Dereck Harris:  Dark Carnival by Glenn Ward

Several of Dereck Harris’ recent paintings were begun in comparative isolation during the Covid lockdown period of 2020-2021, while supporting his wife in caring for her seriously ill father. I begin with this biographical detail because it chimes with the eerily ambivalent staging of choreographed figures in Harris’ work. At one level his bodies teem with muscular vitality, visceral mastery and velocity which push against their surrounding darkness. But at another level they appear sapped of life: often freeze-framed in an indeterminate and ineffable space, awash with a miasma of bilious green, they can appear as arrangements of corpses or configurations of flayed bodies. In other words, they often hover between life and death. This sense of wavering in-between-ness is a major part of the paintings’ uneasy affect.

Harris’ images derive from videos of performances choreographed by Damien Jalet. The artist is drawn to them largely for their sense of ego transcendence or loss of self, as the performers can often be seen to enact orgiastic rituals or ceremonies. For Harris, the images – whatever Jalet’s original intentions – speak of ecstasy or rapture, akin perhaps to Georges Bataille’s description of excess and expenditure as eclipses of the socially productive self. But, taken as a series, the paintings approach this broad theme from several angles. Cyber Ascent (2001) suggests bodily and perhaps spiritual ascension, the kind of aeriality we sometimes experience in dreams. The earlier Silent Slippers II and III (2019) (based on a film of Maurice Bejart’s Rite of Spring) have a different relationship to gravity. Implying an interstitial state of anticipation, pause or transition, the low, close point of view in these paintings emphasise the verticality of the legs and the inky depths of their surroundings, but also the solid horizontality of the floor upon which they quite securely stand. In Le Sacre: Sisters’ Oath (2018) (also based on Bejart’s Rite) and The Rite of Spring: Sisters’ Dance (2022) (adapted from a Pina Bausch image of her Rite production) we can easily imagine the dancers as participants in some cultish ritual of supposed transcendence devised by a self-appointed messianic leader. Over all, the works recognise that any number of deletrious outcomes can result from loss of self control; absorption into the non-self of the mass may be ecstatically liberating, but is by no means necessarily so.

These paintings manifest attraction and repulsion – or seduction and fear – in equal measure. Much depends on Harris’ selection and treatment. The images are not merely appropriated, but are subtly and crucially modified through multiple mediations and through his fastidious techniques. Harris captures stills from YouTube videos of Jalet’s work, crops them, sometimes stretches and compresses them, filters them through Photoshop (usually with a transformation of the chromatic base) and then painstakingly transcribes them via projection onto paper or canvas. He initially works the image up in layers of quite weak ‘shading grey’ acrylic airbrush paint, gradually establishing defined tones. Colour is then often added to the image with brushed glazes. To some extent, through these elaborate processes and craft techniques – editing, tracing, glazing and spraying (it is tempting to say that the airbrush breathes the pigment on) - Harris aims to individualise the potentially mechanical or electronic overtones of his precise and homogeneous surfaces. But only to some extent. It is part of the paintings’ eerie affects that Harris conceals his hand in the act of revealing it. Touch is arrested at the moment it is exposed.

Harris has talked about how phantasmagorical artists of various genres inhabit his “imaginarium”: an interest in gothic, faerie and visionary romantics as diverse as William Blake, Henry Fuseli and Richard Dadd inform the background of his work. For Harris, these protagonists share psychic space with late Goya and El Greco. Unlike fantasy or myth, Harris’ images do not proffer alternative worlds or sites for escapism (suspension of disbelief, or willingness to believe). They offer no balm for the human condition, no catharsis. In their sense of uncertainty and liminality they come closer to Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as a zone of equivocation between (a) supernatural, marvellous and ‘faerie’ understandings of strange events (‘these are demons’) and (b) ‘natural’ explanations of such events (‘these figures seem to be enacting a black mass, or am I imagining it?’). Hence the fantastic does not build new worlds, but defamiliarises what we take as real, and tests the truth by rendering it strange and other.

