John Reynolds
A Diptych of Triptychs

Text © Laurence Simmons 2012

Twilight of the Idols (1992)

graphite, oilstick and acrylic on three wooden panels
title inscribed, signed and dated 1992
2440mm x 3600mmIn

Turin on 3rd January, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of number six, Via Carlo Alberto. Not far from him, near Piazza Carignano, the driver of a hansom cab is having trouble with a stubborn horse. Despite all his urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon the driver loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche comes up to the throng and puts an end to the brutal scene, throwing his arms around the horse's neck, sobbing. His landlord takes him home, he lies motionless and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words, and lives for another ten years, silent and demented, cared for by his mother and sisters. Just before this incident Nietzsche published a book, Twilight of the Idols, he had written in just over a week during the summer of the previous year, the final year of his sanity. It would be the last book that he saw into print and was in many ways a summary of all the ones that preceded it. Its title in German, Götzendämmerung, is an indirect parody of Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) the title of the last opera in Wagner's Ring cycle, an opera about the end of the reign of the gods. Dämmerung, like its English translation 'twilight, refers to the time between the dark and the light of the day. Where there is no indication of which comes after which. Twilight, during which sunlight scattering in the upper atmosphere illuminates the lower, and the surface of the earth is neither completely lit nor completely dark, marks the time between what came before and the beginning of what comes after.

In the first section of his book, 'Epigrams and Arrows, Nietzsche expresses hostility towards and distrust of all systematisation, the desire that everything should fit together: "I mistrust all systematisers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity." Epigram is derived from the Greek epigraphein to write on, inscribe votive offerings at sanctuaries. John Reynolds is a master of the epigram; he has produced diverse series of small 10x10 cm canvases of pillaged maxims, repeated clichés, street slang, fashion jargon, medical acronyms, child-speak... See, for example, Acronyms, etc., New Idea and One Hand Read. But the larger argument may be that all his painting of the last twenty years is epigrammatic. To understand an epigram one must take it inside oneself, allow it to resonate, so that it can be turned over from within. Epigrams do not dominate their readers, one is touched by them, something stirs. The epigram presents itself as the answer to which we do not know the question. Full of allusive reticence and concealment, it allows us to broach problems rather than solve them and contains a resonant meaning, which is in the musical sense contrapuntal, juxtaposing subject matter rather than resolving it. It tempts the viewer with an apparent consonance only to shift over into another dissonance. The most famous epigram from Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols is "Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.

"I want to propose that Reynolds' Twilight of the Idols is a unification of dissonant themes that draws upon a classical style of drawing (highly conscious of its own form) while subverting it through the abstract gestures of painting. The proposition is that Reynolds is at war with himself, in the thick of a fight between drawing and painting. His surfaces are palimpsests of unruly line, drawing incident together with washes of painterly gesture. They involve the attempted eradication of gestural abstraction in favour of pictographic and calligraphic accretion. For Reynolds, the mark of real drawing is a constant provocation; it is always a clumsiness because it is a form of hospitality and openness to what is being drawn. Reynolds seldom makes preliminary drawings for he draws directly on his ground or the canvas. The drawing includes a mastery of space, of proportion, but always against the washy murkiness of the painted, abstracted ground. In a process of unconcealment the drawn line emerges as if precipitated through darkness like an X-ray. Yet there is little of linear, we might call it drawn, logic in Reynolds' paintings. If his paintings convince, and I think Twilight of the Idols does, they do so because the details, the separate parts, emerge and come out to encounter the eye. Nevertheless, the dislocations in Reynolds' paintings are not demonstrative; they are almost furtive. Something else, something almost antithetical to real drawn space, interests him. He gives to his depicted objects - in this case, a chrysanthemum, knots and swirling motifs from The Book of Kells, celtic spirals, medieval marginalia, Leonardo da Vinci's late drawings of floods and deluges - a special power of narration. So that his painting then speaks with different voices - like a story being told by several people from different points of view, and in so doing makes a space for his viewer. Reynolds' best paintings deliver coherently very little to the spectator's point of view. Instead the spectator overhears dialogues between parts of the composition seemingly gone adrift. The trajectory played out here is the long one between the prehistory of human mark-making: primordial scratches and incisions - scribble, doodle and scrawl - through the rhythmic dexterities that generate calligraphy to the gestural disarray of a murky black washed ground. In a similar fashion, Nietzsche takes a proverb, a homily or epigram - such as all truth is simple' - and displaces it slightly, gives it a new twist so as to debunk it: "All truth is simple.' - Is that not a compound lie?" he rectifies. There are idols that Nietzsche and Reynolds are out to unseat.

The first sentence of Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols sets up an opposition between the gloomy and the cheerful, which opens out into a broader textual metaphorics of darkness and light (a black question mark, shadow and sunshine). Nietzsche declares he wishes his book to encompass a "revaluation of all values, this question mark so black, so monstrous that it casts a shadow on the one who poses it - such a fateful task forces one to run out into the sun at every moment, to shake off a heavy seriousness that has become all too heavy." From a sunny and vital noonday to a pallid, tremulous, evening twilight, from the muscular to the crepuscular. The first panel of Reynolds' Twilight of the Idols addresses the crepuscular with similar long lanky curving question marks, "so black, so monstrous..." Then it gives way to the ethereal light of the agitated, graphic flower at its centre and returns with its carefully crafted graphite circles to signs of prior violence and potential undoing that are submerged amidst the complex layers of the ground, the perception of pending destruction. The latency of threat froths and whirls unrest from the painting's depths. The contingency and mutability, the vulnerability of what one senses as beautiful, is crucial to the impact of the work but that is subtly but surely upset by the intimated insurrection of a power pushing up from underneath.

Twilight of the Idols also represents a return to and a transformation of the aesthetic principles of Nietzsche's early writings according to which artistic creation depends on a tension between two opposing forces, which Nietzsche terms the 'Apollonian' and the 'Dionysian. Apollo is the Greek god of light and reason, and Nietzsche identifies the Apollonian as a life- and form-giving force, characterised by measured restraint and detachment, which reinforces a strong sense of self. Dionysus is the Greek god of wine and music, and Nietzsche identifies the Dionysian as a frenzy of self-forgetting in which the self gives way to a primal unity where individuals are at one with others and with nature. Both the Apollonian and the Dionysian are necessary in the creation of art. Without the Apollonian, the Dionysian lacks the form and structure to make a coherent piece of art, and without the Dionysian, the Apollonian lacks the necessary vitality and passion. Although they are diametrically opposed, they are also intimately intertwined. Reynolds' paintings do indeed initiate and enact such an arc.

