Intersections

Pulling in multiple directions, John Reynolds' recent works are frequently both everyday and epic in their references. Characterised by laminations, intersections and ruptures, they brim with literary, liturgical and art-historical allusions, yet exude a notational quality and thereby a fragility. Taken as a whole, his recent exhibitions and projects meditate on the meaning of passage. They also deploy signs, materials and images as matter of fact, and as directional devices which signal or point to a specific idea of place, while alluding to someplace else. This amalgam of sign, image and material activates a meta-space that is punctured but profound, one that joyfully rampages through art's history, while boundary-riding between its internal categories.

Untitled photograph
2001
photograph: John Reynolds

For even though he is often described as a painter, Reynolds' references to art history are not restricted to painting. His sense of installation and his use of material seem as much aligned to recent sculptural practice. Furthermore, Reynolds does not paint so much as use the devices and languages of painting; stretched and un-stretched canvas, drawing paper, oil stick and references to painterly concerns such as figure-ground relationship and composition. His mark making is just that, marks made with oil stick that may at times involve representational drawing, but taken together read as diagrammatic assemblages of notations, schemas, writings, plans, repetitions and cancellations. The elegance of these assemblages is frequently manifested not through the marks themselves but through their conjunction or array.

Take Trading hours and various materials 2001, one of two large 'paintings' included in the project Harry Human Heights 2001. Rather than graceful or expressive, the crossed marks seem crudely controlled and their repetition, to the extent of filling an expansive field, appears compulsive, or to quote Reynolds from a work in his related series Epistomadologies 2001, it suggests "the obsession of LASTNESS apropos of everything, The LAST as category, as constitutive form of the mind, as original deformity, even as revelation . . .". So we have a blandness that turns inside out in its surprises. Standing at a distance from the work, the field of marks is mesmerising, activated not by the marks themselves, but by the changing tone of the abutted stretched canvas sections. Compared with the probity and purity of abstract painters such as Piet Mondrian, the alternating tones of the unbleached canvas appear contaminated, thereby drawing attention to the stretchers as material and object. Yet it is the materiality of the canvas and not the overlaid marks that gives the work much of its chromatic tension. The canvas ground simultaneously offers and denies the work its painterly attribute.

The sense that the viewer is being invited to engage with the work as an object within an installation is supported by the series of Epistomadologies that circumnavigate an adjacent room. Made up of pillaged motifs, maxims, directional signs and signposts, grids and co-ordinates, collectively these works convey a knowingly futile quest to define place, in all its material, poetic and ideological configurations. Again the chromatic shift of the paper grounds highlights a materiality and matter of fact-ness to the series, which loops back to the entrance, thereby leading the viewer back into the adjacent room, while also suggesting the series could be never-ending. In any painterly sense the intersection between the two massive paintings in one room and the cul-de-sac of works on paper in the other is disconcerting. Their relationship appears defined not by overt subject matter but by the way they collectively force an engagement with space, movement, rhythm and materiality.

Epistomadologies #1–75 (detail)
2001
oil stick on metallic paper

Epistomadologies #1–75 (detail)
2001
oil stick on metallic paper

Epistomadologies #76–91 (detail)
2001
oil stick on metallic paper

The positioning of painting as installation is not new. Colin McCahon made paintings to walk by, while Cy Twombly installed works to simultaneously highlight the processes of painting, viewing and reading. These artists nevertheless depend largely on the neutrality of the grounds they inscribe. Conversely, Reynolds highlights the partiality of ground and its significance as object. Examples of figuration and abstraction mingle with text and diagram, but they are rarely privileged from the grounds on which they are overlaid. At times ground as object dominates, as with the exhibition K Rd to Kingdom Come and the work Western springs/bloody angle 1998, which features a large, but cumbersome looking, double-sided chalkboard. In its well-worn appearance, this object alludes to years of material history as an instrument for the inculcation of knowledge. Thoughts are immediately evoked of classrooms and academies, and countless erasures of explanations, cultural and religious maxims, dissertations, translations, mathematical and scientific formulae and mappings, reinforced by the grid that emerges from within the weave of the fabric surface. The object, through its chalkboard fabric and its varnished and chipped wooden support, exudes a residue of human contact that so completely conditions Reynolds' own overlaid marks.

