Walking The Line #23: City's Edge
9/17/2006
by Gary Michael Dault

I think paintings are best enjoyed up close—up really close, so that you’re breathing on the canvas and the museum guards are getting ready to pounce.

Only in this way can you really see what the painter has done.  

Only in this way can you feel the paint heaving in the wake of the painter’s brush; only up close can you read the painter’s handwriting and hear it whispering the stories it remembers from the painting act.

When you first encounter the new paintings of Martin Pearce—there is currently a selection of them at Toronto’s Rebecca Gallery—you are apt to imagine (and you have every reason to do so) that Pearce has decided to go with the all-over, post-Pollock look: flecks and smears and outcroppings and excavations of oil pigment everywhere, frame-edge to frame-edge, in a way that can look, if you don’t gaze for very long, heavy, thronged, muddy and congested.

That’s why it’s a good thing to get up close. As James Elkins writes in his rhapsodic, up-close study What Painting Is (Routledge, 2000), “Substance can express any feeling, any motion” (p.197). Motion, notice, and not “emotion”. Meaning in painting does not depend, Elkins insists, on what a painting is about. Rather, a painting’s meaning, he argues, “is there at a lower level, in every inch of a canvas. A brushstroke is an exquisite record of the speed and force of the hand that made it, and if I think of the hand moving across the canvas—or better, if I just retrace it without thinking—I learn a great deal about what I see. Painting is scratching, scraping, waving, jabbing, pushing and dragging” (p.97).

And, in Martin Pearce’s case, painting is also applying pigment and removing it again, digging, chipping, sanding, maybe tearing at it with your fingernails. Pearce operates as if he were a surrogate for erosion, for the wearing away of the landscape by force and time. Pearce is a kind of weather.  

I walked up to within three inches of the surface of Pearce’s painting, City’s Edge (2005), and found that there was a teeming world there and that this world was spread out panoramically before me, as if I were floating high above the landscape and were suddenly privy to that eagle’s view that, for example, Albrecht Altdorfer (c.1480-1538) gives us in his astonishing The Battle of Alexander at Issus (1525)—in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich—where, against a molten sunset, you can watch, suspended above the fray, thousands of tiny soldiers far below, clashing in the light of the waning day.

I walked up to within three inches of the surface of Pearce’s paintings, and found houses, barns, churches (some with elaborate domes, built there by a scratchy brushful or two of oil paint)—habitation nestled in, clinging to, the landscape rukus. It seemed inevitable that Pearce should also turn his pictorial attentions to the mimicking of certain of the earth’s loci of abrasion: quarries, for example (see such paintings as Quarried Landscape, and Exposed Chalk 1, for example).  

In such a way do you find that, looked at up close, Martin Pearce’s paintings—paintings such as his Late Victorian, Hill Structure, and (my current favourite) City’s Edge—are porous, raw and distressed and perhaps almost exhaustingly complex in surface incident, in minute painterly event (where all the roiling texturing sometimes leads the painting to read, initially anyhow, as geological crust, as a clash of processes and procedures—just like the embroiled surface of the earth we walk every day), but that given a sudden, detached moment for re-focussing, they lift you up and out, and offer you (actually they insist on it) a newly lensed look: a vista where you have suddenly been heaved back from an intimate inspection of the canvas to a panoptic one.  It’s a privileged view, and it comes as a shock of optical and metaphysical readjustment. If the lenses of perception were cleansed, suggested the mystic poet William Blake, everything would appear as it actually is: infinite.

”These paintings”, writes Martin Pearce in his gallery statement, “derive from diverse landscape environments and from the complex narratives that are part of their fabric both on the surface and at depth”. The “fabric of the surface” yields a vigorous, raucous, painterly experience: the clotted membrane that is the modernist re-visitation of the expressionist picture-plane. “The fabric of depth” generates a longer vision: a humanist vision, in which the surface of the painting and the pigmented engagement that made it the way it is, now come to a sort of rhyming, procedurally speaking, with the what Pearce identifies as “the sense of continuous removal and remaking” which is “fundamental to the processes that have shaped and continue to shape the earth”.

The paintings offer, in other words, a “horizontally” performative painted surface which aligns itself with the other modernist surface treatments. At the same time, they also offer—and here is the transformative moment in which Pearce’s originality is incarnated—a “vertically” performative painted surface which aligns itself with the sudden ascensions of sublimity, of transcendence, of a species of visual omniscience by which the viewer is able to see more than there is to see.

“The task”, writes Pearce, “is to find equivalents in painting for an experience that is sensory, perceptual and conceptual”. Yes, and liminal too, if the experiential margin that is glimpsed in the paintings is the site of what might be thought of as a painterly kind of hypostasis: hypostasis being—and Elkins’s definition is as useful as anybody’s—“the feeling that something as dead as paint might also be deeply alive, full of thought and expressive meaning”.        

Paint means. And Martin Pearce’s paint means much.