The Feel of Things
Is it possible to show the dynamics of a situation without depicting the situation itself? This question came up while I was looking at the paintings of Michelle Jezierski. The works convey a sense of movement, an active feeling caused by a rhythmic display of forms. First you notice the dynamics of colored shapes, and only after that do you start to wonder what exactly it is you are looking at.
What you see might evoke a landscape: a glimpse of the sky as seen from a plane, the contour of a mountain from a hike, but it never comes as a completed image in which everything has fallen neatly into place. Rather, the world comes to us in fragments, in compartments, in gestures of paint, in thicker or thinner strips of colors, creating horizontal, vertical, or diagonal patterns. Within each painting, the fragments are related in color and tone. Yet in terms of figuration, they do not deliver a fixed scene, set in outline. Instead, everything stays open, not yet settled but remaining up in the air, in the process of movement. Or you could say, in the act of becoming. A sense of geometric order, created through lines and repetition, balances a more personal, handmade gesture, as if two approaches to painting are being practiced at the same time. This causes jumps and shifts in perspective. Wind blows through colors, moving them across the painting. It is a feeling more than a completed view that is offered, even if it is served through a static image hanging on the wall. Such is the paradox of these paintings.
Jezierski studied in Berlin in the 2000s with Tony Cragg, a sculptor with an interest in formal structures that can be found in nature, but also in industrial materials and processes. His sculptures of steel, wood, and other materials often have natural and human features while also remaining abstract. As a painter, Jezierski did not feel out of place in Cragg’s class, as the conversations revolved around a broad range of artists’ concerns, such as perception, volume, perspective, and space. Sculptures need to be regarded from all angles in order to sense the whole. For instance, the surface of a metal piece will react and change with a light shining onto it, and the outline will be different from another viewpoint. The artist has taken these insights into her practice of painting, differentiating successive moments that can be extracted from one situation – a view on the street, out on the land, or up in the sky. A painting may be a flat surface, but of course this doesn’t mean that space and perspective are not involved. And time plays its part in this: in the act of making, in the different layers that are brought together, and in the process of collecting multiple moments in one image.
Is it a view into the depth of a space, or is it a reflection going backwards? In fact, we can see both at the same time. Take, for example, what happens when stopping to look in a shop window while walking through the city. Two worlds appear in the window: the products for sale inside, behind the glass, and the street or buildings around us, reflected in the glass. We usually filter out the reflection since we are looking with a purpose, for a pair of shoes, a book, or a dress. We look for what we are looking for. But as a screen, absorbing its surroundings, the window does not take sides – it shows us both. It allows our gaze to pass through while also mirroring what is behind us. Jezierski focusses her attention on this in-between surface. She is not interested in choosing only one aspect from her field of vision. She wants to see what is inside the phenomenon we call seeing, and she transmits her observations through paintings that combine complexity and layering.
When we see a painting for the first time, we do not necessarily know what to look for – we just observe, following form, absorbing color, and responding to shapes, thus forming an impression of both what the painting is and what it could be about. Instead of a glass facade, there is a canvas; instead of passersby, there are moving, painted shapes, abstract in appearance. The open atmosphere of Jezierski’s paintings allows us to reflect on these elements, bringing them to the forefront of our attention. It is not a classical subject matter that presents itself as the main issue, but rather the question of how we form an idea of subject matter, and how a rhythm of color and shapes can define an experience.
One artist who has inspired Jezierksi’s thinking on what art might cause or be is Robert Irwin, who started out as a painter in the 1950s but later on, as an artist affiliated with the Light and Space Movement in Southern California, moved to making site-specific installations. In his work, the experience of an environment is crucial, more important even than the actual objects staged to create such a setting. In a recent installation in Berlin, Light and Space (Kraftwerk Berlin) (2021), he created two spheres, contrasting like day and night, by placing a wall in the huge, open space of an empty industrial building. On both sides of the wall were patterns of fluorescent light tubes creating abstract rhythms. One side had bright white light, the other dark blue. There was no narrative, no punch line or “meaning” to be uncovered in the pattern of lights; there was simply an audience moving around the wall, having conversations or just sitting down and absorbing the environment. Irwin wants us to “get it” by walking into it. Nothing has to be depicted in his artwork; there is no subject matter. His focus is on the dynamics of the situation, and the way the visitor moves through the space.
