Paper Plates & Poisoned Porcelain 2019
Painting is about looking. In a first instance it is the artist looking. In the artists’ interrogative look, the prime concern is for the visual. Looking and noticing, that is both the eye and the mind’s eye of the painter. I think this probably holds not only for the resultant work of the artist but also their environment. Mondrian’s studio is an embodiment of the paintings, which, despite references - like Boogie Woogie – are nonetheless embodiments of his person. Even for a Barnett Newman the outside world exists and has its particular materiality for each artist. The beginning is looking and then doing something that very few of us go on to do, registering, noticing.
The infinitely small event or the overall mood, something discombobulated, analysed out of its environment and holding some fascination for the artist. In working on a painting the artist is the first onlooker. The work might emerge from looking backwards and forwards from object to subject by looking at and finding a particular translation, not a depiction or a reproduction …that would add nothing and the work always has to justify its existence in its own terms. Stand alone. There is more to be said about the multiplicity of what we could call sightings needed in making the work. And I need to come back to that in giving an account of this most recent group of works by Andreas Rüthi, stemming from time spent with the Glynn Vivian Museum’s collection of Swansea and Nantgarw porcelain, dating from precious years of production concentrated into less than a decade of the early 19th century.
I want to skip to us, to the viewers’ looking. What paintings ask us to do is to repay the looking of the artist in the material of pigments and medium and surface and application. Viewers have history and a lot already going on in their minds but the painting will offer a hook or a way in, if it engages (and not everything will engage). Mere imitation, the sense of a setup is less likely to stay in our minds (bar the odd Landseer lion perhaps) because the impact of a good work of art is what stays with us over time. Painting has a prolonged and diverting range of propensities and subject matters. It has had aspirations, ever since the Plato put-down of it never being able to be anything other than a simulacrum, incapable of giving the truth. By the time of Leonardo, painting had become a closer representation of the truth than painting was in Ancient Greece, but in contradistinction to mere material fact or practice, Leonardo was able to maintain:
“La Pittura è cosa mentale” (“painting is a thing of the mind”). The advent of photography seemed to seal painting’s fate, Delaroche supposedly maintained “From today painting is dead”, when in fact and persistently, painting has refused to be a still life - nature morte.
What of Andreas Rüthi’s looking at Swansea’s porcelain? Firstly there is the rationale that invites the proposition of this painter for this task. He has a long fascination for objects and a dialogue with art and areas of representation, a setting down of relationships in space and time. He works through periods of almost obsessive observation leading to a body of work that works both on and away from its original stimulus. In a recent Oriel Davies exhibition this saw him move from closely observed fungi from a botanical treatise to a fantasy forest floor in an overall arrangement on the gallery wall of a group of paintings in the shape of a large eye. And always in the work, issues of colour and translation from a reality to paint.
In the precious period in the second decade of the nineteenth century when factories at Swansea and Nantgarw developed a particular clay body and mix of frit and firing to attain what has become world renowned translucency, they formulated porcelain of pureness in both surface and substance that warranted only the finest of applied painting. So for Rüthi there is manifest here a meditation on surface form and decoration, splitting out for him the fundamentals of painting materials, subject and form and time to dwell on it and the resonance of the objects themselves, what they bear in the history of their making and their “use” and their collectability.
It is intriguing to think through this whole span of activity stretching from Lewis Weston Dillwyn to Rüthi’s work.
We then can encompass the entrepreneurial and scientific spirit behind the Cambrian Pottery in the porcelain years, moving as Dillwyn did from a botanist’s
observational “plates” of natural forms in river tributaries and Swansea Bay – the dense compact intense forms of algae, that were captured for engraved plates of his scientific treatise British Confervae or colored figures and descriptions of the British plants referred by botanists to the genus Conferva (London 1809) to porcelain fabrication, to luxury markets in the regency period to scholarship and collecting and Museum presentation to now the spreading Rorschach-like blots seeping over the large square canvases of Rüthi’s latest collection for the 21st century.
In immersing himself in this decorative art, the painter allows a progressive relishing of the design and the repetitions he sees in plate patterning and the hand painted. The painter continues ideas and thoughts around transposition of designs to surface, what was happening in the creation of these exquisite artifacts, and Rüthi makes a series of lateral thinking conceptual moves whilst painting what is before him with all the transpositions involved by an iterative observational process, governed by his logic around this material.
The choice of plates to work from is documented in photographs, each then enlarged to an approximation of the actual plate size, printed off and then laid flat on a surface, so already, when the images of the plates are cut out, some subtle distortion as well as flattening is already there. If fruit are placed on them then dialogue with three dimensional space is re-activated and Cézanne or Tintoretto-like (as in the vignette of apples in the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice) he paints from this new reality and seeks the sets of equivalences presented by these still-life arrangements including shadow play of real apples on “paper plates”.
There are the compositional questions of circular forms in rectangles and what a tondo form does inside a stabilizing rectangle and how the eye is pushed around the composition. The bright colour flat surface is not a background or naturalistic table top and maybe has more in common with Albers placing colour squares within squares, or where such twentieth century colour theory might meet renaissance “tondo” form. This sort of musing, it feels to me, as I explore these works, full of wit as they are, and redolent of “jeux d’esprit” , is actually part of this painter’s process. Or so it feels to me as onlooker. Painting as musing.
Painting is in dialogue constantly with other painting and remembers other painting or the feel of other work. There is a playfulness and brio in these paintings - in for example, the rendering of the repeated schematics of decoration - we get the idea and on and on so forth - that recalls forms and touch and colour over colour in particular Matisses. Ultimately, painting repays looking at other painting. Painting is enjoyed for such moments recalled or refreshed by a communing with other painting. The materiality of a scene, even exact mimesis, is a lesser pleasure than can be had from what we retain of paintings’ luscious approximations: the dabs in a Gwen John “saying” teapot, or an off white and cream in a Fantin Latour “saying” cup, the tones of cardboard and mottled paint in a Vuillard room or the worrying over surface that wants more than flowers in a David Jones.
Out of the selection of still lives the Glynn Vivian has asked Andreas Rüthi to put together to complement his own works, there is a test to apply: how many speak to us of painting more than of fruit in a bowl or fish on a plate? Fine examples of the genre, but what Andreas Rüthi is asking us to interrogate is the life of still painting - inert marks leading to some reverie. The pleasure is of touch and animation that the porcelain and the decoration permitted, not slavishly rendered, but exulting in those painterly approximations and of these being set at liberty and having associative painterly power.
This pretty world of the circular plate and its decorative topography can however also be symbolic. Edmund de Waal, guru of both the tales of porcelain and maker at the same time, alludes to the whiteness of Chinese porcelain and its association through its whiteness in an essay accompanying an exhibition in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (where you would also find Fantin Latour’s White cup and saucer): “White in China means clouds and mist, egrets, paper. It is also the colour of mourning…Porcelain is always in conversation.” Chinese celadon glazed pottery first acquired the legend that contact with poisoned food would affect the glaze and even cause splitting - choice examples, with a crackle in the surface, acquiring additional merit for the collector.
Over the exuberance of the large works, which lay flat on a table top and had to be encircled, worked in the round, by the painter, physical extends into metaphysical, and the plate/globe is subjected to a spreading but see-through pollutant stain, a different dialogue but one still owning to its original stimulus.
Painting is (about) looking.
David Alston
Exhibition view
Exhibition view
Exhibition view
Exhibition view
Still Life, 2019, 184 x 184 cm, oil on linen