Nico Israel,
Essay for exhibition catalog 1999
The Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA
Emily Eveleth’s paintings conceal as they reveal. At once theatrical and restrained, open as a wound and yet somehow private, they seem to invite the viewer’s gaze, acknowledge it, and then absorb it, folding it into their won particular dramas. They are monumental and bold but maintain a strong sense of discretion.
This quality of discretion has the paradoxical result of highlighting the very craft of their making. For whatever she paints –doughnuts, the backs of heads, and most recently dimly lit human silhouettes – Eveleth remains first and foremost a painter. Her works are sculptural, sometimes almost thespian in the dramatic luminescence, but they make no attempt to hide their own contingency, their sense of being born out of a process. Brush strokes present themselves as labor, a loving labor to be sure, but part of a painstaking building technique.
Perhaps this is why Eveleth paints the same shapes so meticulously, so tirelessly: doughnuts exclusively for five years, heads for another two, and for the last two years doughnuts and heads. Gazed at so long – long enough – the shapes cease to be “merely” doughnuts, or backs of heads, or, now, bodies lying on their sides. They become vehicles in both the poetic sense of “a medium for conveying ideas and expressions” (OED) and in the quite literal sense of allowing for movement – the fundamental, ineluctable movement of paint against surface.
In this vehicular double –movement between poetry and paint, there is no need to “get it right” – the “it “ in question being the quintessence of the object under her almost scientific scrutiny – because, in the process of discovery, there ceases to be an essence to reveal. There is, rather, always more exploration – of shape, density, plane and form – ad more building and moving to do.
But Eveleth is not, or not simply, a formalist. There is a cool, analytical, feel to each of the works, a studied neutrality that mediates the play between the melancholy and comedy of their subject matter. This is how doughnuts – archetypal American food that barely fills a void of hunger, almost silly in their ephemerality, their sweet, sticky nothingness, their prosaic corniness – can begin to seem so weighty, as weighty as a Serra sculpture, or alternatively as impressionistic as a Chinese landscape painting.
The doughnut paintings on view in this exhibition can be divided into two types: those on ten inch square panels and titled serially, Ten by Ten No. 18, Ten by Ten no 19, and so on – and those larger works painted on canvas a given slightly more expressive (but still decidedly minimalist) one works titles Exposure and Monument.
The larger works are the more directly figural, and the more suffused with painterly detail. Exposure presents a stack of two glazed doughnuts tipped slightly to one side, on a golden foreground set against a get black background. One doughnut seems slightly more aged and puckered, the other, its mate, seems fresh out of the oven. (By placing her doughnuts in g groups of twos and threes, typically with stage-like foregrounds and against monochromatic backgrounds, such narrativized dramas within the pieces almost always begin to propose themselves: Romeo and Juliet? Vladimir and Estragon? Mommy and Daddy and Me?) The glazed doughnuts with a slit-like space between them appear somehow corporeal and wounded at once – the body, perhaps, as wound. Yet, simultaneously, they seem to be joined together, coupled in an uneasy embrace. The painting’s title suggests precisely such and ambiguity: in Exposure, something is revealed, something quite personal, raw: yet this revelation is rerouted, as with a photographic exposure, by a sense of temporal arrest, of being caught in a moment - in this case perhaps a moment of falling down, disengaging. This ambiguity is further accentuated by a tension between photography and painting that the painting itself proposes. As with Richter’s superb paintings of photographs, the sense of verisimilitude begins to slip away, and one is left with a residue of the space between photography and painting (and, in Eveleth’s case, theatre and cinema and poetry as well).
In Monument, which is actually smaller (and less monumental than Exposure, Eveleth places three whitish doughnuts in a triangle against a white foreground and stark black background. Here, her subjects look less directly bodily and more like landscapes: little powder-covered mountains brought into the studio. Through these cold, wintry vehicles, lines from Wallace Steven’s lyrical poem “The Snow Man” seem almost to course:
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine trees crusted with snow;
For the listener, who listens in the snow
And, nothing of himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
It is thoroughly within the realm of Eveleth’s aesthetic sensibility to translate “pine trees” with “doughnuts” and “listener” with “viewer.” For, in the interplay between the whitish shapes, and in the slit of nothing between them, there is a kind of void that cannot be avoided, a void that calls the viewer into (the) play but seems somehow to exclude him.
The Ten by Ten doughnut works on view are some of the least figural in Eveleth’s body of work, and suggest the influence of some of her most recent paintings of bodies lying on their sides. The doughnuts are presented in silhouette, and neither their foregrounds not their backgrounds are clearly demarcated. As with the larger paintings, they are set in groups of two or three, but, cast in shadow, the viewer cannot tell where one object ends and the other begins. It is as if Eveleth is painting the wall behind which her ”other” doughnuts – the ones set in almost cinematic light – are screened.