In the centre of this painting, playing a starring role, is a fantastic dance of whirling and looping, a scribbly mass and filigree of lines racing like lightning across its anchoring scrims, which, as we have learned, manage to be both a veil and a plane of disclosure. Reynolds' bouquet is anything but decorative, it is a stylisation, a child-like ideogram drawn in a loopy freehand, the sort that sketches blind with a kind of pre-calligraphy. Looping and tatted, a spider's web of dropped stitches. A reference also, perhaps, to the craquelure often found on ceramics or the cracked oils of old masters, inferring transience, delicacy and a hyperesthesia. A showy bloom, balled at the outset but opening with a splendid burst, chrysanthemums die messily as their full-blown petals fall. These flowers are not decorative, nor are they derived from painting still-lifes. They are gestural, crude, imparting always something of the wild, invested with suggestions of mortality and violence. Importantly, Reynolds' image does not depict the chrysanthemum's beauty; rather, it emphasises its destruction. Its representation for the artist involves both a challenging beauty and the vanity of its ignominious end. Among the antecedents of Reynolds' floral tribute are the nymphaés of Monet, the peonies of Twombly, the sunflowers of van Gogh. But Reynolds' flowery maelstrom specifically invokes Mondrian's studies of chrysanthemums, which come to Reynolds via McCahon, and are a pool of reference at which he has long slaked his thirst. There is in this composition another direct reference to McCahon that of the rectangle of silver white that runs up the right-hand panel edge. The plangency of its other-worldly silver shimmer recalling McCahon's Angels and Bed and the elemental connection of both painters to white and black. Reynolds scraps playfully with his artistic predecessor. As he does with his own ethnic identity in the runic gravity, like petroglyphs, of the celtic signs of filled-in graphite that are densely worked, oddly gluggy yet marvellously refractive in the side-light. Their intransigence encompasses the melancholy poetry of Nietzsche's apothem: "I want, once and for all, not to know many things.

"Nevertheless, Reynolds' Twilight of the Idols has its own air-conditioning system. Little white, red and deep pink circles, a chaotically vivacious swarm of air bubbles, erupt and stream upwards in linear formations, like tiny stars punctuating the twilight firmament. These breath-encased bubbles of illusions drift through space and vanish into dark nothingness in the end. In their hectic, frothy chatter they serve as morphological metaphors to investigate the formation of our inner worlds. Repetitive bubbles of raw energy, self-blown bubbles of illusions. As the bubbles drift upwards they also do pneumatic work and aerate a narrative across the triptych panels. We can read the lineaments of a story as if naturally from the left to right, top to bottom, with a passage of the eye that we know well from the written page. In the first panel the three red and three blue larger circles send our eyes dancing across the dark, erupting movement of the surface - curling and coiling, rolling forms, compacted question marks drifting on the open surface, fatefully present. Paint flows down in rivulets and draws our sunken gaze up again, onto the picture plane. The second movement of the central panel is dominated by the chrysanthemum preserved, as already noted, by its cultural memory in artistic tradition. It is the agent of effort in the work, falling apart centripetally but also acting as centrifuge. For a moment the movement across the triptych is reversed as a flurry of lines spew out and down from right to left below the flower - a da Vincian deluge. Flowing in great sweeps as if sucking the unrest out of the painting's black ground. In the third and last panel it is as if the narrative of the painting is almost 'rolled on' by the graphite circular symbols to then become closed off by the interception of a mysterious liminal rectangle, a sentinel posted at the extreme right-hand edge. For Reynolds, the energy of the painting emerges, unfolds, subjects its material to passages and obstacles, endures conflict and destruction, and comes to rest in a form of completion. One of the most distinctive features of Nietzsche's style in Twilight of the Idols is the welter of dashes and dots with which he chooses to 'link' his ideas. For all his excessive bombast (exclamation marks abound!), his ideas are articulated by Gedankenstrische (thought dashes') which call on the reader to bridge the gaps, leaving it to the reader to complete the sense. Reynolds uses the same dashes (elsewhere very literally) and cultivates a similar non-closure through a paratactic, elliptical style, full of dashes and question marks, As if he were signalling to his viewer in a kind of parodic Morse code.

Is there not, Alenka Zupancic has asked, a striking parallel between the megalomania of Nietzsche's delirium, his sobbing embrace of the Turin horse, and the discourse introduced by modern art? Is Nietzsche not a timely contemporary? For some even a postmodernist avant la lettre. If we think of Nietzsche as an 'anti-philosopher' is Reynolds an 'anti-painter"? Anti- not in the sense of an opposition to philosophy (or to painting) but a seeking after the limits, the inherent impossibility, of a possible discourse (philosophical or artistic). Reynolds seeks the reaffirmation of the rhetorical stance of classical painting through an antithetical means (drawing) that paradoxically subverts the declarative nature of the parent style. His Twilight of the Idols contains a deft hand of cunning and self-chastisement at one go; a hand that admits and rejects suppleness - one marked by a blunt elegance but does not belie the innate grace and felicity of the pictorial gesture. Reynolds is the master of almost imageless calligraphy and his paintings recall 'the scene of writing' described by Jacques Derrida: a palimpsest of traces on which every mark is always already a transcription, the archive of its own event. For these marks are and are not quite like writing. Instead, it is the field of drawing that is worked and reworked - scratched, smudged, and incompetently erased, so that each past action remains compressed on its surface. Despite, and because of, the paint, it is undoubtedly drawing that is at stake here; the paint washes function as ground to be inscribed rather than covered. Each line is scuffed and broken by the friction of the graphite or oil-stick against the surface. The details of the painting emerge rising to the surface from the depths, half obscure. This is a painting to swim and seethe in. The Flemish term for such pictures was swarming pictures (wimme-beelden) in which disparate details bob together in antic hedonism. There is no winning side in this battle. Like Nietzsche, Reynolds reopens and makes these topics start up again, and the event of his painting is immanent to what it revolutionises or subverts. Nietzsche's 'madness', as Maurice Blanchot noted, is altogether unique, in seeking, through reason, to affirm eternal recurrence. Nietzsche is 'mad' because his language cannot capture, or express such a thought. How can he refer in a language that suffers the consequences of time to another language that might be removed from the ordinary forms of temporality? How can he express something, asks Blanchot, "in which the formulation of the return has always already engaged him"?

Laurence Simmons‍

Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophise with a Hammer, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Alenka Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).

