Full Fathom - Scott Plear

 -Georges Braque

This lovely quote popped into my head while looking at Full Fathom, Scott Plear’s latest exhibition at Petley-Jones Gallery, and made me realize the extent to which this artist’s approach is diametrically opposed to the majority of artists working in the contemporary art world’s vein of cerebral self-consciousness. Plear takes us to an almost forgotten innocence of vision; you can just walk up to his paintings and feel the look of them. He one of those rare contemporary artists who are deeply concerned with art quo art: the belief that the quintessence of painting is the relationships and tensions within the borders of the frame, and not extraneous extra-art issues such as politics, gender or power. In other words, painting isn’t about “saying” something that could be better expressed with language; it is about conveying and expressing those things which are outside discursive language’s scope - namely the emotive, the expressive, the felt life of subjective experience. 

That doesn’t mean that his painting is apolitical. One of the biggest misconceptions about an artist focusing on aesthetic concerns is that it encapsulates a blind turning away from political responsibility. To put it bluntly, painting doesn’t need to be explicitly about politics, because the very act of painting is a political act, and the decision to put a non-objective painting on your wall is a statement about the importance and need of the non-utilitarian in the face of all kinds of oppressive authoritarianism.

A Plear abstraction doesn’t offer a window into an illusionistic space. The painting is a solid, expressive vehicle in and of itself. Yet there is space there too: the primary tension comes from the strain between thick, worked acrylic and the delicacy of the surrounding forms (often mere washes of thin paint on the canvas). This distinction separates Plear from other contemporary abstract expressionists, such as Mounier or Auerbach, who layer their surfaces so thickly that the classic push and pull of post-painterly abstraction is denied and the eye sits on an unvaried single visual plane. In the exhibition’s most eye-catching work, “Full Fathom Fire,” there is an almost palpable strain between the softness of the undulating salmon orange background and the rough intrusion of a sensuously muddy form of earth grey.

In recent years, the artist has been experimenting with different approaches. The paintings became monochrome towards the end of the 1990s, employing a range of subtle greys. In Full Fathom, primary colours return with a vengeance, tempered with deep umbers and ochres. Sometimes Plear can surprise you with his restraint of hue: “Full Fathom Free Fall” has a tightly controlled range of orange red to lemon yellow, but in “Full Fathom Flip,” the painter celebrates clashes of divergent colour: the painting is dominated by the tartest, sourest yellow, complemented with creamy cobalt blues and orange ochre. These are the results of the artist’s struggle to explore the expressive possibilities of the verbally ineffable, the musicality and poetry of pure form.

            Paintings like “Full Fathom Fury” and “Full Fathom Force” are as earthy and guttural as the titles suggest rich cadmium reds and pinks next to dense black and umber yet there’s something wistful about the overall effect, a calmness brought about by the balancing of energies which reminds one of the truth inherent in Henri Matisse’s observation that the “secret” of painting lies in the “play and balance of forces.”

A few years ago, the contemporary art vanguard began endless speculation about the state of painting in relation to contemporary discourse. Is it alive? Is it dead? In “Full Fathom Fix” the whole painting is a vivid accumulation of dark purples and vivid reds that seem to dissolve into a bold orange rectangle. This central shape wants to dominate; but unexpectedly, there’s a border on the right edge of sour yellows and soft greys that seem to complement and enliven the warmer colours. As my eye travels from thick impasto to delicate washes, from creamy cadmium orange to the richest, sharpest magenta, the painting answers the question “Is painting alive?” strongly in the affirmative.

Adrian Livesley

Vancouver