Multiverses

Painting has a problem with superimposed images.*

Interweaving and mutually enhancing patterns and motifs are indispensable to music and the decorative arts. With pictures it’s a different story. Overlaid images displace and compete with each other. One image has to appear as ‘figure’ or ‘foreground’ and the other as ‘ground’ or ‘background’.

Geoff Diego Litherland’s paintings take up this problematic in a determined way. Images are superimposed but there no argument about who is boss – the ground is firmly put in its place by strutting foreground features. Whether there is a ‘third term’, a dialectical resolution or synthesis, a unitary ‘work’, is what I am trying to figure out.

In the 1980’s, a diverse group of artists came to prominence who had each lain siege to the problem of superimposed images in painting. Sigmar Polke, Julian Schnabel, David Salle were the best known. There was also a renewed interest in the superimposed paintings of the Dadaist Francis Picabia.

Multiverses exhibition view

The link with Dadaism is instructive. By and large the aesthetics of superimposition had been those of conflict, incongruity, subversion, irony. Superimposition (as in the photomontages of John Heartfield) had been used as a ‘V’ effect, a technique to alienate or distance the audience or spectator.

What one finds in the later superimpositionists, however, is the idea that visual and perceptual extremes can maybe be mended, healed by art. This is perhaps most strongly the case with Polke, the both the most technical and lyrical of the bunch.

By using all kinds of jiggery-pokery, photography, film and digital graphics have fared far better with superimposition. They revived a convention in painting which combined ‘solid’ and ‘transparent’ images so the latter would appear ghostly, dream-like or divine.

To return to Litherland’s paintings, the issue at stake in all these processes and practices is “Where is the real surface of the work?”

The works are a metre square and project three or four inches into the viewer’s space. On these platforms or wall plinths, the artist builds up a series of layers or strata. The first layer is the linen, open in texture and loose at the edges, but firmly pasted down. The second layer is the ‘beta’ layer, produced in free- flowing washes with motifs drawn in black.  These are tonal and low-keyed, sombre in mood and natural or organic in their references and associations. Finally, there is the ‘alpha’ layer: geometric or biomorphic motifs painted in an impasto that is as thick as the artex in a Yorkshire pub.

These sections are not only in raised relief but contrast in lightness and intensity of hue. They are as manic as the backgrounds are depressed, as synthetic as the backgrounds are organic. The shapes they form contain repetition and variation but they also seem like representations. Mostly they are preoccupied by their own informal, and possibly slightly stoned, geometry. The paint has been applied with a brush rather than a knife, leaving brushmarks so deep they cast shadows.

Unlike other attempts at fusing imposed images, he uses not only different images but entirely different tonalities.  ‘Alpha’ and ‘beta’ layers, ‘foreground’ and ‘background’, ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ are distinguished on a numbers of counts:

Raised against flat
Rough against smooth
Light against dark
Chromatic against achromatic
Smaller against larger
Patterned against glyphic
Geometric against biomophic
Biomorphic against symbolic

Multiverses exhibition view

Together these multiple distinctions create two separate tonalities or tonal registers. Yet they exist together in the same painting.
(These binary oppositions have more to do with Gestalt Psychology than Structuralism…)

Although the exhibition is called Multiverses there are only two, or possibly three worlds, in these works. Each painting in the room comes close to recreating the same disjoint tonalities with different imagery. In fact some of these paintings could be pushed together with interesting results.

Generally, there are limits to how much visual stimulus we can make sense of. Our perceptual systems are primarily adapted to see the kinds of things we have in our practical environment. Superimposed images are not a common feature of our environment. We struggle with two superimposed images; let alone three, nine or nine hundred. We use our perceptual programmes for ‘things overlapping in space’ to try to handle superimposed images.

In a sense this is one of the ‘last great challenges’ open to experimental painting. Can we make superimposition and violently contrasted types of imagery legible, even beautiful? People have tried and gone mad. But the struggle is not pointless. For the time being we live in a world with more and more information and less and less space. We need to explore the conditions of handling multiple arrays of information on one surface in a way that reduces stress, rather than induces it.

This is a real world job for artists and designers.

I think the paintings in Multiverses contribute to this job in two or three ways.

First, the disparate layers of information are counterbalanced by a reassuring physicality, which says “It’s okay, this isn’t Op Art, this is just a funky real object sitting in your environment”. The physical object here is chief candidate for being the ‘real’ surface and hero of the work. And the colours, tones and motifs are? Less real.

Second, he recovers the amniotic, floating space of Miro, Arp and early abstract expressionism. Normally we see things in terms of three categories of objects: faces (surfaces), figures (objects) and settings (environments). Outside and beyond these there is a fourth, less typical, category which is the realm of floating and swimming things: clouds, things in water, dreams perhaps. These are relevant because in this space objects have little solidity and are close to weightless.

Finally his works both succeed and fail to achieve a ‘third term’ – a dialectical synthesis. In reproduction or at some viewing distance the works cohere into a single image with a single tonality. Move into a normal viewing distance, however, and the two tonalities pull away from each other.

One of the difficulties of these paintings is the predominance of strategy over tactics. A clear technical procedure is being followed and this compromises the scope for artistic expression. You cannot easily re-work earlier layers of the painting. All early superimpositionists have tended to be hamstrung by their technique.

I think it’s important that Litherland keeps moving forward with his paintings. In the tradition of experimental painting, each painting must be an attempt at a new kind of painting. I have situated the Multiverses pictures in specific tradition of modern painting where broadly representational images are superimposed. However there is a parallel and aesthetically more important tradition of superimposition in abstract art.

Multiverses exhibition view

Jackson Pollock is perhaps the pivotal figure here. Pollock’s mature method of working grouped visual properties in superimposed layers. In any particular work, a given type of mark or gesture is assigned to a given colour of paint. In perception these layers separate to create a shallow ambiguous space. At the same time they synthesise physically and aesthetically.

Similarly in the work of Rothko and Louis depth and mood is created by overlapping distinct curtails of colour. It is no accident that Pollocks, Rothkos and Louiss are big. They are only weakly connected to figures and faces but are strongly connected to how we orientate ourselves to settings - to environments and also to the fourth realm I mentioned, where things float, drift and swim.

The aesthetics of superimposition are tense, stressed and contradictory. There is an absence of space. There is crowdedness, confusion, no room for play. Then at a certain point, there the opposite emerges: a kind of clarity and expansiveness. With Pollock, Rothko and Louis that was achieved through an environmental aesthetic, through a version of the Sublime.

It will be interesting to see what other solutions are possible.

*This could be put the other way: superimposition has a problem with painting.

For more information about Geoff Diego Litherland visit  www.geofflitherland.info