Harris’ paintings are therefore not merely ambiguous for the sake of it, and nor are they instances of a fantasy genre. After all, they depict, at whatever remove from the referent, real staged events. Nevertheless, those events take on a fantastic appearance in Harris’ treatment of the mise-en-scène of alterity. I have already hinted that the fantastic mode ushers in category crises. As Harris’ paintings demonstrate, borders between self/other, human/nonhuman, animate/inanimate, life/death, us/them, fear/desire, individual/mass (and many others) are interrogated though not overcome in fantastic works.

For example, Harris’ figures are often hybridised with the post-humanist cyber-body of science fiction: in paintings like Incantation and Dark Refrain (both 2021) futurity meets archaism as – with the aid of Harris’ sprayed blurring of edges - arteries, sinews, seams and creases begin simulteously to resemble electrical cables, wires and coils. Categories of flesh, garment and technology slide and fuse tellingly. Bernini is filtered through David Cronenberg’s body horror; El Greco’s Laocoön (1614) is restyled after H.R Giger’s biomechanical inventions. The exoskeletons seemingly attached to some of these bodies stress an unhuman-ness that was already implicit in their lack of interiority: the material ‘thingness’ of their powerful muscular-skeletal forms exceeds any sense of individual subjectivity. This is vital to Harris’ apprehensive fascination with the quest for a dissolution of self in ecstatic experiences. This ambivalence is articulated in paintings like Screen Flight (2022), where discernible bodies are ‘paused’ in the moment of either emerging from or merging into the mass.

Taken side by side, Web Zeal (Study) (2020) and Web Zeal (2021) exemplify Harris’ methods. Harris has spoken of the “awkward and contorted articulation” of the bodies in his source image, from a film of Jalet’s Vessels (2020). The awkwardness follows through into a broader sense of discomfiture. In both iterations we see an echo of Francis Bacon as their ‘spotlight’ effectively grounds the figures by demarcating a stage for their postures while isolating their corporeality against the stygian depths. Harris has observed that the images present “a tight, knuckle-like-cluster of bodies about to explode with glee”. Yet any dormant jouissance remains unseen and presumably unachieved. Individual subjectivities are erased as the knotted figures hide their faces and their bodies appear to meld (see in particular the cluster of hands and arms). But none of this quite amounts to orgiastic frenzy. We cannot be sure whether these bodies are bound together in defence and revulsion against a world of horror, or pregnant with a vitality on the brink of release.

In the original still, the performers’ skin appears glistening and oily, but especially in the first Web Zeal painting the skin seems more transluscent, suggestive of a radiograph. This offers no clues, but adds further layers of uncertainty – we hesitate between different responses - to what we see. There is also the suggestion of pain here. But we are unsure what sort of pain, and of who or what is its agent; binary thinking around notions of activity and passivity in relation to the scenario does not apply. Harris’ and our own viewing-and-desiring position is similarly impossible to call: are sadistic or masochistic impulses implicated in it? Is the unknowable event observed voyeuristically? Thus the figures in both versions of Web Zeal are only doubtfully protected against the surrounding gloom; their enclosing pool of light becomes a precarious platform, shortly to collapse into the void.

Mikhail Bakhtin proposes that the fantastic can be part of the carnivalesque, in as much as both are sites of misrule in which the self is subsumed, and ‘official’ accounts of the world temporarily break down and liquefy. In some cases (Bakhtin’s chief example is Dostoevsky), the dissolution of categories and dichotomies comes with a descent into a criminal, deranged or deathly underworld. In this case, the eclipse of self by otherness presents an ontological threat as much as an unconscious desire. Hence dread is often part and parcel of Harris’ seemingly Dionysian phantasmagoria. Open Sourcery I and II (2020-21) seem especially diabolical, and the three Ecstatic Manoeuvres paintings (2023) have an air of brutal subterrananean debauchery. The slight blur with which Harris treats his subjects makes a significant contribution. As well as implying movement, it hints at, without closely imitating, the electronic screen. The subtle haziness alludes to the odd absence/presence of digital-realism and to the detached proximity of the online image. To emphasise the point, Harris acknowledges his source by incorporating a slightly soft-focus YouTube progress bar into some of the compositions. Possibly introducing a note of order and containment to images suggestive of wild abandon, this bar arguably has the effect of further distancing us from the ‘onscreen action’ while reminding us that we are seeing a slice of time-motion that would normally escape the naked eye. (To this extent the paintings recall the revelationist tradition in photography, which is to say that the photographic image reveals truths that are otherwise invisible). Meanwhile Harris’ use of queasy greens does more than add to the digital effect: it is redolent of night-vision cameras picking out incidents which, being under cover of darkness, are ordinarily unseen. Quite what such incidents consist of depends on a viewer’s imagination which cannot fully delineate or comprehend them. In some cases we may even feel that we are witness to something awful and forbidden accessed on the ‘Dark Web’ of popular mythology: quite literally a ‘dark carnival’ of that which is normally offscreen, this moder equivalent of the underworld has come to stand for the terrifying beyond. The ‘Dark Web’ functions as a repository of evil, an updated take on uncharted waters in ancient maps, inscribed with dragons.

