REGAINING ORDER
One of the characteristics of contemporary fine painting is that it takes us back to our childhood (Huizinga). But, how can this happen if we don't remove the cultural habits which oppress us?. Our first impression, when looking at Matt Lamb’s paintings is precisely this dichotomy. On the one hand, the order of a “mens construens”; on the other, the disorder (chaos) of the last of the savages, (dell’ ultimo selvaggio). A great neurologist who’s gone in for art, R. L. Gregory, compares the eye with the brain, showing how they interconnect. There can be no coherence if it’s not within the conciliation of the intuitive and perceptive moments. This is the really disturbing fascination in Lamb’s paintings. This is powerful and fragile at the same time (Sophie Delassein). Enrique Mallen precisely adds the Niestchan contrast between Apollo and Dionysus.
Incoherence? It’s exactly the opposite. Lamb, an American, deeply agrees with the great 20th. century painter Pablo Picasso. He agrees the very way as the first Pollock did: a disorder which slowly turns into order. Critics have pointed out many figurative similarities between Picasso and Lamb. These are formal and symbolic as well. A curved line may mean a certain sort of feeling, while a broken line suggests the opposite. Love, affection, communication on the one hand; hate, neurosis, dissociation on the other. Aren’t these the components of human life, from a humanitarian point of view?
Picasso knew how to play every cord, just like Tiziano or Goya. Thus, Lamb may be happy with a certain kind of line, a certain chromatic preference, a brush movement to express what lies under the matter of the painting –the plenitude of human feeling. As the great sailor he is, he takes us from one port to another. Now, the sea is calm; now it’s stormy.
Forty years ago, I was friendly with a wonderful Italian painter: Felix Carena. Something that really attracted me was his internal and tragic contrast: on the one hand, viscous, sensual, turbid brush strokes; on the other hand, an almost desperate search for spirituality. We always used to speak about this, and when I see his pictures, in the hall of my home in the Lido of Venice, said contrast comes back to my mind: frightful and yet very sweet.
Now I feel something similar looking at Matt Lamb’s pictures. They live and grow in the internal struggle. On the one hand, I interpret them with the sign of a seductive primitivity: like an indian totem, a darkened mask, a red skin’s feathers, the arrows, the red bow of the land, lit up by the Sun, the clots that coagulate on the wall, and perhaps, those altered, dazed eyes; that hallucinated look, that feeling of retuning to a lost, wild and barbarian virginity. On the other hand, I’m attracted by the indian wanting to speak, the expressive distortion of features, the pathetic design of a sign, getting lost in the darkness, the primary symbols and, above all, the effort of getting close to the internal spirit.
Everything is a consequence of this effort of the artist. Nothing breaks, there’s no skill, no hypocrisy. I could apply the “biological truth” criterion, so appreciated, for example, by the great studious Ernest Gombrich, to Lamb. No doubt, Lamb is a painter based on honesty in his feelings: this means, he doesn’t deal with any pose or false beliefs. Also, when he seems to get to the limits of abstraction, which, in itself, is beyond each representation, the painting “talks”. You just get into it, listen and hear the thousands of inflections, the high pitch sounds and its soft tones.
Primitive and learned
At this point, a technical and critical analysis seems useless. What does it mean to have something in common with Picasso or Miró, with the “Cobras” or the first Pollock, with Chagall or Rouault, with the German Neue Wilden or the Blaue Reiter painters or, perhaps, with the Italian transvanguardists? It is known that culture floats in the air; it’s assimilated by each one of us, though we may not be aware of its main source. Being a Venetian, I could go back in time: maybe, I’d return to certain 16th. century fashions, like that of old Tiziano or Tintoretto. Painting as a pure and charismatic fusion of fluid and free colors.
Primitivism of shapes (human and antropomorphic) depend on the essential qualities of the painting. I see, or better still, I perceive, people speaking to each other, who perhaps love or hate each other. Sometimes, they’re standing in front of us, alert not to spoil a delightful potential conversation; in other opportunities, they move in wild rhythms which turn into civilized ones, full of charming echoes. In the end, an eye may grow bigger, become a symbol of a raising Sun. A ray becomes a hand asking for help. How does one answer? With a grimace or a smile?
A first psychological analysis of Lamb’s work, takes me to some key items. First: I’m before an artist whom I could define as cyclothymic. Different natures coexist within him: on the one hand, an aggressive vitality; and on the other hand, romantic emotion. Matter and spirit (this is what also Michael D. Hall stresses from the rest in his critical work) live together and struggle. The dogmatic Catholic spirit merges with his Irish origin. Lamb loves repeating “I think outside schemes”.
I could add that, from a strictly critical angle, Lamb is close to Neo-expressionism order (the following remarkable names have been quoted: Baselitz, Clemente, Rothenberg, Schnabel). The strength of the language is obvious. His liking for matter is just as evident, which is inert and turns alive (and here is the comparison which takes us to Dubuffet and the “art brut”). A wonderful world, full of a deep desire for individual freedom, and taken to a sort of children’s adventure. Here is the most cultural aspect: this is, his relationship with Picasso, Miró and the other mentioned artists. What does it mean? It means that Lamb doesn’t want to feel caged in: he wants to be a free spirit. As free as Picasso was.
