Jordy Hewitt: Ledge Point: Moana.
Sentence. Painting. Text.
by Graham Mathwin
by Graham Mathwin
Painting died a private death in my life a few years ago. I
thought it would never be redeemed. Sometimes though, something incredible
appears before me, and I find myself in a position of dissonance. Hewitt’s
paintings were one such appearance. How could they have impacted so much on me?
I had built myself a fortress to defend myself from the wiles of painting –
especially abstract painting, so easy it is to be recouped into whatever
discourse that requires some visual matter.
The reconciliation I reached was to deny what most people
would interpret this as: the ability of painting to overcome its mediation and
affect us viscerally. Such an idea is ludicrous. Painting is perhaps the most
mediated, complex and meaning-full practice in art – it certainly has the
longest and most eminent history. Yet here is also the point of reconciliation
that I reached: in the very mediation itself. We too often deny that painting
is a language, and therefore do not realise that if it speaks to us, it is
through this language that it speaks. The power of literature is not diminished
by its nature, save we realise it is only paper, and barring the necessity of our
being literate. Painting likewise need not suffer all our distaste for being
what it is: the ultimate auratic object. Rather, it is through the application
of a language, albeit an archaic one, but certainly a complex, intricate, and important
one, that painting can speak to us. We can consider a sentence separate from
its text, and so we can isolate the sentence of a painting, like it asks us to
do, and its capital letter and full stop will be its frame, and we need not see
the paper the ink is printed on all the time. To do so is important: through
it, perhaps we can give painting a space and understand the possibility of its
language. It does entail a duality: that we understand the painting’s language,
but that we do so necessarily at the cost of our ability to argue against it on
the basis of its broader mediation, that none-the-less exists.
It seems especially appropriate to talk of language in
seeing Hewitt’s work over the last two years. The progression she has
undertaken has been especially deductive and logical – Hewitt is someone whose
practiced ability with the language of paint results in an articulate and
comprehensible ‘thinking’ through paint. Not that it is a purely logical
deduction that is present in these works – they are certainly still within the
realm of poetry – yet her two bodies of work, ‘ledge point’ and ‘act one scene
one’ both present what I feel is appropriate to call something of a Cartesian
meditation. Both bodies of work seem to contain the kind of realisation of an
origin that Edmund Husserl asked us to undertake, as the basis of a
phenomenology.
‘Act one, scene one’ is analogously illustrated by a
narrative Hewitt tells of a dying relative, who, upon her deathbed, uttered her
last words of ‘act one, scene one’ – a return to beginnings at the end. The
work was a confused ground, without any figure, an evocation of uncertainty,
but also a reduction of the language of painting back to its origin in the
painted surface. This is why I call it a Cartesian meditation. Descartes, in
his own meditation, decided to question everything. He very rapidly then
deduces the existence of the world. Descartes’s method invariably validated the
world he lived in, though it also changed it. Hewitt’s realisation can be taken
in parallel with this idea: that Descartes returned to an origin, and then
deduced the world from it – an end from an unsubstantiated beginning. The new
beginning of her passing relative echoes this double relationship: the return
to the origin in order to end, or the end as the beginning – something we can
see paralleled in science’s obsession with the ‘final theorem’ – the equation
to define the universe. It is both an origin, and an end. The hope of returning
to an originary principle is that you may then extrapolate everything: that you
will come to know the end. Within it, everything will be defined yet still
unfolding. Hewitt’s work can be seen in this broader context, her work is, as
so much abstract work has been, a ground. There is no figure, yet also little
paper visible. The work is a cloudy accumulation of marks. The work is not as
totalising as either the final theory, embodied perhaps in Malevich’s black
square, or Yves Klein’s blue or white, or Rauschenberg’s white canvas. The work
is a Cartesian meditation, but it is not the same ‘return to origin’ that those
artists purported. Like an expert poet, Hewitt knows that it is not the
physicality of the paper that makes the painting; it is the arrangement and
choice of its language. What she presents us with, then, is not only an origin:
the raw stuff of the language of paint: the ground; it is also an articulation
of that ground: it is an attempt to understand the language that enables such a
ground to be established. Far too often the Cartesian meditation in art results
in nothingness, without an understanding of the language that enabled this
absence-of-itself to occur.
The formation of this second body of work ‘ledge point’ is a
fascinating progression, or deduction, from the previous body of work. For
Hewitt has not conjured up something to inhabit the ground she constructed in
her previous body of work. Rather, she has constructed a second ground. The key
figure of her work in this show is not any figure at all, but a horizon. The
horizon is a fascinating figure because it is not any defined figure at all; it
is a limit of visibility, a figure generated by the curvature of the earth, and
on a hypothetically even surface is set about 5 kilometres away from us.
Hewitt’s horizon is rather less global, yet pertains to the same strange
definition as that horizon that defines the limits of a visible world. It feels
wrong to call it a figure; because of the lengths Hewitt has gone to avoid any
figure in these works, even any definitive directionality, despite the easily
language-able ‘landscape’ in these works. She has denied it, and avoided
conjuring a typically easily comprehensible world into being – rather she has
only conjured a horizon, a limit. The figure exists outside of the space of any
particular definition; it is a meeting point, an infinitesimal space between
two others.
This move is itself an intriguing one, but is again made
poetic by the expert negotiation of the painted surface that was there in her
last body of work, and that is here again. The marks, in both exhibitions, are
a fluctuating mix of strokes, scattered yet controlled. There is only one
definitive mark here, and that is the horizon’s line – and the sentence-like
structuring of a sheet of paper and its frame. All else is articulated noise, a
poem that is its own celebration, colour, tone, and those visible strokes that
create them. This language is that of uncertainty, an indistinctness that does
not reveal anything except itself as a ground. It is to Hewitt’s credit that
despite the bold inclusion of a horizon, there is not more distinctness for it
– or rather, that she has not done away with the implacable uncertainty, the
cloudy, indistinct form of her grounds, rubbed every which way, in an attempt
to invoke and dispel a foundation, a ground.
The true magic of a Cartesian meditation, and these
paintings, is that they are an alchemical transformation, or a conjuring. They
transform base material into value, or they bring forth the earth. The magic of
what are just black lines on paper, and what are marks of pigmented dirt on
paper are not espoused enough. The return to an origin is a magic spell, a
conjuring of the earth. Similarly, the basic material of paint is manipulated
into a ground. Through language it becomes something else, something beyond its
material alone.
I am yet further intrigued by imagining what may come of the
Cartesian meditation that Hewitt has undertaken, the reduction of her work to a
field, and then to its division. It is a private, personal Cartesian
meditation, something that feels like a crisis of sense. The continual emphasis
on the indistinct, the confused, despite its more recent definition, gives the
argument its power. Yet it is still that extraordinarily articulate structuring
of the space, the manipulation of the shape of marks, the selection and
presentation of colour, that gives the work its magic, and that wrests from
base material the wonder of these painting. What the next step of this argument
will be will emerge from that indistinct mass of paint, the confused marks that
exist within that frame, just like the horizon that has come into view.
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