Prof. William Ganis, Wells College, reviews a show at the String Room Gallery, March 2010
Lakes Affect: monotypes and paintings by Neil Berger
An abiding dialogue between mediation and representation unifies Neil Berger’s works. While all artists have to find adequate means to express their concepts, Berger engages a philosophy of depiction in which he chooses among painterly marks. These gestures are both deft and pleasing—they also convey objects, places or atmosphere. While his hand is identifiable throughout this exhibition, Berger does not have a signature stroke (like the Impressionists) or gesture (like the Abstract-Expressionists) but employs a range of painter’s symbols—his idiomatic visual language. Berger’s monotypes and paintings are also unified by attitudinal approaches that might be described by the Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi that encompasses the transience, solitude, melancholy and imperfection found within these paintings and prints. In certain works, Berger emphasizes a Japanese visual strategy; pieces such as Willows—Wauconda, Il (2007) emphasize foreground objects much as woodblock prints by Hiroshige and other ukiyo-e artists.
True to the wabi-sabi sensibility, Berger’s images are not the picturesque Finger Lakes beauty shots found in wineries and tourist galleries, but are the liminal spaces of spindly, late-growth forests, winter farm fields, and settler-family cemeteries. These are the ubiquitous locations of quiet beauty experienced through car travel, wayfaring on cross-country skis, and dog walks; they do not have the “wow” factor of the area’s lake vistas, waterfalls or gorges; but are experienced through enduring contemplation of the landscape. For those who remain after the lake home owners and wine tasters vanish, these are decidedly our views—of mud season, electric sunrises yielding to cloudy days, transient vernal streams, and a January thaw’s patchy snows. Even Berger’s images of Taughannock Falls do not show the iconic views of the plunge, but focus on misted and iced details.
Berger creates visual dichotomies between representation and abstraction—works such as Creekbed (2008) can be difficult to read. At least for a moment, the work staves off resolution and we are forced to see it as pigment and paper, lights and shadows, brushstrokes and voids. Winter Willows (2007) similarly reads as abstracted painterly swaths until the horizon provides an orienting visual outcome.
Berger’s monotypes embody the paradoxes of representation. Contradicting his oil paintings that are made by building layers of physical pigment, in his monotypes he often marks illusions and highlights by removing pigments in a subtractive process that can leave expressive traces. This deduction is most evident in Berger’s interpretation of the patterned dress in Sophie Scholl (2008). His monotype prints are mirrors, literally reversed from what he’s painted onto a piece of Plexiglass before printing the image onto paper. The prints flatten and distance the artist’s hand even while maintaining its gestural nuances. Fitting his transient subjects, the prints are a kind of memento mori that simultaneously mark the artist’s presence and absence.
We have inherited “figurative” and “abstract” from mid-twentieth-century formalist discourse, especially as Clement Greenberg, among other mid-century critics, posited that artistic progress was a move toward abstraction and self-reference in any single medium. However, in recent years, the critic Barry Schwabsky offered an update that alters the well-worn figurative/abstract dichotomy. In his essay for the Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (2002) survey, Schwabsky discusses a conceptual and linguistic level for art-making whereby today “a painting is not only about a painting but also the representation of an idea about painting”. He sums up the problem, “the painting is not there to represent the image; the image exists in order to represent the painting.” In other words, “figuration” is a vehicle to give the viewer a foothold in order to reveal the artist’s approach and mediation—we must remember that painting, whether realistic or nonfigurative, is still always an abstraction, a distillation from an experience of a place.
Photographic media have also complicated the abstraction/realism dichotomy. Photography has to be an image of something; even at its most conceptual level, it captures conditions of light. As such, this medium renders everything an “image”—not exactly “abstract” or “figurative” but more a range of “unrecognizable” to “identifiable” as evidenced by the paradox of Aaron Siskind’s “abstract” photographs that show peeling paint or torn posters. These paradoxes of visual interpretation are brought up in the works Berger makes after photographs, namely the Sophie Scholl monotype and the oil painting Confirmation — from August Sander (2008), though he is not trying to make photorealistic renderings. He beautifully captures the tonal ranges and uniform flatness of silver-gelatin prints in his monotypes, but the marks in his photo-inspired works come from his experience of painting portraits and landscapes. In Sophie Scholl , the spontaneity, quality of lighting and facial gradations read as photographic, (as does the heartbreaking, idiosyncratic way she rests her hand on her forearm) but the print is infused with calligraphic patterns. In Confirmation , Berger does not attempt to render the optical quality of the blurriness outside the shallow depth of field in Sander’s famous photograph from ca. 1911, Moreover, he freely rewrites this black-and-white photo in bright oil colors.
That Berger makes marks readily showing their ambiguity as material presence and as illusionistic representation, is another marker of wabi-sabi , and the Zen Buddhist philosophy that questions the nature of reality. In this worldview, sensual experience is always false and illusory. For Berger, this unstable aesthetic oscillating between states that can’t be fully grasped as physical or as representation, abstract or figurative, heightens his works’ quiet, emotive power.