Kepler's Dream (2012)

silver marker pen, acrylic and rainwater on three canvas panels
title inscribed, signed and dated 2012
2440mm × 3600mm

Around 1611, Johannes Kepler, one of the world's greatest mathematicians and astronomers, circulates a manuscript of what would eventually be published (posthumously) as Somnium (The Dream). Part of the purpose of Somnium was to describe what practising astronomy would be like from the perspective of another planet, to show the feasibility of a non-geocentric system of the universe. The manuscript, which disappeared after changing hands several times, described a fantastic trip to the moon; it was part allegory, part autobiography, and part treatise on interplanetary travel (and was described by Kepler's biographer Arthur Koestler as "the first work of science fiction"). Years later, a distorted version of the story may have instigated a witchcraft trial against Kepler's mother, as the mother of the narrator of Somnium consults a demon to learn the means of space travel. Beginning in August 1620 Kepler's mother was taken away in the middle of the night in a laundry chest and imprisoned for fourteen months as a witch. She was released thanks in part to the extensive legal defense drawn up by Kepler. Following her eventual acquittal, a defensive Kepler composed 223 footnotes to his text The Dream - several times longer than the actual text - which carefully explained the allegorical aspects as well as the considerable scientific content (particularly speculations regarding lunar geography and climate) hidden within the volume.

Kepler's biographer, Koestier, paints the picture of a man astride the crest of a great 'watershed' in Western intellectual history: on the one side is the medieval world where science is dominated by religion and the teachings of the ancient Greeks; on the other side is the modern world in which science finally becomes a discipline unto itself. Kepler leans one way, then the other; but he can never quite extricate himself from the medieval mentality of the times (astrology) and cross over onto the plain of modern thought (astronomy). The Somnium is itself a watershed, a twilight work, for it marks both the end of an old era and the beginning of a new one, it is an imaginative modern work anchored in fact and rich in rational scientific theory. Astronomia nova was the title of another of Kepler's works. If Kepler's little fictional work was to be overlooked by historians of science for over three and a half centuries, later writers of cosmic voyages in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries did not make the same mistake. The Somnium was known to Jules Verne, Samuel Butler, H.G. Wells, and such contemporary writers of science fiction as Arthur C. Clarke. For them Kepler opened the way for a new vision of the universe as the home of a plurality of worlds.

Kepler's 1593 university dissertation - the germ for the Somnium, which he would work on throughout his life - bore the title 'How do the Heavens appear to a Man located on the Moon?' The central thesis posed by Kepler is that the Earth does rotate and if we were to place an 'observer' on the Moon he would see the earth waxing and waning in the sky as we on Earth observe the Moon does. This image of the waxing and waning of the Earth in the Moon's sky is created and sustained by the means of Copernican theory, a unique mixture of physics and fantasy. Its form reflects the early evolving definitions of science and fiction. "I hold the world to be a manifestation of the possibility of order," declared Kepler and his call for a 'celestial geometry might seem the very opposite of Nietzsche's admiration for disorder. But the Somnium is an attempt to give figurative substance to the visualisation of the universe, as something both rationally conceivable and quantifiable, while making use of a fictional vehicle. Furthermore, in Kepler's text his fictional narrator recounts a dream in which there appears a book the contents of which are recounted by its own first-person fictional narrator who is listening to another first-person fictional narrator who is telling him about the Moon. By its very structure therefore the Somnium falls into itself. It exists as a series of concentric circles that critics call mise-en-abyme. Like nesting Russian matryoshka dolls, in the outer circle are Kepler's scientific notes (a total of 223); the next circle contains the narrative account of the dream by narrator 1; inside this circle we encounter the manuscript of Narrator 2 which relates the tale of Narrator 3 who reveals the truth about the Moon. These revelations are then worked upon by Kepler to produce his apparatus of scientific and critical notes, thus linking the innermost circle back with the outermost. By fable the new (scientific) knowledge is given acceptable substance.

How do we experience the marks of Reynolds' homage, his Kepler's Dream? It is full of hooks and barbs, hyphens and ellipses, resistors and capacitors, mysterious circuit switchers. "In my treatise there are as many problems as lines, declared Kepler, We experience the painting as a collection of marks and as a manifestation of ongoing coherence. Reynolds marks, falling from top to bottom, both differentiate and tie things together and thus are examples of what Gilles Deleuze described as the importance of the 'and'. "The And" he wrote, "is neither the one nor the other, it is always between the two, it is the boundary, there is always a boundary, a vanishing trace or flow, only we don't see it because it is scarcely visible. And yet it is along this vanishing trace or flow that things happen." The vertically aligned signs mark but also bridge the gap between the painting's individual panels. The diverse marks (dots, dashes, hooks, capital Ts, cruciforms, open rectangles) on the pictorial field invite viewers to observe them as individual events, that is, from up close they retain a chaotic independence from each other. From a greater distance, the individual marks acquire a visual context. The barbs of Reynolds' hooks begin to dance excitedly across the painting surface. Our attention is further captured by the gatherings of branch-like symbols - pectiforms (eyelashes), claviforms (clubs), flabelliforms (tufts of grass), penniforms: (branches with fronds), tectiforms (hut-like entities) - that Reynolds has borrowed from the cave art at Chauvet and Lascaux, which is thought to be more than thirty thousand years old. With these specific and repeated painted signs investigators now believe that our Paleolithic ancestors were attempting a form of written language twenty-five thousand years earlier than was previously thought. The painted ground to which all of Reynolds drawn marks are related equally does not appear as something passive or dead, but, on the contrary in its effusive dripping and swirling, something that activates the circuits and synapses of the drawn marks. This leads to the paradox that the individual marks are applied on the picture's surface but their pictorial effect is nevertheless based on the fact that they spring forth from an undefined ground. Reynolds' Prussian blue twilight sky background is a thin acrylic applied so that fluid drips, and veiled flows of colour interrupt and cover the broad surfaces. The surface figures and grounds blend and unify the plane, and the dripping veils also serve to disguise the seams between each successive panel. The painted ground promises transcendence or sublime experience, both terrestrial twilight and the spongy blackness of deep space.

