The Solway Jones gallery is not an impressive space. Tucked away inside a nondescript, run-down office complex in Chinatown, the single-room gallery is small and rather industrial in style: cement floor, exposed wood-frame ceiling, florescent lights. Perhaps this is for the better, however, as the unpretentiousness of the gallery makes it all the easier for the current exhibition – a collection of the paintings of Hadley Holliday – to dominate the space. Eleven works are on display, united by Holliday’s use of stripes, geometric forms and colorful composition. In some paintings, such as Fool's Paradise (pictured), Holliday paints stripes into a elaborate yet elegant, multicolored swirl. In other works, U-shaped stripes stack one upon another, rainbow-like, or form co-centric grids. Many of the paintings are scattered with drips and spots, and as Holly Myers notes in her review of the exhibition, Holliday “generally guides the stripes around them.”
Of particular note is Holliday usage of acrylic paint on unprimed canvasses, a choice of medium that gives her work a unique style. With the pigments free to fully saturate the canvas, her colors are simultaneously vibrant yet gentle. This medium also allows the colors blend into one another, creating a complex, layered visual that is reminiscent of silkscreening.
Moving beyond their formal beauty, however, Holliday’s works raise some intriguing questions on the direction of painting in the twenty-first century. As Myers alludes to in her review, one cannot view Holliday’s work without wondering “Why a return to stripes in 2009?” To answer this question, it is necessary to return to the debate surrounding painting’s return to prominence in the 1980’s, and with it the re-popularization of figurative art.
This dramatic shift in the art world generated both positive and negative reactions, aptly represented by the writings of Barbara Rose and Benjamin Buchloh. Rose was a vocal supporter of these developments. In “American Painting: The Eighties,” she harshly criticizes the conceptual, video, and performance artists of the 1960’s and 1970’s, arguing that these artists stunted the art world with “the idea that to be valid or important art must be ‘radical.’” With artists now free from “puritanically precise and literalist styles,” Rose joyfully notes that painters of the 1980’s are “dedicated to the preservation of painting as a transcendental high art, a major art, and an art of universal as opposed to topical significance.” No longer will art be judged on its sociopolitical critique, but rather it’s aura, “emphasizing the involvement of the artist’s hand…[in] creating highly individual visionary images.”
Buchloh, in contrast, argues that “the specter of derivativeness hovers over every contemporary attempt to resurrect figuration, representation, and traditional modes of production.” Curators such as Rose, in his view, are simply refusing to view “developments in the larger context of these historical repetitions, in their nature as response and reaction to particular conditions that exist outside of the confines of aesthetic discourse.” Thus, art of the 1980’s is every bit as reactionary and political as the art of the previous two decades; it is just reacting to new conservatism of Reagan and Thatcher. Buchloh also problematizes Rose’s emphasis on a painting’s aura, arguing that this fetishization serves only to reframe painting as a luxurious, high cultural product.
With this historical context in mind, let us return to Myers’ review of Holliday’s exhibition. Noting that Holliday’s work is “proof that there’s joy to be found yet in what has come to seem a dull and largely reactionary genre,” Myers uses the words “reactionary” and “joy” to describe the paintings. By juxtaposing these two words (and their accordant meanings), Myers is in essence incorporating both Buchloh and Rose’s viewpoints. And this, I would argue, is exactly why Holliday is using stripes in 2009; as a contemporary artist, she must grapple with the conflicted legacy surrounding the return of painting in the 1980’s. Her works are conceptua
l and reactionary, but they also radiate with joy and exhibit an aura, a masterly touch. In short, her paintings prove that the Rose-Buchloh dichotomy is a false dichotomy.
It is difficult to categorize Holliday’s paintings within any specific art movement. They are too free-flowing and sensuous to fit neatly within the 1950’s abstract expressionist cannon, yet they are too abstract to fit within the “postmodern” cannon of the 1980-1990’s. While they share characteristics the color-field movement of the late 1950’s, Holliday’s press-release denies this affinity. But once again, this is precisely the point. Holliday’s press-release concludes with the following sentence: “Holliday’s works all joyfully nod references to American painting’s history while simultaneously acknowledging closer relationships with fashion and the decorative arts.” Her work, like that of many contemporary artists, acknowledges Rose and Buchloh but pledges allegiance to neither, in order to carve out a personal niche somewhere in between.
Bibliography:
Buchloh, Benjamin. “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting.” October (1981): 39-68.
Myers, Holly. “Artist of a totally different stripe.”
Rose, Barbara. “American Painting: The Eighties.” Arts Magazine, 1980.
