Dereck Harris:  Ecstatic Void by Jane Lee

Mais ne suffit-il pas que tu sois l’apparence, Pour rejouir un coeur qui fuit la verite? Qu’importe ton betise ou ton indifference? Masque ou décor, salut! J’adore ta beaute.

But isn’t it enough that you are appearance,
To gladden the heart which flees from truth?
What does your stupidity matter or your indifference?
Mask or painted background, I salute you! I adore your beauty(1).

L’amour du mensonge, (To love the lie) Charles Baudelaire, 1860.

This series of Dereck Harris’ paintings is a “paradis artificiel” but it is not this, which brings Baudelaire immediately into my discussion. It is rather a remark which Yves Bonnefoy made in an essay concerning painting in the Seicento. “It is really in the seventeenth century and in Italy,” writes Bonnefoy, “that the image, in the Baudelairean sense of the suggestion of a reality alongside our own, would have been lived with the greatest ardour”(2). The phrase in French is... realite en concurrence... and has the sense of a reality not only alongside but slightly in competition with our own. There is a distance which comes into being with the image.

A great deal associates these new paintings with the paintings of the Baroque. A large figure looms within a vapourous or unidentifiable background. Extremes of foreshortening and cropping tend to dismember the body. The mobility of “point
of view”, which goes even to the extreme of the anamorphic conceits of the seventeenth century, makes us oscillate between one position and another. The subjects are in the grip of some passion or obsession the strength of which isolates them from common understanding. Strange as these genealogical lines always seem when dragged across the centuries, the women in Harris’ paintings are sisters to Francesco del Cairo’s swooning

(3)
SalomeinTurin.Theirrelationshipisnot, however, simply that embedded in the discipline of painting but one which is mediated by that “culte des images” which Baudelaire put at the centre of modern life and in which Bonnefoy sees the plenitude of the Baroque.

Whether or not we are treated to the preliminary studies and attendant drawings the “coming into being” of the image in each of Harris’ canvases is available to us. The “craft” of these complex paintings is one which unfolds and reveals the complexity of the poetic image in each of them. Harris’ images begin in the poetics of the flaneur. It is not ambulatory exercise which marks the flaneur but the manner in which he looks. Seeing a succession of frames, of vignettes, of decoupures offered to vision is Harris’ starting point among magazine photographs. The motif is from visual culture not the visible world, that is to say a motif already highly constructed and one which can withstand his subjectivity. As Walter Benjamin famously pointed out, these constructed things face one with their own “desire” for attention(4). This desire, which precedes that of the viewer, sustains some small independence for that which is within the frame, isolating it from the never-ending chain of significance with which man binds and overwhelms the world of objects. In this small independence is the root of the “concurrence” which distinguishes the image from the “illustration”. Like the poet Harris’ does everything he can to nurture and protect it.

Each of Harris’ paintings is as assertive but inpenetrable as a vitrine. Many are like aquariums with the figures pressed against the glass. The atmosphere is liquid, with a certain tangible viscosity and an aquatic instability of light. The figures are separate and of different substance but move within this molten environment, the long fluid lines of their silhouettes sufficiently like those of the amorphous background to indicate a shared buoyancy. The attenuation of limbs in sharp recession suggests a physicality separate from our own. Glass is everywhere known and not seen. In Angel Dusted Sisters the turn in the perspective is like a refraction and a plate of glass separating the figures somehow seems likely despite the interlocking of their fingers. There is a mirror in Candy Raver II, which cannot be seen because it is isometrically positioned as the surface of the painting. Outside of all social communication, an isolated figure in this pose with such an extreme grimace can only be posing in the mirror. It reminds one of “Hoogstraaten’s mirror” and the recommendation to seventeenth century painters to think of the feelings in the scene they will depict and look at themselves in the mirror. The longer one looks at this painting the stronger the image of the mirror becomes, just as the painting Candy Raver I calls up more and more vividly a half closed window. The separation of these images depends upon a sophisticated play with the metaphysics of the vitrine.