As with the larger paintings, this question of placement seems all-important.
Eveleth almost always sets the objects of her painterly inquiry at or near the center of her canvases. But in this Ten by Ten series, the doughnuts are lowered somewhat, pushing down against what’s left of the foreground, and emphasizing the puffy background. They consequently appear at once more ephemeral, cloud-like, and yet somehow solid as a giant boulder.
In previous works, Eveleth had set her doughnuts with their holes facing front and center, sometimes oozing a bit of their jelly, suggesting an eerie vulnerability along with a kind of sassy self-revelation. But in the works on view here, all from 1999, their holes are turned away from the canvas. Or perhaps it would be better to say apropos of the Ten by Ten series of both doughnuts and heads, that the objects themselves become holes of a sort.
This sense of turning away and of a “black” hole that absorbs the viewer’s gaze (absorbs, in both senses of the term) is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the head series. In these works, we are typically presented with a single figure of a human head, either bald or covered by a small hat. Again set against stark, often dark, monochromatic backgrounds, and placed at or near the center of the panel, the heads seem suspended, lost in contemplation, thoroughly alone. As viewers, we strive to give the scenes meaning – to give the heads a face that might give our own contemplations meaning (The face is in fact the way many viewers recognize a painting, or recognize themselves in a paintings, and we may be looking, detective-like for a face – the artist’s face or our won face – in all works of art; abstract art may not be the exception to this quest for or saving of face, but actually the exemplum here.) Eveleth, by giving us a head with no face – a reverse mug shot of sorts – is actually replication our won status as viewers of the picture. She thereby sets up a sort of infinite regression of tenets of contemporary art theory, our gaze does not ”trap” the subjects of her paintings, freezing them in to static, objectified submission; in some sense, it actually allows them to “perform”.
Consider the large oil painting on canvas, Vones with Cap. Here, a lone figure faces away from us. Lit sharply and cast against jet black, his head and shoulders, clothed in what looks to be denim, seem to float in mid air. He is wearing a hat. (A hat is typically a metonym for a head: does it mask the head or double our desire to see what’s below it?) Staged in this way, he seems an apparition, a figure under interrogation, or perhaps a cinematic projection (akin to Gary Hill’s illusionistic holograms). What does he want? Or, perhaps more pressingly what do we want him to want?
In Ten by Ten No. 38, a bald headed male figure stares away from the panel. Or maybe it would be better to say that the back of his head stares at the viewer. Eveleth presents him against a gold-ish brown background, the white of his t-shirt cutting a diagonal plane wand creating the painting’s foreground. His bald head – baldness standing for a kind of vacancy along with a vulnerability (age or illness, perhaps) – is illuminated again by a single light source: its top is shiny and it’s back in shadow. Eveleth has indicated the shiny top with a little dab of white paint in the form of a cross, surrounded by thick whorls of gold, itself surrounded by impasto-like brown. All of this creates a scenario in which we not only notice the lonely drama of the scene – whose precise logic, as always, is held in abeyance from us – but, also as always with Eveleth’s work, the very flatness of the painting’s surface.
Perhaps one can attribute this tension between dramatic action and technical dexterity to Eveleth’s own interest in the history of still life painting – of, for example, the Spanish masters Juan Sanchez Cotan or Francisco de Zurbaran – in which a grape or a chalice can appear at once remarkably detailed and replete with urgent meaning and yet also nothing other than a blob of paint. Perhaps, too, we notice something of Rembrandt: the series of dark, lonely self-portraits spring immediately to mind. Or, to think of am ore contemporary influence, one can see something of Eric Fischl’s naughty scenes, in which the erotics of voyeurism are both inflated and rerouted back into an interrogation of painterly form.
Nowhere does Fischl’s influence seem to be lurking more menacingly than in Eveleth’s most recent paintings, which present lone figures, presumably youngish and female, lying on their side. While doughnuts typically occupy a square plane and the force of the heads is vertical, these Ten by Tens have a decidedly horizontal feel. One, No. 41, cast against a whitish gray background, looks as thought one of Fischl’s female subjects (the one from, say, Bad Boy) were taken out of the pas de deux scenario and placed in solitary confinement. Is Eveleth’s reclining figure sleeping or resting? Is she lost in reverie or collapsed in misery? The sight of her back and the absence of painterly detail entails a lack of resolution (in both sense of the term).
It is Eveleth singular achievement to draw us in, to bring us close to the action, without presuming to present it directly. And perhaps this is what I meant earlier by “discretion”: her paintings acknowledge the complexities of viewing, the desires and questions it generates, the roads it maps. But they refuse to offer easy answers, or for that matter, exits.
Nico Israel