At the heart of Kepler's Somnium is the complex allegorical figure of the Daemon narrator, simultaneously evocative of the scientific and the supernatural, synthesising science and magic. The Daemon derived from daiein, meaning 'to know" suggests Kepler) is the site and the embodiment of the competing forces that inform Kepler's attempt to understand the shape and the order of the cosmos. According to art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl, the 'daemon' is "the great and secret (because practically indescribable) theme of modern art." For daemon, the dictionary offers "a subordinate deity, as the genius of place or our attendant spirit." Modern daemonism, says Schjeldahl, is "the secular revelation of impersonal activities that are experienced in the intense activity of, apparently, nothing." In Reynolds' work, nothing is quite subjective or quite. objective, though everything seems ordered by some mastering comprehension. However, this comprehension - like the Keplerian "daemon' - is extremely unreassuring. As noted, Reynolds' impudent deeds of artistic vandalism, performed on painting by drawing, have ended up in and as painting. He has shown that painting can absorb and trap the force of every repeated blow against it. This is the basis of my conviction of his daemonic seriousness. This is why we can say that Reynolds' art, like Kepler's (science-fictional) treatise, involves an art of the daemonic. It is in the nature of the daemonic artist to awaken a sense of conviction, of being in the presence of things self-evidently true, and most particularly to put this sense to serious tests. What the daemonic enacts and counteracts is the disintegration of the self in a hypertrophic culture. Kepler's Dream is thus an intimate treatment of the largest possible subject. The shapelessness of our postmodern world tells us that we have lost our sense of the past, that we have ruptured all traditions, but in Reynolds we have a learned painter - and a learned painting - one who connects us, with a certain melancholy secondariness, back to our traditions, back even to the handiwork of Stone Age predecessors. In such a way that the viewer of painting finds a new regard for the mark, a new assessment of the illustrative, a new sense of colour. The sequence of mark making itself is replete and shows a drive towards a beauty of inexhaustibility. As Leigh Davis once insisted, "You cannot see Reynolds painting fully until you see it as stubbornly and diligently old fashioned: as an activation a troublesomeness, a roaring - in traditional painting's time-honoured skin." With the stately initiation of a procession we journey across the night sky of Kepler's Dream in a trepidation of impasse and destabilisation. The fate of this effort of storytelling, the drive to make a narrative possible inside a painting, sometimes between paintings set in a series, but most often within the details of a single work, is one of Reynolds lasting subjects. Similarly, Kepler's continuous writing of his Somnium never absolved him from the creation of a new universe made through observation, conjecture, and imagination.

Reynolds' creation of Kepler's Dream and its current display opposite his Twilight of the Idols recapitulating as it does two decades of his painting, was a perilous undertaking, it might have marked some kind of terminus, even a tombstone. But the terms in which this work is cast, its rhetoric of dreaming, enable the artist to slip out from under the net of identifications imposed by his allusions and his reading. His battle between drawing and painting, between a bookish appetite and the visual sensuality of painting, becomes the battle of making art. For all the poetical allusiveness, Reynolds' work in both cases addresses touch not subject. The brush motions of their inky grounds including the drip and the sweep, the operations of the pencil, the drag of the oilstick, arid or viscous, the sense of the ground, board or canvas, the instrumentalisation of chance and orchestration of space, the hesitant tremble of the stuttering hand, the momentary atmospheric blush of overt subject matter. The impulsive line in Reynolds' painting has often been compared to children's drawings but it represents a return to the archaic rather than the infantile, to that distant proto-language of Chauvet and Lascaux. Reynolds' line dances stammering across his three panels in a punchy staccato, but it is also broken by each up-and-down alignment in which we delight in the pure vagrancies of the connections. The layered surface is a tissue of lines, drips and smudges, rain-watered-down pigment coursing in rivulets. The silver lines because they urge us to read up and down are like Chinese calligraphy. But like Twilight of the Idols, Reynolds' work investigates both the production and effacement of the trace, painting's self-mirroring back to itself in its mise-en-abyme.

We have discovered Reynolds' painting doing battle with itself, the graphic centre of these works wrestle with their brushstrokes; paint, gestural brushwork, even rainwater, graphite, marker pen, drawing become one and the same; eliding the distinction between drawing and painting. The surface of Kepler's Dream grows intercalated as veils of paint and silver enamel paint marker cascade down its surface. All artists, and writers, rifle their pasts. In Kepler's Dream Reynolds ransacks his lexicon of imagery with refreshed abandon. Here again is Mondrian and this time it is a reference to his abstracted seascapes. We are present at the discovery of painting's past as it is being painted into the future. The disjuncture between the titular allusions of Reynolds paintings (to Nietzsche and Kepler) and the visual disarray of marks and signs that accompany them is part of Reynolds' aesthetic of dissonance, a dissonant allusiveness that both provokes and repels interpretation. Reynolds use of literary referents, here Nietzsche and Kepler, is curious because the referent is not subject, as in subject matter, Reynolds does not illustrate Nietzsche or Kepler (despite the inclusion of some of Kepler's mathematical drawings, his geocentric motions of Mars, hexagonal symmetry of snowflakes, a horoscope for General Wallenstein, and the constellation of Sagittarius), nor is his subject iconographic:
the mere identification of visual content, the inky night sky. There is no proprietary defensiveness or pious solemnity over textually decreed standards of reference. Rather Reynolds' referentiality is demonstrative, a sort of flirting with his referents, a playful come-on full of irony and double-entendres. It breaks the rules of iconographical etiquette with a stealthy rubbing up against the other subject, a flicking of the hair, furtive crossing of glances and feigned disinterest. A daemonic shamanism.

This exhibition doubles the fear of powerlessness to succeed or repeat past successes. Like all of Reynolds' large-scale achievements, these two works spanning twenty years appear in equal parts controlled and uncontrolled. What is remarkable is that while commanding and imposing, they are also tentative and languorous. Reynolds' present is most certainly indebted to his past, but there can be no doubt that he continues to reinvent the possibilities of his art. He has been challenged from the beginning of his career, often and unfavourably, with producing work that is too decorative. At the same time, his work has been consistently attacked for being too messy and disordered, too transgressive, just plain scribble. In reality he has alternately and consistently laid claim to both characterisations: monochromatic and colourful; drawn and painted; rough and refined; recalcitrant and effusive; scratched and splashed. All of Reynolds work, twenty years ago and now, depends on an anxious, unstable, sensuous line, at times in the form of graphic marking and at other times in the form of fluid painterly gesture. He has struggled to make his statements in painting assert and question themselves at the same time. His ability to draw his creative energy from the opposing impulses of Apollonian restraint and Dionysian excess remains at the core of his practice. If I am right and Reynolds' entire oeuvre has been produced under the aegis of the conflation of excess and restraint, Apollo and Dionysius, drawing and painting, then his is a kind of painting that always dies and must be recommenced again, a painting simultaneously embracing and dismantling its own past.
‍
Laurence Simmons

Leigh Davis, 'Country and Western (2002)' at http://www.jackbooks.com
Gilles Deleuze, 'Three Ouestions on Six Times Two' in Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
Johannes Kepler, Kepler's Somnium, The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy, trans.
Edward Rosen (Milwaukee and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967).
Arthur Koestler, The Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler (New York Doubleday, 1960).
Peter Schjeldahl, "The Daemon and Sigmar Polke in The Hydrogen lukebor Selected Writings 1978-1990 (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1991).