Behind the “glass” in that “concurrent reality” there is an even more telling separation, that between the figures and the fluid disorganisation of the rest of the image. The technical complexity of Harris’ work is directed towards this partition and the richness of his handling underscores its importance. The figures are painted in oil while the rest is in acrylic. The boundaries between the two become the site of a mannerist intricacy in which the painting gives up freely its memory of all the stages of its drawing. Long continuous lines and an overstated local shadow along the limbs or torso of the figures are traditional means of drawing up the integrity of the figure. “Splendour”, that light behind the figure which supplies an electric current of a highlight to redraw the periphery is a favourite of the Baroque. To these Harris’ adds an array of marks which re-introduce the flat banality of the photograph and the disintegration of pixilation. The separation is not complete, however, or easy. It is created to bring about a certain hyper- awareness which is crucial to the image. The considerable anxiety in many of these images lies in the tension between the overwhelming, sagging, viscous environment and the figures themselves who seem not to be impervious to deterioration.

Harris sustains the integrity of the figures while sustaining both this anxiety and the physics of the vitrine which demand a certain affinity between the figures and their “atmosphere”. He does this dialectically, sometimes quite directly in visual puns. Were the background to signify with the body the frontier would have been crossed and he plays with that illusion in Ephemeral Smile I, Ephemeral Smile II and Astral Flesh in all of which the amorphous background becomes involved in the gestures of the hand. More consistent and more central to the poetics of his image making, however, is the principle of putrefaction which runs throughout the work. Areas of the body which resemble the generalised viscosity or pullulating division of the background are putrescent. The swollen green cheek of the young girl in Angel Dusted Sisters and the too liquid body of the woman who reels away from her, the livid forehead and scarification of the pixilated makeup in Ephemeral Smile II as in Candy Raver II signal corruption. Everything that is de-natured in these figures signals a corruption. The motif is a photograph and the painting is a highly complex poetic image but the subject is still a human figure. Duncan MacLaren, who recently interviewed Harris in regard to this series of paintings, quotes Harris as “wanting a distinction between the areas for the mind, but of needing a synthesised environment for the eye. The figure of the girl in the complex atmospherics of an implied nightclub has got to be a convincing one, its got to work on that level before it can really work on others”(6).

It is in corruption that Harris’ poetics are those of Baudelaire and he follows that romantic understanding of corruption as a dangerous but ultimately creative principle.

“Tout glisse et tout s’emousse au granit de sa peau” (everything slides and is sloughed off the granite of your skin)... Baudelaire,  Allegorie.

The best of Baudelaire’s readers, Jean-Pierre Richard, asks “...what is the corrupt but the supremely expansive? The dream of putrefaction is not separated from the reverie of multiplicity from which it follows logically and of which it is the caricature. Rotten life is life defeated; but that life, just because it is defeated, seems to us expansive, pullulating, supremely active”(8). Corruption is the expansion of organised life into the environment of disorganisation, deformation, the surrounding informe. The anamorphic clown which hovers in Harris’ paintings is a corrupted form. The rhythm Harris gives its shape is fluid, expansive and above all slower than the rhythm of the figures.

Energy comes from the first signs of corruption of the figures. Harris builds up their inviolable difference, works up the membrane of their peripheral lines because they are nevertheless expanding, phosphorescing, “la phosphorescence de la pourriture” which Baudelaire found in Poe. Putrescence is life in excess, life which demands its release back into dissociation.

It is this excess which links the poetics of Harris’ artificial paradises with those of Baudelaire. The vitre, the glass, which establishes our spectatorship (our third party innocence) doesn’t protect us from the interiority which the human subject brings to Harris’ paintings. They are both “subjects” and figures of excess. With all the means of the painter since the baroque, idiosyncratic palette, stark composition, and particularly, with Harris, the minutiae of paint handling leads us into the subjective nature of this excess. A course runs from excess, to frenzy to rhapsody, here as in Baudelaire’s Paradis Artificiels. Baudelaire’s conception as the paradisiac subject was one of interior expansion. There came a moment in that expansion, which he also referred to as ecstasy, in which the subject passed from excess to frenzy, when he lost all control of this expansion and had to submit to what he saw as the law of all frenzy, la surenchere, overactivity of everykind, the morbid heightening of every feeling. The ecstasy was the same but it had passed from a feeling of fullness to a feeling of overfullness and, in a rupture between the mind and the existence it so intimately surveys, happiness had become tinged with terror. The inevitable overactivity of frenzy makes this terrible joy grow unendingly and disproportionately until all feeling is thrown open to chance or to the absolute. The mind, the soul then becomes the victim of joy, of fantasy and the subject knows the horror which is rhapsody where “la reve gouvernera l’homme”, the dream will rule the man. Existence is pulverised into the informe.

