review Plain — Holly Fay

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At the Galleries

Jack Anderson

Review

Holly Fay: Plain

Although traditionally configures to record, depict or represent something specific and most often recognizable, any and all paintings are — in purely objective terms — nothing more than wet pigment applied to canvas.

Holly Fay’s latest exhibition, Plain, consists of two bodies of paintings, both of which are without recognizable reference points. We find numerous smaller paintings in which two bands of roughly surfaced colour are placed horizontally one above the other dividing the picture into two equal halves; as well, we find another group of larger almost monochromatic, paintings in which the whole surface is little more than a soft, hazy field of atmospheric colours. Reduced to a barebones minimum of information, both groups of paintings are visually simple; they are, well, plain.

Although Fay does not refer to her work as landscapes, her paintings certainly conjure the suggestion of them: despite being just pigment arranged on canvas, this one looks like a flaming sunset sky above loamy earth, while that one resembles shimmering sunlight reflected on the surface of deep blue water. Without any specific visual landmarks to guide us through these paintings, though, we can not be “where: they represent.

Clearly, Fay denies traditional landscape paradigms here, suggesting her interest lies not so much in “place” as the idea of place. Almost generic in their simplicity, it is possible that we respond or understand these images to be landscape, in part because they correspond in some vague undefined way to our experience of places that they resemble. Indeed, Fay’s work here interrogates our response to these images, asking how it is that mere bands of colour on canvas can be transformed in the mind’s eye into something we would call landscape. How is it that one looks like foreboding clouds above an amber patch of farm land?

We might be justified here in asking whether this is mere painterly navel-gazing, more an imaginative exercise akin to the childhood pastime of seeing objects in clouds as they float across the sky and our imaginations. But, without any details or shapes or any geographic or man-made features to latch on to, there is clearly something more going on here than that; something that evolves fleeting deep-seated memories that are somehow triggered and brought to consciousness by these configurations of colour.

Lie strange deja vue experiences, Fay’s paintings do not replicate remembered places — they awaken deeply felt, remembered experiences of them; felt, as Fay states, through having been to places like them, of having been bodily present in these kinds of places.

Clearly, if we extrapolate from this, fay suggests that consciousness itself, and thus knowledge, of the world are likewise dependent on bodily experience and therefore Fay’s inquiry denies French philosopher Rene Descartes’ famous dictum that “I think therefore I am,” purposing instead something more akin to “I perceive therefore I am.”

Fay’s use of painterly language (from colour to light, to gesture, to form) somehow congeals and conspires to mean something — and she asks here how it is possible for a painting to mean something without representing anything at all. And, in this way, her work is about the mechanism of meaning in painting and, more importantly, about how the world (reality) is itself understood to have meaning. In phenomenological terms, her landscapes indicate, then, that reality is not an empirical definable construct independent of experience, but is constructed in mind through body.

There is much discussion these days about how our viewing and reading of art and of reality is effected by what we bring to it as individuals, by our personal and cultural histories and by our unique intellectual points of view.

Fay’s simple, subtle and attractive paintings in part address this problem, looking past cultural issues such as gender and race — looking past differentiation — for answers, arriving ultimately at the notion of independent but mutual experience. Visually simple but conceptually heady, her generous work suggests that despite our differences, we do not just inhabit the world, but on some deep level share our understanding of it.