All of this is condensed into Harris’ tenebrism. A baroque style concerned with dramatic relations of light and shade, tenebrism overlaps or combines with chiaroscuro (it is associated with Caravaggio among others). But whereas chiaroscuro embraces modulations of light and shadow, tenebrism foregrounds the dramatic illumination of forms against impenetrably dark backgrounds. As with Harris’ approach to the style, in tenebrist paintings darkness occupies a large expanse of the canvas. On one hand, the profound darkness of space throws the brightly lit bodies into an intense radiance through force of contrast. On the other hand, the darkness is all the deeper through contrast with areas of illumination. One possible response to this is that objects and bodies gleam with a spiritual ‘inner light.’ Born from within nothingness, light may be given by God just as in Greek mythology it is distributed by Apollo; hence light manifests life against death; presence against absence; God against Godlessness; enlightenment against ignorance; rationality against fear. Of course, the fantastic impulse rebels against the neatness of these comforting dualities. In Harris’ hands, darkness continually threatens to overwhelm the scene and annihilate the performers. In Ecstatic Manoeuvres II a pyramid of figures apparently engaged in near-Sadean sexual activity can be seen as caught in a moment of abandon; abandonment of self seems to be metaphorised by the unilluminated depths which creep over, infiltrate and fragment the bodies. The baleful mood is amplified the closer we look, as the enveloping gloom makes illuminated forms incomplete and indistinct and, in the process, expands the space for fantastic speculation. A misty area to the left of the central figure can be at the same time hair, and a photograph of ectoplasm taken by a Victorian spiritualist; a peculiar being at the top of the pyramid is a trick of the light, but to my mind it is a deformed, insectoid hybrid of man and beast (reminiscent of the dead Martian in Quatermass and the Pit (Roy Ward Baker, 1967); the figure towards the bottom right seems to be on day release from Hieronymus Bosch’s Hell (1504). In these and many other examples, Harris’ tenebrism plays a key role in his fantastic treatment of ecstatic transport and bodily excess. Darkness can be railed against but not defeated; both enthralled and appalled, we are tempted to the edge of the precipice. The fantastic mode, then, involves desire. Seeking compensation for cultural constraints and lack, the fantastic beholds phenomena beyond (or imagined to be beyond) ‘ordinary’ categories and hierarchies, yet keeps these just out of reach through endless hesitation and doubt. As Harris’ paintings demonstrate, this fascinated mode of dis/belief deals in vicarious tracings of transgression: the unhuman, the body of the other and the imagined ‘outside of culture.’ Yet if this implies a search for ‘compensation,’ it can no more be fully attained than desire can be wholly known or satisfied. Fantastic connotations are too slippery and numerous to provide wish fulfilment. Instead, we are offered sites for multifarious and shifting fantasmatic investments which can fleetingly expose social ruptures and unseal tender wounds. The problem may be compounded by the possibility that the non-self is an unconscious projection of the self, representing something unacceptable lurking in the psyche.

Thus, Harris’ tableaux simultaneously invite and withhold the immersive or identificatory experience we might expect from genres of either marvellous or decadent fantasy. Since the fantastic in Todorov’s sense resists closure in order to decentre the world and our place it, it is, as Bataille puts it, “sovereign in the desire for the object, not the possession of it.” This may be to say – in any case, Harris’ paintings suggest it - that fantastic tropes keep desired transgression at arm’s length, in order to keep desire alive and the carnival open.

Glenn Ward