Twilight of
the Idols

(1992)


graphite, oilstick and acrylic on three wooden panels
title inscribed, signed and dated 1992
2440mm x 3600mmIn

Turin on 3rd January, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche steps out of the doorway of number six, Via Carlo Alberto. Not far from him, near Piazza Carignano, the driver of a hansom cab is having trouble with a stubborn horse. Despite all his urging, the horse refuses to move, whereupon the driver loses his patience and takes his whip to it. Nietzsche comes up to the throng and puts an end to the brutal scene, throwing his arms around the horse's neck, sobbing. His landlord takes him home, he lies motionless and silent for two days on a divan until he mutters the obligatory last words, and lives for another ten years, silent and demented, cared for by his mother and sisters. Just before this incident Nietzsche published a book, Twilight of the Idols, he had written in just over a week during the summer of the previous year, the final year of his sanity. It would be the last book that he saw into print and was in many ways a summary of all the ones that preceded it. Its title in German, Götzendämmerung, is an indirect parody of Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) the title of the last opera in Wagner's Ring cycle, an opera about the end of the reign of the gods. Dämmerung, like its English translation 'twilight, refers to the time between the dark and the light of the day. Where there is no indication of which comes after which. Twilight, during which sunlight scattering in the upper atmosphere illuminates the lower, and the surface of the earth is neither completely lit nor completely dark, marks the time between what came before and the beginning of what comes after.

In the first section of his book, 'Epigrams and Arrows, Nietzsche expresses hostility towards and distrust of all systematisation, the desire that everything should fit together: "I mistrust all systematisers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity." Epigram is derived from the Greek epigraphein to write on, inscribe votive offerings at sanctuaries. John Reynolds is a master of the epigram; he has produced diverse series of small 10x10 cm canvases of pillaged maxims, repeated clichés, street slang, fashion jargon, medical acronyms, child-speak... See, for example, Acronyms, etc., New Idea and One Hand Read. But the larger argument may be that all his painting of the last twenty years is epigrammatic. To understand an epigram one must take it inside oneself, allow it to resonate, so that it can be turned over from within. Epigrams do not dominate their readers, one is touched by them, something stirs. The epigram presents itself as the answer to which we do not know the question. Full of allusive reticence and concealment, it allows us to broach problems rather than solve them and contains a resonant meaning, which is in the musical sense contrapuntal, juxtaposing subject matter rather than resolving it. It tempts the viewer with an apparent consonance only to shift over into another dissonance. The most famous epigram from Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols is "Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger.

"I want to propose that Reynolds' Twilight of the Idols is a unification of dissonant themes that draws upon a classical style of drawing (highly conscious of its own form) while subverting it through the abstract gestures of painting. The proposition is that Reynolds is at war with himself, in the thick of a fight between drawing and painting. His surfaces are palimpsests of unruly line, drawing incident together with washes of painterly gesture. They involve the attempted eradication of gestural abstraction in favour of pictographic and calligraphic accretion. For Reynolds, the mark of real drawing is a constant provocation; it is always a clumsiness because it is a form of hospitality and openness to what is being drawn. Reynolds seldom makes preliminary drawings for he draws directly on his ground or the canvas. The drawing includes a mastery of space, of proportion, but always against the washy murkiness of the painted, abstracted ground. In a process of unconcealment the drawn line emerges as if precipitated through darkness like an X-ray. Yet there is little of linear, we might call it drawn, logic in Reynolds' paintings. If his paintings convince, and I think Twilight of the Idols does, they do so because the details, the separate parts, emerge and come out to encounter the eye. Nevertheless, the dislocations in Reynolds' paintings are not demonstrative; they are almost furtive. Something else, something almost antithetical to real drawn space, interests him. He gives to his depicted objects - in this case, a chrysanthemum, knots and swirling motifs from The Book of Kells, celtic spirals, medieval marginalia, Leonardo da Vinci's late drawings of floods and deluges - a special power of narration. So that his painting then speaks with different voices - like a story being told by several people from different points of view, and in so doing makes a space for his viewer. Reynolds' best paintings deliver coherently very little to the spectator's point of view. Instead the spectator overhears dialogues between parts of the composition seemingly gone adrift. The trajectory played out here is the long one between the prehistory of human mark-making: primordial scratches and incisions - scribble, doodle and scrawl - through the rhythmic dexterities that generate calligraphy to the gestural disarray of a murky black washed ground. In a similar fashion, Nietzsche takes a proverb, a homily or epigram - such as all truth is simple' - and displaces it slightly, gives it a new twist so as to debunk it: "All truth is simple.' - Is that not a compound lie?" he rectifies. There are idols that Nietzsche and Reynolds are out to unseat.

The first sentence of Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols sets up an opposition between the gloomy and the cheerful, which opens out into a broader textual metaphorics of darkness and light (a black question mark, shadow and sunshine). Nietzsche declares he wishes his book to encompass a "revaluation of all values, this question mark so black, so monstrous that it casts a shadow on the one who poses it - such a fateful task forces one to run out into the sun at every moment, to shake off a heavy seriousness that has become all too heavy." From a sunny and vital noonday to a pallid, tremulous, evening twilight, from the muscular to the crepuscular. The first panel of Reynolds' Twilight of the Idols addresses the crepuscular with similar long lanky curving question marks, "so black, so monstrous..." Then it gives way to the ethereal light of the agitated, graphic flower at its centre and returns with its carefully crafted graphite circles to signs of prior violence and potential undoing that are submerged amidst the complex layers of the ground, the perception of pending destruction. The latency of threat froths and whirls unrest from the painting's depths. The contingency and mutability, the vulnerability of what one senses as beautiful, is crucial to the impact of the work but that is subtly but surely upset by the intimated insurrection of a power pushing up from underneath.

Twilight of the Idols also represents a return to and a transformation of the aesthetic principles of Nietzsche's early writings according to which artistic creation depends on a tension between two opposing forces, which Nietzsche terms the 'Apollonian' and the 'Dionysian. Apollo is the Greek god of light and reason, and Nietzsche identifies the Apollonian as a life- and form-giving force, characterised by measured restraint and detachment, which reinforces a strong sense of self. Dionysus is the Greek god of wine and music, and Nietzsche identifies the Dionysian as a frenzy of self-forgetting in which the self gives way to a primal unity where individuals are at one with others and with nature. Both the Apollonian and the Dionysian are necessary in the creation of art. Without the Apollonian, the Dionysian lacks the form and structure to make a coherent piece of art, and without the Dionysian, the Apollonian lacks the necessary vitality and passion. Although they are diametrically opposed, they are also intimately intertwined. Reynolds' paintings do indeed initiate and enact such an arc.