To some extent, every painter could be called a light artist, as dealing with colors and their combinations presupposes an interest in how light touches a surface and activates its palette. Painting means working with light – how light breaks into a spectrum of colors, how different positions of the sun make every surface change through the course of the day, or even how an artificial light source works differently on the canvas. But some painters choose to focus on the way light acts, as Claude Monet did, for instance, in the late nineteenth century. He painted the cathedral of Rouen in France many times, not because he wanted to say anything particular about the church or the architecture, but in order to catch the light at different moments of the day or in different types of weather, and to grasp how the same visual motif can be so varied. For Monet, as well as for other Impressionists, the meaning of painting was “in the air” between the viewer and the actual object depicted.
Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Things One Sees, originally a quote from Paul Valéry, is the title of a book on (and made in conversation with) Robert Irwin. It points to that moment that captures you, an experience of seeing, when words are no longer needed or even available. That is the moment that Jezierski is attracted to: a kind of seeing that does not need identifying words to support it. This does not mean that no words were involved as she developed her work – behind the paintings are ideas about how to attain compositional structure, how to create rhythm. There are obviously also materials that help create the imagery of a painting: photos from magazines, works of art, self-taken pictures of skies or city views, observations from walking through cities or traveling across countries or looking in the mirror. But once Jezierski starts making the painting in the studio, it is not about putting a specific reference inside the work or replicating her source image. It is about having a dialogue with the paint and creating a new kind of space from there.
A similar act could unroll from the viewer’s side, once the work is done and exhibited. The surface of a painting must be activated by the beholder, and it can be explored through following the lines that the painter has laid out, or through questions addressing the image. What is background or foreground in a scene with multiple horizon lines, an image not composed according to one central perspective valid for the whole picture? The geometric patterns and the cuts (or even disturbances) in the image offer different pathways through the painting. The horizontals and verticals could be considered interruptions that separate different moments, yet they could also be the seams holding two fragments together, creating contact. Friction and connection go hand in hand here, which is what we experience as dynamics in the paintings. We are looking at pieces that fit together yet at the same time do not really line up.
The play of colors creates a different atmosphere in each painting – or, you could say a different temperature. Some paintings appear warm, like Amp (2020), while Unspoken (2018) has a colder expression. Some colors seem to come from southern skies, others from crisp, freezing environments. Some may look like a late night after the sun has gone down, others spread a gentle glow, such as Refract (2021), which shows a rhythm of verticals counterbalanced by diagonal bands that shine like sunbeams. The painted shapes contain yellow, blue, and orange, and could be imagined as clouds but might just as well represent plots of land. Sky and earth are not clearly separated here, but intertwined through the refraction of light.
Jezierski takes much of her inspiration from non-painterly sources such as sculpture, light, and spatial art. The influence of music is also important for her – natural, given that she comes from a family of classical musicians. This may have led her to perceive visuals in terms of rhythm and sequences. And also to think about colors in harmonies, or to pair them as dissonant, to orchestrate a painting while composing it, working with tonalities and contrast. Music is not that different from painting when considered on an abstract level, through its compositional structures and lines of development.
What is the painterly context of these works made by an artist who enjoys a broad range of input? Some ideas may be gleaned from a book found on Jezierski’s studio table: The Eye’s Mind, with texts by Bridget Riley. It contains reflections on how colors work together and how they are always interdependent. Riley has a much stricter geometric sense, but what Jezierkski shares with her is an interest in a vibrant surface where color relations produce a dynamic of seeing. Individual colors do not have a character by themselves; it is only in their relationships that a certain effect or atmosphere is defined. Riley also pointed to the fact that the history of abstract painting is in fact still a young one, a little more than a century old, where much is still to be discovered. And this seems to define the spirit of Jezierki’s studio: painting is for her, like for Riley, ongoing visual research, a practice that unfolds as a dialogue with the environment as well as with existing works of art.
“I paint the experience of landscape, rather than landscape itself” Jezierski has noted. In her approach, she takes out the narrative of a situation, or geographic specifics of a landscape, and instead focuses on abstract principles such as harmony, rhythm, and depth. During the process, she leaves out details in order to draw the focus to the larger movement, to light and color. There are pathways and different roads to travel through the painting. Letting go of the subject matter or breaking the image is a conscious decision in this process, a way of reducing the distraction that occurs when we name or identify a scene. Her practice is directed toward dematerializing the experience, even though this is addressed with an object made of canvas and paint.