Like the dimly lit and ornately comfortable opium smoking dens of mid-nineteenth century Paris the nightclubs which are indicated in this series of Harris’ paintings are enclosures for just this romantic sequence of the overexpansion of existence. Rhapsody is the end to which these women enter the atmosphere of corruption and excess in clubbing. These spaces, and the activities within them, are deliberately emptied of all meaning the quicker to uncouple existence from the particular and deliver it to the absolute formlessness of rhapsody. They are spaces of “sound and fury signifying nothing” pushing existence to the brink of emptiness and the absurd. Here the subject can embrace stupidity and indifference, the beauty of masks and painted backgrounds. The difference between the nightclub itself and the image in which Harris uses its qualities is the profound silence of the vitrine. This silence is not a narrative stilling of the subject, like the direct gaze of Valenciennes musicians, but the repositioning of the noisy genius loci behind the glass, within the aquarium. The silence is not stasis but the subsuming of music into the dialectical energy of the image. The image itself is hyperactive, its energy hermetically sealed but constructive as in a Leibnizian monad. The putrescent phosphorescence, the hyperbolic expansion toward rhapsody is a separate reality, continuing in itself as our reality does. It is an image which can only fold back on itself and build in intensity but it is safe from any final collapse into change. Like all poetic images it occupies the nunc stans, the absolute time which is always in competition with our reality. The virtu, or power, of this virtual reality in the face of our own is precisely its folded back intensity which allows the “realization” of things which otherwise too dispersed through life, too porous to events.

The theme of Harris’ series of paintings is the re-entry into the profound energy of excess. The building of intensity leads to in important paradox. “Every fine and agreeable odour” writes Baudelaire, in Confiteor d’Artiste, “taken to the maximum of its power, that is to say of its density...raises a certain repulsion and the hint of nausea”(9). This is the significant point of excess, when it becomes the index to the extreme density of existence. Baudelaire marks the paradoxical equivalence of attenuation and density by using a perfume as his example. The real matter, the real investigation, of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal is the density of existence and the actual fecundity of the void which seems to threaten it. Harris’ images deal with the same fundamental matter. The emptying, dissipation, attenuation of the figures ultimately serves to manifest the profound density of their existence. . The density of existence is known in extremes: “L’intensite du regard ou du geste.... temoigne d’une tension vitale heureusement maintenue; il affirme l’extreme densite d’une existance” An extreme gesture is a “witness” to a vital tension maintained. These are images which need intricate procedures and, as Harris pointed out to MacLaren, a sustained reading to be fruitful. The paintings are assertive, highly worked, minutely judged because this excessive attention of the artist is necessary to the poetic task. That task, no less than being Baudelaire “painter of modern life” who finds again the universal themes in modern dress” is Ariadne’s thread between Harris’ clubbers and de Cairo’s swooning Salome. The modern dress of Harris’ images is an existentialist one, as Baudelaire’s was romantic and humanist. The philosophical dress of the Seicento painters may have been the theology of the Council of Trent but the fundamental content of the image was the same. In the final rhapsody when the self is given up to the undifferentiated wholeness, when the subjective life of the rapt seventeenth century saint has reached its extreme she is still a vital presence, a testimony to the density of existence, she is not the empty light filled drapery of an eighteenth century ceiling. Similarly, these figures, photographic traces of themselves in tawdry nightclubs, witness the density of the “ecstatic void”

Jane Lee