In the centre of this painting, playing a starring role, is a fantastic dance of whirling and looping, a scribbly mass and filigree of lines racing like lightning across its anchoring scrims, which, as we have learned, manage to be both a veil and a plane of disclosure. Reynolds' bouquet is anything but decorative, it is a stylisation, a child-like ideogram drawn in a loopy freehand, the sort that sketches blind with a kind of pre-calligraphy. Looping and tatted, a spider's web of dropped stitches. A reference also, perhaps, to the craquelure often found on ceramics or the cracked oils of old masters, inferring transience, delicacy and a hyperesthesia. A showy bloom, balled at the outset but opening with a splendid burst, chrysanthemums die messily as their full-blown petals fall. These flowers are not decorative, nor are they derived from painting still-lifes. They are gestural, crude, imparting always something of the wild, invested with suggestions of mortality and violence. Importantly, Reynolds' image does not depict the chrysanthemum's beauty; rather, it emphasises its destruction. Its representation for the artist involves both a challenging beauty and the vanity of its ignominious end. Among the antecedents of Reynolds' floral tribute are the nymphaés of Monet, the peonies of Twombly, the sunflowers of van Gogh. But Reynolds' flowery maelstrom specifically invokes Mondrian's studies of chrysanthemums, which come to Reynolds via McCahon, and are a pool of reference at which he has long slaked his thirst. There is in this composition another direct reference to McCahon that of the rectangle of silver white that runs up the right-hand panel edge. The plangency of its other-worldly silver shimmer recalling McCahon's Angels and Bed and the elemental connection of both painters to white and black. Reynolds scraps playfully with his artistic predecessor. As he does with his own ethnic identity in the runic gravity, like petroglyphs, of the celtic signs of filled-in graphite that are densely worked, oddly gluggy yet marvellously refractive in the side-light. Their intransigence encompasses the melancholy poetry of Nietzsche's apothem: "I want, once and for all, not to know many things.

"Nevertheless, Reynolds' Twilight of the Idols has its own air-conditioning system. Little white, red and deep pink circles, a chaotically vivacious swarm of air bubbles, erupt and stream upwards in linear formations, like tiny stars punctuating the twilight firmament. These breath-encased bubbles of illusions drift through space and vanish into dark nothingness in the end. In their hectic, frothy chatter they serve as morphological metaphors to investigate the formation of our inner worlds. Repetitive bubbles of raw energy, self-blown bubbles of illusions. As the bubbles drift upwards they also do pneumatic work and aerate a narrative across the triptych panels. We can read the lineaments of a story as if naturally from the left to right, top to bottom, with a passage of the eye that we know well from the written page. In the first panel the three red and three blue larger circles send our eyes dancing across the dark, erupting movement of the surface - curling and coiling, rolling forms, compacted question marks drifting on the open surface, fatefully present. Paint flows down in rivulets and draws our sunken gaze up again, onto the picture plane. The second movement of the central panel is dominated by the chrysanthemum preserved, as already noted, by its cultural memory in artistic tradition. It is the agent of effort in the work, falling apart centripetally but also acting as centrifuge. For a moment the movement across the triptych is reversed as a flurry of lines spew out and down from right to left below the flower - a da Vincian deluge. Flowing in great sweeps as if sucking the unrest out of the painting's black ground. In the third and last panel it is as if the narrative of the painting is almost 'rolled on' by the graphite circular symbols to then become closed off by the interception of a mysterious liminal rectangle, a sentinel posted at the extreme right-hand edge. For Reynolds, the energy of the painting emerges, unfolds, subjects its material to passages and obstacles, endures conflict and destruction, and comes to rest in a form of completion. One of the most distinctive features of Nietzsche's style in Twilight of the Idols is the welter of dashes and dots with which he chooses to 'link' his ideas. For all his excessive bombast (exclamation marks abound!), his ideas are articulated by Gedankenstrische (thought dashes') which call on the reader to bridge the gaps, leaving it to the reader to complete the sense. Reynolds uses the same dashes (elsewhere very literally) and cultivates a similar non-closure through a paratactic, elliptical style, full of dashes and question marks, As if he were signalling to his viewer in a kind of parodic Morse code.

Is there not, Alenka Zupancic has asked, a striking parallel between the megalomania of Nietzsche's delirium, his sobbing embrace of the Turin horse, and the discourse introduced by modern art? Is Nietzsche not a timely contemporary? For some even a postmodernist avant la lettre. If we think of Nietzsche as an 'anti-philosopher' is Reynolds an 'anti-painter"? Anti- not in the sense of an opposition to philosophy (or to painting) but a seeking after the limits, the inherent impossibility, of a possible discourse (philosophical or artistic). Reynolds seeks the reaffirmation of the rhetorical stance of classical painting through an antithetical means (drawing) that paradoxically subverts the declarative nature of the parent style. His Twilight of the Idols contains a deft hand of cunning and self-chastisement at one go; a hand that admits and rejects suppleness - one marked by a blunt elegance but does not belie the innate grace and felicity of the pictorial gesture. Reynolds is the master of almost imageless calligraphy and his paintings recall 'the scene of writing' described by Jacques Derrida: a palimpsest of traces on which every mark is always already a transcription, the archive of its own event. For these marks are and are not quite like writing. Instead, it is the field of drawing that is worked and reworked - scratched, smudged, and incompetently erased, so that each past action remains compressed on its surface. Despite, and because of, the paint, it is undoubtedly drawing that is at stake here; the paint washes function as ground to be inscribed rather than covered. Each line is scuffed and broken by the friction of the graphite or oil-stick against the surface. The details of the painting emerge rising to the surface from the depths, half obscure. This is a painting to swim and seethe in. The Flemish term for such pictures was swarming pictures (wimme-beelden) in which disparate details bob together in antic hedonism. There is no winning side in this battle. Like Nietzsche, Reynolds reopens and makes these topics start up again, and the event of his painting is immanent to what it revolutionises or subverts. Nietzsche's 'madness', as Maurice Blanchot noted, is altogether unique, in seeking, through reason, to affirm eternal recurrence. Nietzsche is 'mad' because his language cannot capture, or express such a thought. How can he refer in a language that suffers the consequences of time to another language that might be removed from the ordinary forms of temporality? How can he express something, asks Blanchot, "in which the formulation of the return has always already engaged him"?

Laurence Simmons‍

Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992).
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophise with a Hammer, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Alenka Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003).

