10 July – 4 August 2019

Genevieve Felix Reynolds

Health

The grey glaze of the past attacks all know-how:

Secrets of wash and finish that took a lifetime

To learn and are reduced to the status of

Black-and-white illustrations in a book where colorplates

Are rare. That is, all time

Reduces to no special time.

– John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

The digital screen is flat and deep. A quantifiable set of pixels arrange themselves to form not exactly an illusion (because we understand, more or less, the screen’s terms) but a simulacrum of layers that we respond to as we would to a physical space. In referencing earlier forms and features (keyboards, photography, physical feedback), operating systems retroactively refigure their influences. You hear, these days, perhaps apocryphally but meaningfully, of small children frustratedly trying to swipe through the pages of books.

In these works, Genevieve Felix Reynolds describes an intersection of historical and dimensional surfaces, mixing ancient and contemporary objects and symbols. A series of familiar images along with abstract forms that recall architecture, machinery and geometry are made strange by their apparent proximity and interaction, as is the space in which they float unmoored. 

Paintings resolve into graphic representations that break down on approach, whereas digital spaces that prioritise the viewer’s numbed comfort erase anything that recalls their constructedness. Our time within the latter is commodified and the environment is optimised to hold our gaze, our being, inducing a state in which it’s hoped, by those who buy and sell us, that we lose track of both our own intentionality and that of the creator. 

These works, seven paintings and one video, depend on an acknowledgment of the maker and a consequent tracing or inferring of intentionality. Gestural constructedness is the fundamental feature of painting: subtle protrusions into physical space and handmade lines mark confidence, manifesting a belief that the audience and art share a realm where a conversation – a productive exchange – can occur. The digital space, on the other hand, subsumes its audience. It expects you to succumb to unreflective desire. This is why to lose yourself in a painting suggests the taking up of an invitation, an entry into a mutually constituted state of imaginative belief, whereas to lose yourself in a screen suggests a loss of will, a kind of death. 

Felix Reynolds layers planes and objects in such a way that distance and scale are unfixed. Each work is a landscape in which background and foreground are interchangeable, and as a new element becomes prominent for the particular viewer its context rearranges, the hierarchy moveable. A traditionally authoritarian digital vernacular is thus redeployed as a generous personal disclosure. 

The works themselves develop and reinforce an evolving spatial vocabulary; the mixture of the representational and abstract implies a universe in which such distinctions lack the specific weight they’ve been attributed by history. Grids and surfaces seem to both sustain and be sustained by the figures and fragments within, above or against them. This context of tradition and abstraction, lines and planes, welcomes the viewer’s agency, acknowledging that we now seem to experience all of history, especially art history, at once; an accelerating cascade that, piling up, eludes any satisfying description. Offered here is a formula that recognises history as indispensable (unavoidable) while resisting the temptation to narrativise it or treat it as a product to be contained or resolved. 

Some of the recreated objects herein have undergone numerous iterations: made, destroyed, recreated, preserved, archived, photographed, and now represented. Whereas we might traditionally think of shoelaces, unmarked pills or sculptural fragments as defined by the absence of the context from which they’ve been removed (the shoe, the pill bottle, the whole sculpture in its original location), the ever-new aesthetic of the digital is such that we’ve become accustomed to digesting a stream of data made coherent and relevant merely by its presence, or by the eminence of the authoritative device from which it glows, rather than as a result of what it’s preceded, followed, or surrounded by, or by any intrinsic value. In these works, the language of the operating system is inverted so that attention can be liberated from its increasingly common status as a property up for sale.

In these works, each element imports a singular history into a broader formal conversation within the long tradition of painting, where a particular occurrence or vision is created, contained and held still, a surface called to our attention. Objects and forms remind us of a history of representation, the sophistication and ambiguity of which is gradually being erased by the internet’s craving for categorical certainty. This prompts the question: what if, as we migrate through our screens, we lose our capacity for care for the particular? A particular work or particular object? But they refuse such an abandonment by demanding the viewer continually reposition their perspective and feeling, attending to an ever-shifting painterly and historical system of which they count themselves a part. It is as if you could walk across these surfaces and be gifted new modes of access to beauty, to experience, as shapes and textures orient themselves around you. 

The presentation of organic and made forms (animals, plants, materials, vessels) may seem, at first, frivolously orderless, but these works are organised by a logic of play and pleasure. If there is danger in the mindless sensuality of the digital, there is also danger in the self-seriousness of total rejection, the presumptiveness of claiming to know exactly how we must respond. Instead, we might discover ourselves, and our capacity for self-knowledge, by attending to a space that doesn’t know what we should make of it, that doesn’t mind what we make of it.

Dan Dixon

Installation images by Docqment

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