8:20 - 3:40
September 7th - October 27th, 2024
Garner Art Center
Garnerville, NY
solo show
3:40 2024 60 x 96 inches oil on canvas
ESSAYS FROM THE CATALOG
CHAIRS
Kyle Utter
Clare Kambhu’s series of large scale paintings, depicting public school chairs on linoleum tile floors seen from above, are executed in a manner that is both fastidious and fluid – a tour de force in both representational ability and sensitivity to materials.
Kambhu’s keen observation is in tension with her severe cropping that reduces and abstracts the chairs upon first viewing. From a distance, these paintings read as bluish black trapezoids on gray fields. As one gets closer, harsh geometry gives way to masterfully nuanced articulations of form in pictorial space and the central trapezoid reveals itself as the seat of a chair. Move in even closer and Payne’s gray engulfs your entire field of vision as mimesis falls away to dark, painterly gesture. This back and forth foregrounds the paintings’ dialectic between dark formlessness and delineated, naturalistic illusion. There is a definite sense of pictorial space while at the same time the rhythmic daubs of thick impasto oil comprising the floor declare the materiality of paint and take you back to the surface.
It is clear that Kambhu uses a real-life referent to paint these chairs. The way she captures light hitting the seat and legs is carefully observed and makes it clear that she was looking at a specific chair in a specific location while painting. But the sheer number of chairs we have interacted with in public schools that look exactly like this one and the seriality of the paintings renders the subject general. These views of the seats could be from the perspective of many people. They are the visual residues shared by the public. The form and subject is universal, the facture is highly individuated.
Despite the fact that they are representational, I see these paintings in dialogue with mid-century abstraction. The black central corpus of the seat is locked into a surrounding ground composed of impasto-knitted gray oil paint, recalling the so-called ‘dark pictures’ of Philip Guston from the early to mid 1960s. The experience of standing close to the painting feels like that of encountering one of Lee Bontecou’s wall pieces as the void beckons. The reduced means, seriousness, and quietude evoke Mark Rothko.
There is something romantic about large scale paintings that celebrate the use of brush and oil paint. There’s a sort of heroism and a celebration of individuality that this painterly process embeds in its products. At the same time these paintings depict the every-chair of public schools. A chair that embodies aspirations towards universalism. Everyone has seen these chairs and thus the perspective of the paintings says almost nothing about whose viewpoint is being depicted. It is a view from nowhere, or everywhere. There is an oscillation between self and a non-self, between the individual and the universal. These oppositions echo the contradictions that our education system contains. It exists in the imagination as both a universalist institution and a site for creating self-actualizing individuals.
The large chair seat paintings repeat. There is an unrelenting insistence on the same form, palette, composition and vantage point. The repetition evokes slow rhythms, pauses, and lulls, with intimations of ritual. They are meditative and somber, their affect is calm, a result of narrow chroma, inanimate subject matter, considered and controlled brush strokes and repetitions across paintings. A certain predictability emerges. Perhaps it is the calm that comes from dependable, sustained ritual — the ringing of bells, the taking of attendance, the morning announcements. But this calm affect may also come from an interior deadening via an acclimation to dread. A dread that is found in the anesthetizing refuge of predictable work. Instructions and schedules provide an escape from freedom, relief from contingency. The chair seat becomes a cathexis object, a quadrilateral stop sign where the painter returns repeatedly, trying to retrieve some part of herself that was forcibly splintered off as teacher or student.
Chair no. 20 2024 60 x 60 inches oil on canvas
Chair no. 22 2024 60 x 60 inches oil on canvas
Rubric 2019 - present 36 x 24 inches oil on panel
RUBRIC
Kyle Utter
One must take an up close look at Clare Kambhu’s two by three foot painting depicting the standardized grading rubric of the International Baccalaureate visual art class to appreciate the stunning accuracy with which she has shaped each letter free hand with thick, impasto oil paint application. Without this up close inspection the viewer may assume that the letters have been mechanically transferred to the panel. The first time I leaned in for a closer look, an unnerving awe descended upon me as I realized that the letters are hand shaped.
But how do these letters shape us? Everyone has interacted with forms like this which dictate goals, responsibilities or liabilities. So how do these forms motivate or inform our interactions with the people and the world around us?
Inspecting the painted rubric, we learn that students should “use materials appropriate to their intentions.” What if my intentions are only revealed to me through my material choices? The language of the rubric promotes a linear determinism which envisages the action of the past upon the present. This leaves little room for intuitive making where one reflects on their own material choices after the fact to better understand their own motivations and surroundings. This gives a certain primacy to language and makes the visual, material object merely an illustration of a language based statement. Kambhu’s Rubric raises questions about how the way we measure ourselves and our outputs impacts what we make and do. At what point do we begin valuing symbols of achievement over actual achievement? What happens to improvisation and free association, ways of making which resist quantifiable assessment?
The depicted paper appears to be sitting on the surface of the painting, bringing to mind a tradition of trompe l’oeil painting, in which printed matter such as playing cards, engravings and newspapers have been objects of depiction for centuries. Effectively pictures of pictures, trompe l’oeil paintings employ the most humble of pictorial genre, the still life, for a highly conceptual and self-reflexive end; to represent representation.
Kambhu’s painting speaks to the idea of representation in two ways. The first is pictorial representation: how painted images can depict the visual appearance of things, such as a piece of paper. The second is linguistic representation: how educational documents are created to represent our values and thus expectations for students. I see Kambhu’s painting as meta-representational; that is, a representation of a representation, or a representational image of a linguistic representation of values. The piece of paper depicted in the painting is a medium for circulating values, a kind of currency that validates certain types of making over others. This brings to mind the way American painters of the late 19th century such as John Haberle, introduced the depiction of paper money into the trompe l’oeil genre. These painters, with their visual trickery, play with deception in order to question legitimacy and remind us that sometimes, things are not what they seem.
The paper in the painting becomes thick. The oil paint is built up to the point where it visibly extends an inch off the panel surface into our real space. As such the paper becomes a corporeal presence and is perceived simultaneously as a mass of paint and the depiction of a piece of paper. The paper rubric becomes heavy with engraved letters like the tablets of Exodus presented to us from on high: Thou shalt “select and use materials appropriate to your intentions.” It turns art-making, that thing that should be light, full of dancing, spontaneity and folly into something leaden, weighted down with compliance.
A painstaking amount of labor and patience has gone into meticulously building up and carving out each letter. It’s as if the artist has turned painting into administrative work, clocking in and spending a half hour on each letter. How long does it take Kambhu to complete an entire box within the rubric? How long does it take IB professionals to formulate the language in that same box? The painting becomes a hand-chiseled monument to the routines of education and the bureaucracy surrounding it, bidding us to marvel at procedural tedium and bringing, in the words of Mierle Leiderman Ukeles, “a bit of Artmagic to the city bureaucracy.”
So is this a memo on how to read the exhibition and the rest of the works in it? Does Kambhu follow these dictums in her own personal studio practice? After all, the painting looks unfinished. At the bottom of the rubric, pictorial description dissolves into a mass of errant brush strokes. We are reminded of the materiality of the paint and brought onto the surface of the panel. I wonder if this is “in line with her intentions”? I’m not sure that it’s important for the viewer to know. Leaving the painting in this seemingly unfinished state is like pulling aside the veil to reveal the state of material becoming that underlies all painting and allows the painting to be more than window dressing for an idea. An action becomes an image, a gesture. A figure is frozen in the medial nowhere between two positions and two moments, making visible to the viewer an unfolding as part of a continuous process.