Kepler's Dream

(2012)


silver marker pen, acrylic and
rainwater on three canvas panels
title inscribed, signed and dated 2012
2440mm × 3600mm

Around 1611, Johannes Kepler, one of the world's greatest mathematicians and astronomers, circulates a manuscript of what would eventually be published (posthumously) as Somnium (The Dream). Part of the purpose of Somnium was to describe what practising astronomy would be like from the perspective of another planet, to show the feasibility of a non-geocentric system of the universe. The manuscript, which disappeared after changing hands several times, described a fantastic trip to the moon; it was part allegory, part autobiography, and part treatise on interplanetary travel (and was described by Kepler's biographer Arthur Koestler as "the first work of science fiction"). Years later, a distorted version of the story may have instigated a witchcraft trial against Kepler's mother, as the mother of the narrator of Somnium consults a demon to learn the means of space travel. Beginning in August 1620 Kepler's mother was taken away in the middle of the night in a laundry chest and imprisoned for fourteen months as a witch. She was released thanks in part to the extensive legal defense drawn up by Kepler. Following her eventual acquittal, a defensive Kepler composed 223 footnotes to his text The Dream - several times longer than the actual text - which carefully explained the allegorical aspects as well as the considerable scientific content (particularly speculations regarding lunar geography and climate) hidden within the volume.

Kepler's biographer, Koestier, paints the picture of a man astride the crest of a great 'watershed' in Western intellectual history: on the one side is the medieval world where science is dominated by religion and the teachings of the ancient Greeks; on the other side is the modern world in which science finally becomes a discipline unto itself. Kepler leans one way, then the other; but he can never quite extricate himself from the medieval mentality of the times (astrology) and cross over onto the plain of modern thought (astronomy). The Somnium is itself a watershed, a twilight work, for it marks both the end of an old era and the beginning of a new one, it is an imaginative modern work anchored in fact and rich in rational scientific theory. Astronomia nova was the title of another of Kepler's works. If Kepler's little fictional work was to be overlooked by historians of science for over three and a half centuries, later writers of cosmic voyages in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries did not make the same mistake. The Somnium was known to Jules Verne, Samuel Butler, H.G. Wells, and such contemporary writers of science fiction as Arthur C. Clarke. For them Kepler opened the way for a new vision of the universe as the home of a plurality of worlds.

Kepler's 1593 university dissertation - the germ for the Somnium, which he would work on throughout his life - bore the title 'How do the Heavens appear to a Man located on the Moon?' The central thesis posed by Kepler is that the Earth does rotate and if we were to place an 'observer' on the Moon he would see the earth waxing and waning in the sky as we on Earth observe the Moon does. This image of the waxing and waning of the Earth in the Moon's sky is created and sustained by the means of Copernican theory, a unique mixture of physics and fantasy. Its form reflects the early evolving definitions of science and fiction. "I hold the world to be a manifestation of the possibility of order," declared Kepler and his call for a 'celestial geometry might seem the very opposite of Nietzsche's admiration for disorder. But the Somnium is an attempt to give figurative substance to the visualisation of the universe, as something both rationally conceivable and quantifiable, while making use of a fictional vehicle. Furthermore, in Kepler's text his fictional narrator recounts a dream in which there appears a book the contents of which are recounted by its own first-person fictional narrator who is listening to another first-person fictional narrator who is telling him about the Moon. By its very structure therefore the Somnium falls into itself. It exists as a series of concentric circles that critics call mise-en-abyme. Like nesting Russian matryoshka dolls, in the outer circle are Kepler's scientific notes (a total of 223); the next circle contains the narrative account of the dream by narrator 1; inside this circle we encounter the manuscript of Narrator 2 which relates the tale of Narrator 3 who reveals the truth about the Moon. These revelations are then worked upon by Kepler to produce his apparatus of scientific and critical notes, thus linking the innermost circle back with the outermost. By fable the new (scientific) knowledge is given acceptable substance.

How do we experience the marks of Reynolds' homage, his Kepler's Dream? It is full of hooks and barbs, hyphens and ellipses, resistors and capacitors, mysterious circuit switchers. "In my treatise there are as many problems as lines, declared Kepler, We experience the painting as a collection of marks and as a manifestation of ongoing coherence. Reynolds marks, falling from top to bottom, both differentiate and tie things together and thus are examples of what Gilles Deleuze described as the importance of the 'and'. "The And" he wrote, "is neither the one nor the other, it is always between the two, it is the boundary, there is always a boundary, a vanishing trace or flow, only we don't see it because it is scarcely visible. And yet it is along this vanishing trace or flow that things happen." The vertically aligned signs mark but also bridge the gap between the painting's individual panels. The diverse marks (dots, dashes, hooks, capital Ts, cruciforms, open rectangles) on the pictorial field invite viewers to observe them as individual events, that is, from up close they retain a chaotic independence from each other. From a greater distance, the individual marks acquire a visual context. The barbs of Reynolds' hooks begin to dance excitedly across the painting surface. Our attention is further captured by the gatherings of branch-like symbols - pectiforms (eyelashes), claviforms (clubs), flabelliforms (tufts of grass), penniforms: (branches with fronds), tectiforms (hut-like entities) - that Reynolds has borrowed from the cave art at Chauvet and Lascaux, which is thought to be more than thirty thousand years old. With these specific and repeated painted signs investigators now believe that our Paleolithic ancestors were attempting a form of written language twenty-five thousand years earlier than was previously thought. The painted ground to which all of Reynolds drawn marks are related equally does not appear as something passive or dead, but, on the contrary in its effusive dripping and swirling, something that activates the circuits and synapses of the drawn marks. This leads to the paradox that the individual marks are applied on the picture's surface but their pictorial effect is nevertheless based on the fact that they spring forth from an undefined ground. Reynolds' Prussian blue twilight sky background is a thin acrylic applied so that fluid drips, and veiled flows of colour interrupt and cover the broad surfaces. The surface figures and grounds blend and unify the plane, and the dripping veils also serve to disguise the seams between each successive panel. The painted ground promises transcendence or sublime experience, both terrestrial twilight and the spongy blackness of deep space.

