review. Review, Exhibition at Library Gallery, University of Warwick
Looking Back : 1994 – 2004The Library Gallery, University of Warwick
19th April – 7th May 2004
Mick Rafferty appears to likes lines. In this retrospective exhibition– which represents ten years’ work and which is striking for its variety and diversity (a casual observer might easily have mistaken it for a mixed and not a solo show) – it was line that struck me as the unifying principle: line as the most ancient and conventional means of containing, framing-off, and representing human experience while at the same time being that which simplifies, reduces, and translates that experience, knowingly failing to do justice to its multi -dimensionality. This restless artist, who never stands still but is constantly experimenting with new subjects and forms, has an abiding fascination for grids, divisions, compartments, frames, angles, layers, and lines; for the way these classic ways of organising and ordering a design can achieve an aesthetic harmony and beauty in their own right while also pointing up the inevitable, sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, but always poignant failure to do more than approximate to experience, to gesture vaguely in its direction, ultimately to miss the mark. Thus, the x and y axes of the two-dimensional picture plane, while always present here, are ruthlessly interrogated, frames that seek to encase the image being in some cases, like Pergola Daze (1994), trespassed against, wandered over, erased, while in others literally deconstructed and taken apart as stretchers are exposed to reveal a picture’s structural skeleton. An obsession with surface and depth – with substrata and the sedimentation of different levels – also allows this artist to explore ways in which the third dimension can in turn depict the fourth: that is, with how foundations laid down and overlaid, however obscured they might be by what comes after or lies on top, have an axial bearing on the visible surface that has evolved over time and that would not be the way it is without them. These surfaces do not seek to capture a moment in time, to freeze-frame it or fix it dead like a fly in amber; nor do they present themselves as a finished product, the end result of a project successfully completed. Rather, in demonstrating production as process, they seek to honour the experience of time as it is lived through – paused, perhaps, even held up for the game’s dureé, but never completed, never “over”. We may be accustomed to delineating time, but this artist subverts any simple idea of a narrative that organises experience into an orderly series of events, wittily deploying the most graphic of means to play around with the time line: sometimes using lines of text, lines of print, to build up a palimpsest of different versions; sometimes dividing the canvas up into cartoon-like sections that juxtapose sequence with simultaneity, leaving us unsure whether scenes precede or follow each other, or even whether they are connected at all.
Digging for Clues (1999) represents the halfway point in this decade of work – a square canvas with a yellow centre unevenly bordered with silver-grey and covered in shreds and shards, scraps of plastic, strips of paint that have been peeled off and re-applied. The horizontals that organise the composition conjure geological layers – the lines in a cross-section of rock that can be read like a book and that, flattened out and diagrammised, become a kind of reduced shorthand, a two-dimensional way of signalling time, the passing of untold aeons whose scale exceeds the human imagination. At the same time, the canvas swings round, re-orientating the viewer to look into its depths, to see the surface as an outermost skin beneath which multiple levels lie layered one upon the other. The fragments that lie scattered across the canvas are only the finishing touch, the final part of a process traces and remnants of which remain to be glimpsed and intuited through a surface that has been textured, pigmented, and progressively re-worked. The inspiration here is Gerhard Richter, an artist who, in Rafferty’s own words, “combines a production process which superficially displays an informed intuitiveness allied to a controlled rationale and set of techniques. During the process of reaching the finished stage”, Rafferty goes on, in words that could describe his own practice as much as that of Richter, “typically much of that previously arrived at is destroyed, obliterated in order to allow the new to exist; a paradoxical commentary, a simulacrum of the cyclicality of life and death, the inevitability and consequential revivification”. Like much of Richter’s work, this painting enacts archaeology in reverse, for here deposits are made not found, and any ideas that we may have started out with (and that are hinted at in the title) of extraction or excavation, of objects deeply embedded, of mysteries waiting to be mined and brought out into the light, are forcibly turned round. For now the buried is on the surface, the last is first and the most ancient the most recent, allowing the artist to bring into focus the series of paradoxes with which he is habitually concerned: hiding and seeking, concealing and revealing, completion and process.
Itself the product of a substantial period of time, this exhibition as a whole could be read as an archaeology of the artist, with individual paintings as separate “deposits”. In the pieces that precede Digging for Clues, Rafferty – who always regards his work as paintings and the activity involved in producing them as that of a painter – subjects the form, rationale, and raison d’être of his chosen medium to intense scrutiny, taking the components apart and re-assembling them in a way that barbarises and defamiliarises whatever might once have been taken as a norm. Here stretchers are exposed and strips of canvas torn and re-woven to pose the sheer materiality of painting and to question – in their warp and weft – its necessary bi-dimensionality. Pigment is pre-applied, usually to what will be the back of the surface exposed, so that what the viewer sees is rather consequence and aftermath than the deliberate application of paint. As before, the artist is concerned with the processes of uncovering and laying bare, but not with a view to revealing some hidden message or inner truth – the “deep and meaningful” that will satisfy the customers and supply their art with its complacent justification. In Do You Want to See More? (1998) The painting performs a striptease before us, its strips of fake leather and black pvc deliberate clichés that punningly signal that most paradoxical of scenes, at once public and private, sexy and banal. But the point is not to savour the nakedness underneath. As Barthes hints in his essay on the subject, striptease is less about mystery than about mystification, a fetishising of content, teasing the viewer with the illusion that there is something there, something more that will make it all worthwhile.
The same issues resurface in the more recent work, identifiable by its recognisably Japanese iconography and theme. In glazed pieces such as Beauty is only Sironurai (2002) or Atsui Desu Ne (2003), layers of semi-transparent, textured, Japanese paper overlap to produce – as in a traditional Japanese interior – a series of partially revealing, partially obscuring screens. Again, strips are overlaid and interwoven to create the impression of linings and facings, of windows and grilles. In the case of the larger paintings, the canvas itself has become another screen, images being projected onto the back and their outlines traced through, so that, once again, what we get is the after-effect – a result or trace rather than the artist’s conscious deliberations – and the image comes to us necessarily filtered, distanced, and reversed. The inspiration behind this body of work is a book of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japanese erotica that drew the artist with its iconic and stylised representations. Here male and female figures are stripped of any individuality or character in the same way that Rafferty is determined to denude his own work of any lingering traces of private consciousness or personal history. In a bid to purge the work of any characteristic mark or “signature” brushstroke, the surfaces here are randomly patterned with Pollock-like dribbles and squiggles, and superimposed with impersonal lines: traditional Japanese calligraphy or images copied directly from the source text. Rafferty’s aim in these seems to be to demote the cult of personality – of the artist “heavy” in his consciousness and intention – and to replace this with a perhaps Zen-inspired quest for the unbearably light. The artist recedes behind figures who are featureless and blank, no matter what erotic entanglements they are engaged in. As such he is both marked and vacant, the images as surely the product of his mind as they are the vestiges of a train of thought, impersonal and detached, that has passed through and is continuing insouciantly on its way.
Dr. Catherine Bates
August 2004