alternative approaches propose the kinds of figure-ground contrasts that infer pictorial presence. One group, for example, separates an unvariegated, monochromatic area from a larger, highly variegated one with a strictly described horizontal – in effect, horizon – line. The painterly incident in the larger section below the horizontal boundary, in fact, shrinks in size as it moves up towards the line, seeming thus to “recede” towards the horizon. Especially given the dour palette Garber has employed here, the effect is one of a flat landscape barren in winter, or perhaps more permanently devastated by some sort of catastrophe. Garber has expressed deep admiration for the blasted panoramas of Anselm Kiefer, and these paintings of hers evince that appreciation most clearly.

The raw threnody of Kiefer’s paintings reverberates as well through Garber’s other abstract diversions, these less readily associated with, if no less metaphorically tied to, real-life imagery. The gray, modulated color of her landscape-like works appears as well in a series of cascades, veils of clotted, thickly painted strokes that descend into an otherwise indistinct space. This descent is noisy, steady but uneven, less a rain than a hail of coarse “objects,” pouring from what is less a cloud than a clump of stuff – perhaps not a rainstorm but a vast clot of ocean-borne detritus, seen from below as it slowly disintegrates. The image is gritty, ferocious, and sad, well removed from the agreeable bustle of the all-over paintings. Closer in spirit – and manner – to the all-over works are paintings that seem built up around emphatically articulated armatures, powerfully described black lines around which the brushstrokes – the broadest and longest in Garber’s abstract oeuvre – dispose themselves. The arrays of lines and strokes at once describe and obscure a figure-ground relationship, suggesting the shattered, shallow space of cubism. Indeed, Garber’s monumental arrangements recall the painterly cubist trees Mondrian realized in Paris shortly before the outbreak of the First World War. Even more, however, these handsome formulations, at once fleshy and skeletal, recall certain European abstraction of the years following World War II, when the rubble of devastated cities inspired in various ways the nervous quasi-architectural fantasies of Hartung, Soulages, Vieira da Silva, Constant, and other informel and CoBrA painters.

The European painters of the 1950s took a more self-consciously pictorial approach to their abstraction than did their abstract expressionist counterparts in America; similarly, Garber’s paintings in this vein are more self-consciously “pictorial” than are her all-over abstractions. But her two bodies of work clearly cross-influence each other, even beyond those characteristics native to her approach overall, and can be understood as her attempt not simply to embrace the scope of postwar abstraction, but to resolve the tensions and differences that linger from that era. Of course, Garber is not simply seeking to settle half-century-old aesthetic arguments, but to re-examine their relevance and their potency in the light of current artistic practice. Indeed, by reverting to abstraction at a time when the kind of narrative and portrait painting she was doing barely a couple of years ago is in the ascendancy, Garber is critiquing the overall role and practice of the artist in contemporary society. Trained in the most classical, traditional, academic manner recently available to an art student in the United States, Garber always derived strength and inspiration from abstract painting no less than from representational. She knew herself early on as a painter first, a maker of pictures only afterward. In this light, Garber not only feels no compulsion to distinguish between the substance of figuration and the substance of abstraction, she feels compelled as a painter to demonstrate the connection, even the indistinction, between the two in actual practice. She exploits the two modes to different visual and expressive ends, but that’s the point: abstraction and representation are not antagonistic positions, but complementary ones.

Ultimately, by turning to abstraction – a profession of fealty to painting itself – Helen Garber asserts the unique quality/qualities of painting at a time when our visual world is being shaped by digital rather than analog means. To paint in the context of the computer-mediated world is to provide literal substance where only approximation is otherwise available – to afford actual experience in the face of virtual reality. Garber could likely compose the pictures she composes in an imaging program, but she could not produce works like these whose power comes from the viewer’s one-on-one apprehension of texture, color, density, and scale. There is no projection involved in these tumultuous, gripping battlefields of pure paint: you are there.

Los Angeles
September 2009