Lakes Affect: monotypes and paintings by Neil Berger
An abiding dialogue between mediation and representation unifies Neil Berger’s works. While all artists have to find adequate means to express their concepts, Berger engages a philosophy of depiction in which he chooses among painterly marks. These gestures are both deft and pleasing—they also convey objects, places or atmosphere. While his hand is identifiable throughout this exhibition, Berger does not have a signature stroke (like the Impressionists) or gesture (like the Abstract-Expressionists) but employs a range of painter’s symbols—his idiomatic visual language. Berger’s monotypes and paintings are also unified by attitudinal approaches that might be described by the Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi that encompasses the transience, solitude, melancholy and imperfection found within these paintings and prints. In certain works, Berger emphasizes a Japanese visual strategy; pieces such as Willows—Wauconda, Il (2007) emphasize foreground objects much as woodblock prints by Hiroshige and other ukiyo-e artists.
True to the wabi-sabi sensibility, Berger’s images are not the picturesque Finger Lakes beauty shots found in wineries and tourist galleries, but are the liminal spaces of spindly, late-growth forests, winter farm fields, and settler-family cemeteries. These are the ubiquitous locations of quiet beauty experienced through car travel, wayfaring on cross-country skis, and dog walks; they do not have the “wow” factor of the area’s lake vistas, waterfalls or gorges; but are experienced through enduring contemplation of the landscape. For those who remain after the lake home owners and wine tasters vanish, these are decidedly our views—of mud season, electric sunrises yielding to cloudy days, transient vernal streams, and a January thaw’s patchy snows. Even Berger’s images of Taughannock Falls do not show the iconic views of the plunge, but focus on misted and iced details.
Berger creates visual dichotomies between representation and abstraction—works such as Creekbed (2008) can be difficult to read. At least for a moment, the work staves off resolution and we are forced to see it as pigment and paper, lights and shadows, brushstrokes and voids. Winter Willows (2007) similarly reads as abstracted painterly swaths until the horizon provides an orienting visual outcome.
Berger’s monotypes embody the paradoxes of representation. Contradicting his oil paintings that are made by building layers of physical pigment, in his monotypes he often marks illusions and highlights by removing pigments in a subtractive process that can leave expressive traces. This deduction is most evident in Berger’s interpretation of the patterned dress in Sophie Scholl (2008). His monotype prints are mirrors, literally reversed from what he’s painted onto a piece of Plexiglass before printing the image onto paper. The prints flatten and distance the artist’s hand even while maintaining its gestural nuances. Fitting his transient subjects, the prints are a kind of memento mori that simultaneously mark the artist’s presence and absence.
We have inherited “figurative” and “abstract” from mid-twentieth-century formalist discourse, especially as Clement Greenberg, among other mid-century critics, posited that artistic progress was a move toward abstraction and self-reference in any single medium. However, in recent years, the critic Barry Schwabsky offered an update that alters the well-worn figurative/abstract dichotomy. In his essay for the Vitamin P: New Perspectives in Painting (2002) survey, Schwabsky discusses a conceptual and linguistic level for art-making whereby today “a painting is not only about a painting but also the representation of an idea about painting”. He sums up the problem, “the painting is not there to represent the image; the image exists in order to represent the painting.” In other words, “figuration” is a vehicle to give the viewer a foothold in order to reveal the artist’s approach and mediation—we must remember that painting, whether realistic or nonfigurative, is still always an abstraction, a distillation from an experience of a place.
Photographic media have also complicated the abstraction/realism dichotomy. Photography has to be an image of something; even at its most conceptual level, it captures conditions of light. As such, this medium renders everything an “image”—not exactly “abstract” or “figurative” but more a range of “unrecognizable” to “identifiable” as evidenced by the paradox of Aaron Siskind’s “abstract” photographs that show peeling paint or torn posters. These paradoxes of visual interpretation are brought up in the works Berger makes after photographs, namely the Sophie Scholl monotype and the oil painting Confirmation — from August Sander (2008), though he is not trying to make photorealistic renderings. He beautifully captures the tonal ranges and uniform flatness of silver-gelatin prints in his monotypes, but the marks in his photo-inspired works come from his experience of painting portraits and landscapes. In Sophie Scholl , the spontaneity, quality of lighting and facial gradations read as photographic, (as does the heartbreaking, idiosyncratic way she rests her hand on her forearm) but the print is infused with calligraphic patterns. In Confirmation , Berger does not attempt to render the optical quality of the blurriness outside the shallow depth of field in Sander’s famous photograph from ca. 1911, Moreover, he freely rewrites this black-and-white photo in bright oil colors.
That Berger makes marks readily showing their ambiguity as material presence and as illusionistic representation, is another marker of wabi-sabi , and the Zen Buddhist philosophy that questions the nature of reality. In this worldview, sensual experience is always false and illusory. For Berger, this unstable aesthetic oscillating between states that can’t be fully grasped as physical or as representation, abstract or figurative, heightens his works’ quiet, emotive power.