Bright as youth
Exhibition Text for ‘Glittering Shadows’, Glasgow
Bright as youth, a promise arches between them. And where is its substance: in a face, a sound, a movement, a fleeting configuration of surfaces? Arching from one to the other, threading these loose strands, these stranded instances, into the Human Tapestry. . There is the giving face, steady eyes, mouth in waves of supple movement. In this room: relics of forgotten moments, idly brushed into the present by vague glances. Recent leather sighs under shifting weight. Some obscure imperative drives tapping fingers, random rhythm in this intricate mesh of them and here and now. Every tightening of flesh, each new curve and angle, draws a desire, draws a response. What did he really say? Anticipation vaults over intention, skewing its trajectory. I mean, really? As their light subsides, features and gestures lose something of their sharpness. The blurry texture of voices gradually drapes across vision’s angular framework. Perhaps language is all that finally binds us, stitching us securely to ourselves and to the rest. The persistence of “I”, the constancy of “you”. Everything here, the thick of it … implication … insinuation … inference. A promise issuing from imagined depth, a promise of depth. Evidence fails. We are beyond the reach of scientific enquiry.
Between eye and hand, for instance, an empty field of expectation. I think I know what is happening: I have been in this area before, seen these movements, heard these words, sensed these feelings. I have watched my share of films and read enough books. But how much of this structure of immediate engagement is simply borrowed from such memory? This other person who now absorbs my attention: what can I possibly know of them? Who are you? This is not an abstract, disinterested enquiry: it is my question and it now curls around me like a snake: and who, it demands, is the one who asks? Must I know myself before knowing the other, or is all such knowledge produced in those shifting, contingent moments of our exchange? Myself and the other; no more and no less than a growing realisation: a becoming.
Portraiture is the challenge accepted by Dani Marti: how to represent not only an other individual, but also a set of relationships, be they physical, psychological, imaginary? Likeness alone, physical resemblance within the representation, is inadequate to this challenge. Likeness must take its place alongside a host of more abstract qualities and concepts, such as appearance, presence, impression, inconsistency, projection, desire, will, time and place. And this other being that the portrait wishes to capture is already a representation, an accumulation of codified signs and conventional expectations. To approach the “real” of the other, we need to somehow risk venturing beyond the comfort zone of the stereotype. We must be prepared to confront the disconcerting incomprehensibility of otherness itself. For ‘otherness’ is not solely a quality of all that is non-self (the object of the representation – the “sitter” within the portrait upon whom attention is directed); it is also a quality that pervades and threatens to undermine the self (the subjects of representation – the artist and the viewer who gaze upon that “sitter”). To think otherwise would be utterly presumptuous: solipsism of the highest order. There are no absolutes here, no eternal verities upon which to rest. Under such circumstances, as Marti demonstrates, the conventional strategies of portraiture – its reliance upon, among others, likeness, verifiability, consistency and an appeal to traditional humanist values – are no longer sufficient in themselves to accommodate this complexity. New modes of analogy and homology, for example, will be called upon to play their part. Abstraction and connotation operate on a par with figuration and denotation; woven fibres and textured surfaces will signify as much as moving video images on a flat, bright screen; and fact will share equal status with fiction, desire and fantasy. The portrait must not congeal.