Freedom and faith
Lamb’s freedom is like his faith. Not a forced faith, but a premonition of the universal order. The obvious and most recent example is that of the “Open the doors to the Redeemer” cycle, made for a great exhibition in the Westminster Cathedral in 2000. Here, in this homogeneous and well structured sequence, the story flows fluidly, uncensored and without corrections.
From “Birth of Christ” to the “Resurrection”, the sign is an orderly origin, formal and spiritual at the same time. The coherence in the language is also surprising. To Lamb, life and death are part of a human and divine story. We see how Christ’s agony and death are the end of the experience, which doesn’t start at birth, but is fixed to the history of mankind.
The Crucifixion in itself, almost means the liberation of pain: Christ looks at us intensely in the eyes with a painful look which, at the same time, is sweet as well as extremely kind. Shapes in the images are always soft, curved, shy. The “Son of God” raises his white arms, blessing the world, with a gesture that tends to the perfection of the circle. The same thing happens in the “Divine Kingdom”, made of circles that join in a harmony which obviously represents the order of the end of the world. It is clear that this sort of painting mainly has a symbolic meaning: this is to incorporate the references of Picasso and Klee, Munch, Rouault. In other words, the artist has achieved his well defined style.
Style unity
Contemporary pictures to those of the “Redemption” cycle and those painted thereafter, may seem heterogeneous. The truth is that the style quality is the same: the representation context is what changes. Now we are in the rough truth of mankind, with its deadly pains, distress, vital power abuse, selfishness, I’d say bestiality. The way Lamb ends up by hardening his painting, turning it harsh and coarse, as well as violent is evident. A mocking gesture, this is sheer irony also appears here, even though the sign is seen as fluid by certain tones, and spoiled by others.
It’s interesting to compare the color in the “Redemption” with that of profane pictures: the former is resonant, bright, vivacious, and it’s also distributed in a diversified manner: according to the order in the sacred cycle, according to disorder in the other works. But in the latter, every so often, harmony appears, something that Lamb tends to at the end, in order to excel of existential contrasts.
Confronting with Picasso, the temperamental and expressive landscape is very clear. It is known that when Picasso fell in love with a woman, he portrayed her realistically, harmoniously in order to exalt her qualities. When they separated, like in the case of Dora Mar, he used to make her ugly, till she became unpleasant, monstrous. It’s the metaphor of life itself, also in an organic and vegetal sense.
Lamb adopts a similar metaphor as well, stressing the symbolic itinerary of Eros and Thanatos. As Enrique Mallen points out correctly, death and renewal are combined in a fatal ride. Lamb says: “we come from the same seeds, we grow, flourish; then, we end up by withering and we die. In the end, we are reborn in another way”. The sacrifice rite repeats itself: in life as well as in painting. Reminiscence of the Minos related mythology merges with the revelation of Christology. “Painting is the addition of addictions as well as of destructions”. In other words, philosophy guides the artist’s hand. At certain moments, Lamb paints in a similar way to the “Cobras” (specially, Jorn and Corbeille), spoiling all gesture and color in a primary symbology. In other occasions, he gets closer to Picasso’s instinct, to his blood and earth, life and death throb, without any adultered distinction.
With the universal sign
Here we could set an analogy between Lamb and the art we have in this period, mainly by the successful (English, American or German) youth. A distinctive element is that today there’s an insistent search for exhibitionism, the strength of scenes, specially when they go from paintings to installations and to happenings. What need is there to replace pictorial matter by elephant manure? Or to put a sequence of pornographic pictures in the Virgin’s aureole? Can it be awfully shocking to cut a cow skeleton in two and insert it into formol mixture, inside a plastic paralelepiped? All this, and even more, hits people, but the effect disappers right away.
However, with painters like Matt Lamb, art is understood as something with a universal meaning. Inside, it reveals the sense of life and death, which we perceive: something that’s there, that goes on through time, beyond fashions. This is the reason why painting has a ultramundane valence, a symbolic aspect which goes beyond any contingency. This is the reason why Lamb presents old subjects in modern times. This is the great gothic metaphor, upsurge of contemporary lead. Lamb’s extraordinary talent is that of merging one historic drift with another, with results well above secular nature.
In all truth, we could say that this is the real aim of modern painting. Surpassing all fashions shouldn’t be the main target, a vicious discharge game. On the contrary, each expressive and stylistic subject must be bonded by a great purpose, which can only be that of the universal conscience. Lamb is close to this concept. He is so because, as a deeply cultured and open-minded man, he knows how to interpret the real demands of today’s culture.
Beyond matter
At one time, seeing beyond matter, showing what lies beneath apparent forms was the aim of religious painting. Juan de la Cruz, a 16th. century great Spanish mystic, loved repeating “We are not here to see; we are here not to see”; this he enigmatically proclaimed from the pulpits in the cathedrals of Toledo and Salamanca. This holy man meant that we must not only hold on to earthly feelings: we must strive to “see the invisible”; this is, get closer to the mystery of God.
Similarly, in each of Matt Lamb’s pictures there’s a meaning which, even if tired, we must lift up in order to understand, or at least, perceive: the cosmic order that rules life. “Reading” Lamb’s pictures is like “reading” the subtle plot which rules the universe. Here again, the apparent disorder changes into order, and painting becomes a real conscious device.
Venice, February 2004.
Translated by: Enrique Carlos Bocking |