In its 'readymade-ness' the board recalls Marcel Duchamp's repositioning of functional objects as art, denied in part by the addition of Reynolds' marks. Nevertheless, these marks could be intrinsic to the object itself and are certainly difficult to read in isolation from the board as ground. They also represent schemas borrowed from another context, overlaid maps of a suburban New Zealand park and of a Turkish terrain, where New Zealand soldiers died in numbers. Their presentation might suggest that they are phantoms of someone else's previous attempts to represent place. It is as if Reynolds has highlighted the trace of two previous erasures of the blackboard, thereby compressing two maps into one. They read as evidence and are as much a conceptual as a painterly device, recalling Joseph Beuys's literal use of blackboards as much as McCahon's metaphorical referencing of them. 

1
Interview with the author, February 2002.

As well, in their superimposition, the two maps appear frozen together, not unlike the schemas or 'delays' that appear in Duchamp's The large glass 1923, a work that is also referenced in the Epistomadologies, in a drawing that features a 'billy boiling'. This work includes the words 'Chocolate Grinder', a direct reference to The large glass. Reynolds derived the image of the billy from a newspaper photograph of refugees in Kosovo boiling water in a tin pot. Reynolds was, like Duchamp, "interested in the idea of an everyday event being elevated to describe a mystery of existence".¹ This sense of the elemental and transformational is echoed in the atavistic qualities of the blackboard, the idea that in its materiality and its traces of the past, the board is more than a sign and might also be an instrument of transformation. Set on wheels, this brawny but solemn device is also potentially peripatetic. Reynolds metaphorically links the unwieldy mobility of the object with the elision that is implicit in the diagrammatic compression of two vastly removed locales.

This amalgam of sign, materiality and instrument recalls the way artists like Beys and Louise Bourgeois work with object and substance to evoke intangible states and hidden forces. Reynolds adds further semiotic layers. With Western springs/bloody angle there is an invasive incongruence implied in the forging together of two distant locales, a buried brutality that is then vested in the chalkboard itself. This sense of aggression is carried through into Reynolds' painted marks. At times lumpy and glutinous, these marks convey an abject substantiality, made more obvious in their defacement of the board's surface. While they may enrich the object they also disempower it, by denying its instrumentality. Here the act of painting is a negation equated with abuse.

This is not to make a case that Reynolds is not a painter. He retains a painterly language and it is this language that often dominates for the viewer of individual works. For example, Reynolds' distinctive mark making may be thought of as his trademark. For, however much they may refuse their status as paintings, in the autographic qualities of his mark making, Reynolds' works generally betray and thereby signify the hand of the artist. But not as a rule, as evidenced by the monumental Office of the dead 2001, presented in K Rd to Kingdom Come. Produced industrially, the surface of each unit is impeccably uniform and each can be seen as an example of pure abstraction. Splayed across a seven-metre-high wall, the multiple units can consequently be seen as non-representational variations on a theme. This work would not easily be recognised as that of Reynolds through its painterly attributes. If we are looking for the signature style of the artist we must look elsewhere.

In addition, each unit of Office of the dead demarks the shape of a chevron, a universal indicator of direction and a sign that conjures up ideas of space and speed by association, as well as the uniform space, or placeless-ness, of the highway. The sense that each metal unit is a surrogate highway sign is emphasised by the use of reflectorised paint, which also underscores its potential status as sculptural object. Outside the art context, the units could easily function as directional signs. Further reference to semiotic systems is made through the title, which is borrowed from a poem by Leigh Davis, itself inspired by a yacht race. In Davis's poem the letters are positioned on the page to mimic the passage and arrangement of yachts on an ocean. So with Reynolds' work, as with much of his recent work, multiple references to non-representational, linguistic, physical and pictorial spaces, places and non-places are compressed together. This sense of collision is literalised even further by Reynolds' placement of the work in the exhibition. Each unit points right, thereby signalling a change in direction, which both mimics and proclaims the physical route of the exhibition.

As with the Harry Human Heights project we return to Reynolds' use of the techniques of installation to invoke a sense of deferral as much as a grander scale. Tentative, even contradictory, his projects signal spiritual leaps but speak of small steps. Overripe but underplayed, they revel in fragments and residues of human existence and aspiration, while engaging attributes of compression, obsession, elision and ambivalence. This is their true constant, an ideational but wretched signature, or 'SIGNATR'. Individual works strive for independence and a sense of completeness, but they are also chained together as markers in a journey to an undefined destination. They enact multiple and at times radically opposed physical and imaginative spaces, intersecting them in an attempt to simultaneously unscramble chaos and reinvigorate painting.


Gregory Burke