Connie Fox and the Proustian Sentence

By Barry Schwabsky

Ours will probably never be thought of as the era of complex painting. Minimalism is the only obvious illustration of the presiding taste for what in the best of cases can be called a complex thought that’s been distilled into a strikingly simple embodiment. Pop Art, Color Field painting, Conceptual art, and most of the other movements that arose in 1960s and continue to influence today’s art reflect the same value.

What do I mean by complexity? Perhaps the best way to define it would be as coherent multiplicity. A complex painting would be one capable of including many spaces (or even many types of space: flat, shallow, perspectival…), many qualities of light, of texture, of facture, a wide gamut of colors; it would allow for descriptive representation, schematic or symbolic representation, for geometric and gestural abstraction; and these would not simply coexist, but they would somehow be coordinated, or perhaps a better word would be concerted. Most important, these distinct aspects or qualities within the work would not simply be experienced separately (a collection of simple things is not therefore a complex thing) but would mutually inflect or affect each other, providing multiple perspectives on each element. And out of that multiplicity would arise the work’s sense of meaning.

What I have in mind is a painting like Connie Fox’s Tapestry, which is typical of her recent work in its deployment of shifting viewpoints, its space which is full of clear geometrical divisions whose significance is ultimately rendered ambiguous, and its use of pictures within the picture- sometimes literally collaged onto its surface, though always at least partially reintegrated with that surface- to propose a reality in flux. That Tapestry is actually one of the most clearly organized of her recent larger paintings only makes it the more dramatic as an example of coherent multiplicity. These paintings seem to synthesize aspects of a couple of previous series, one of paintings (like Defense d’Afficher) that had a much more emphatic geometrical framework, and another, even earlier group that included works like Night Kites, that were wilder and less structured. In the new paintings, structure is understated, wildness contained. One never overwhelms the other. They’re the kind of paintings you can lose yourself in without feeling like you’ve gotten lost.

Maybe it takes a mature artist, rather than a youthful one, to make complex painting for our time. At least that’s how it seems after spending some time with Fox’s recent paintings. I’ve seen a succession of young painters emerge with an ambition to endow their work with more complexity than they find in what’s around them in the art world. Sometimes their first efforts are tremendously exciting. But experience has taught me to temper my expectations, because too often, having exhausted their initial burst of youthful energy, these artists end up, after a few years, faced with the surprisingly difficult question of what the point of all that complexity might be. And usually they draw a blank, leading their work either to become completely decorative or undergo a crisis.

By contrast, Fox reaps the whirlwind of complexity contained by paintings like Aria, Rue de l’Oiseau, or the irresistibly titled One More Time, I Love You with nonchalance. They possess an underlying clarity that seems unshakeable for all the emotional, perceptual, and intellectual hubbub they sustain. Looking with her at some of her recent paintings in small formats, I noticed a couple titled Germantes Way and Meseglise Way. When I asked her about the Proustian reference of their titles, Fox explained that there was no specific narrative reference, either in those or in most of her other titles, which are simply meant to crystallize the mood she has observed in each painting. And then she went on to say that her reference to Proust had not so much to do with the content of the story, but rather with his remarkable sentence structure – the way a sentence can flow on, clause after clause, at times seeming to lose all sense of direction or even connection, and yet by its end reveal itself as quite rigorously constructed and coherent. Her method, too, is to court disorder and incoherence, and yet, through a sense of the hidden threads that tie part to part in her paintings, establish an ulterior harmony.

It’s a dangerous game. First, because she depends on the good will of a viewer who’s willing to play along. I think Rose Slivka captured the essence of how paintings like this can best be appreciated when she wrote, simply, “I trust them.” How many readers of Proust have given up after a few pages, flinging the book away with impatience! His lusciously evocative language, of course, provides a formidable enticement to stick with it. The richness of Fox’s paint, the almost over-ripe intensity of her color might likewise seduce viewers into the more intellectual challenge of reconstructing the oblique sense of her paintings – earns our trust, to use Slivka’s word, that the reward will be worth the effort.

That trust comes into play, as well, at the point where the Proustian parallel breaks down. Painting does not possess an equivalent to the full stop. Which is to say that it does not have a syntax in the way that language does. The movement of the eye and mind through a sentence is in principle linear; Proust confounds this linearity – makes his sentences more pictorial- by inviting you to stop, re-read a clause, go back to the beginning of the sentence, compare the two uses of a repeated word, and so on. And yet, eventually, perhaps after two or three passes, you do arrive at the end of the sentence feeling that you have encompassed it. But the painting offers no stopping point, only this process of looking back and forth, letting the eye wander in and out, taking another look, returning to what you’d noticed first, etc. The prospect of a settled meaning floats teasingly at an ever-receding horizon (which is probably why Arthur Danto saw the paintings’ logic as “dreamlike”). The painting’s time-frame is not instantaneous, but endless.

Fox’s paintings, more than most, highlight this potential for becoming a constantly self-revising construction by the viewer, which parallels the painter’s method of perpetual revision. I’d guess that for her, as for Willem de Kooning, the fundamental question of painting is always when ti stop. For the viewer, as well, the potential endlessness of the process can be a pleasurable challenge, not just to one’s perceptual and interpretive self-consciousness, but to one’s stamina. A recent studio visit that left me happily exhausted provoked the reflection that the fundamental difference between a painter and the rest of us may be nothing but the ability to keep looking longer.

Barry Schwabsky is the author of The Widening Circle: Consequences of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University press, 1997). He writes regularly for such publications as Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Times, and is a Contributing Editor to Art On Paper.