At the heart of Kepler's Somnium is the complex allegorical figure of the Daemon narrator, simultaneously evocative of the scientific and the supernatural, synthesising science and magic. The Daemon derived from daiein, meaning 'to know" suggests Kepler) is the site and the embodiment of the competing forces that inform Kepler's attempt to understand the shape and the order of the cosmos. According to art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl, the 'daemon' is "the great and secret (because practically indescribable) theme of modern art." For daemon, the dictionary offers "a subordinate deity, as the genius of place or our attendant spirit." Modern daemonism, says Schjeldahl, is "the secular revelation of impersonal activities that are experienced in the intense activity of, apparently, nothing." In Reynolds' work, nothing is quite subjective or quite. objective, though everything seems ordered by some mastering comprehension. However, this comprehension - like the Keplerian "daemon' - is extremely unreassuring. As noted, Reynolds' impudent deeds of artistic vandalism, performed on painting by drawing, have ended up in and as painting. He has shown that painting can absorb and trap the force of every repeated blow against it. This is the basis of my conviction of his daemonic seriousness. This is why we can say that Reynolds' art, like Kepler's (science-fictional) treatise, involves an art of the daemonic. It is in the nature of the daemonic artist to awaken a sense of conviction, of being in the presence of things self-evidently true, and most particularly to put this sense to serious tests. What the daemonic enacts and counteracts is the disintegration of the self in a hypertrophic culture. Kepler's Dream is thus an intimate treatment of the largest possible subject. The shapelessness of our postmodern world tells us that we have lost our sense of the past, that we have ruptured all traditions, but in Reynolds we have a learned painter - and a learned painting - one who connects us, with a certain melancholy secondariness, back to our traditions, back even to the handiwork of Stone Age predecessors. In such a way that the viewer of painting finds a new regard for the mark, a new assessment of the illustrative, a new sense of colour. The sequence of mark making itself is replete and shows a drive towards a beauty of inexhaustibility. As Leigh Davis once insisted, "You cannot see Reynolds painting fully until you see it as stubbornly and diligently old fashioned: as an activation a troublesomeness, a roaring - in traditional painting's time-honoured skin." With the stately initiation of a procession we journey across the night sky of Kepler's Dream in a trepidation of impasse and destabilisation. The fate of this effort of storytelling, the drive to make a narrative possible inside a painting, sometimes between paintings set in a series, but most often within the details of a single work, is one of Reynolds lasting subjects. Similarly, Kepler's continuous writing of his Somnium never absolved him from the creation of a new universe made through observation, conjecture, and imagination.

Reynolds' creation of Kepler's Dream and its current display opposite his Twilight of the Idols recapitulating as it does two decades of his painting, was a perilous undertaking, it might have marked some kind of terminus, even a tombstone. But the terms in which this work is cast, its rhetoric of dreaming, enable the artist to slip out from under the net of identifications imposed by his allusions and his reading. His battle between drawing and painting, between a bookish appetite and the visual sensuality of painting, becomes the battle of making art. For all the poetical allusiveness, Reynolds' work in both cases addresses touch not subject. The brush motions of their inky grounds including the drip and the sweep, the operations of the pencil, the drag of the oilstick, arid or viscous, the sense of the ground, board or canvas, the instrumentalisation of chance and orchestration of space, the hesitant tremble of the stuttering hand, the momentary atmospheric blush of overt subject matter. The impulsive line in Reynolds' painting has often been compared to children's drawings but it represents a return to the archaic rather than the infantile, to that distant proto-language of Chauvet and Lascaux. Reynolds' line dances stammering across his three panels in a punchy staccato, but it is also broken by each up-and-down alignment in which we delight in the pure vagrancies of the connections. The layered surface is a tissue of lines, drips and smudges, rain-watered-down pigment coursing in rivulets. The silver lines because they urge us to read up and down are like Chinese calligraphy. But like Twilight of the Idols, Reynolds' work investigates both the production and effacement of the trace, painting's self-mirroring back to itself in its mise-en-abyme.

We have discovered Reynolds' painting doing battle with itself, the graphic centre of these works wrestle with their brushstrokes; paint, gestural brushwork, even rainwater, graphite, marker pen, drawing become one and the same; eliding the distinction between drawing and painting. The surface of Kepler's Dream grows intercalated as veils of paint and silver enamel paint marker cascade down its surface. All artists, and writers, rifle their pasts. In Kepler's Dream Reynolds ransacks his lexicon of imagery with refreshed abandon. Here again is Mondrian and this time it is a reference to his abstracted seascapes. We are present at the discovery of painting's past as it is being painted into the future. The disjuncture between the titular allusions of Reynolds paintings (to Nietzsche and Kepler) and the visual disarray of marks and signs that accompany them is part of Reynolds' aesthetic of dissonance, a dissonant allusiveness that both provokes and repels interpretation. Reynolds use of literary referents, here Nietzsche and Kepler, is curious because the referent is not subject, as in subject matter, Reynolds does not illustrate Nietzsche or Kepler (despite the inclusion of some of Kepler's mathematical drawings, his geocentric motions of Mars, hexagonal symmetry of snowflakes, a horoscope for General Wallenstein, and the constellation of Sagittarius), nor is his subject iconographic:
the mere identification of visual content, the inky night sky. There is no proprietary defensiveness or pious solemnity over textually decreed standards of reference. Rather Reynolds' referentiality is demonstrative, a sort of flirting with his referents, a playful come-on full of irony and double-entendres. It breaks the rules of iconographical etiquette with a stealthy rubbing up against the other subject, a flicking of the hair, furtive crossing of glances and feigned disinterest. A daemonic shamanism.

This exhibition doubles the fear of powerlessness to succeed or repeat past successes. Like all of Reynolds' large-scale achievements, these two works spanning twenty years appear in equal parts controlled and uncontrolled. What is remarkable is that while commanding and imposing, they are also tentative and languorous. Reynolds' present is most certainly indebted to his past, but there can be no doubt that he continues to reinvent the possibilities of his art. He has been challenged from the beginning of his career, often and unfavourably, with producing work that is too decorative. At the same time, his work has been consistently attacked for being too messy and disordered, too transgressive, just plain scribble. In reality he has alternately and consistently laid claim to both characterisations: monochromatic and colourful; drawn and painted; rough and refined; recalcitrant and effusive; scratched and splashed. All of Reynolds work, twenty years ago and now, depends on an anxious, unstable, sensuous line, at times in the form of graphic marking and at other times in the form of fluid painterly gesture. He has struggled to make his statements in painting assert and question themselves at the same time. His ability to draw his creative energy from the opposing impulses of Apollonian restraint and Dionysian excess remains at the core of his practice. If I am right and Reynolds' entire oeuvre has been produced under the aegis of the conflation of excess and restraint, Apollo and Dionysius, drawing and painting, then his is a kind of painting that always dies and must be recommenced again, a painting simultaneously embracing and dismantling its own past.
‍
Laurence Simmons

Leigh Davis, 'Country and Western (2002)' at http://www.jackbooks.com
Gilles Deleuze, 'Three Ouestions on Six Times Two' in Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
Johannes Kepler, Kepler's Somnium, The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy, trans.
Edward Rosen (Milwaukee and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967).
Arthur Koestler, The Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler (New York Doubleday, 1960).
Peter Schjeldahl, "The Daemon and Sigmar Polke in The Hydrogen lukebor Selected Writings 1978-1990 (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1991).

© John Reynolds 2023
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© John Reynolds 2023
6 Point Press
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