Stuart Elliot

Stuart Elliot

An essay by Martin Holman June 2009

‘Painting is intentionally a myopic thing to do. It’s an absurdly delimited activity in certain circumstances.’

‘So, why do it?’

‘Because its boundedness is part of its power. If it’s not participatory, how does it relate to the world, to other images, other media and to other structures?’ (1)

Stuart Elliot is an artist who makes paintings that are of themselves and of other things. Both categories require explanation. One that has come to my mind is in the words of Roland Barthes, an inclusivist aesthete and a primary example of the critic as artist. Barthes’s subject was another art form, literature, and more specifically that aspect of analysis that he termed écriture, ‘writing’. Writing, Barthes insisted, was determined by ambiguity: ‘On the one hand it unquestionably arises from a confrontation of the writer with the society of the time; on the other hand, from this social finality, it refers back, by a sort of tragic reversal, to the sources, that is to say, the instruments of creation.’ (2)
The particular political and cultural circumstances of that comment aside (it was made in 1953), it strikes me as helping to locate in what Elliot does a reason why his paintings take on the appearances they have in the year or so covered by this exhibition. What Elliot presents is an ‘image’ and he proceeds to handle deftly the philosophical as well as visual implications of that demarcation, that acceptance of boundaries. A strength of this work is that it raises the possibility of reflecting on the practice, an underrated study. Painting has been through a lot since about the time, coincidentally, that Barthes was writing about literature. It has travelled up and down and between the gears on a journey sufficiently circuitous to make neutrality an attractive prospect.
For visual art, the route was beset by style (reductionism and the over-compensation of ‘new image’ expressionism), pre- occupied with language and trammelled by predictions of the death of painting, whether by its own ‘hands’ (the suicide theory attributable to the triumph of style) or by altered contexts around it. What Elliot has identified as the ‘structure’ in which to carry out this reflection is itself a demonstration of considerable intelligence. It is not with the adoption of form or symbol, as may at first seem to be the case with the prolifera- tion of star-shapes, for instance, but a more sustainable dialogue, one between the opposites of density and transparency.
Does this approach make for interesting painting? That depends, I believe, on what questions arise in the course of the dialogue and, to my mind, Elliot is asking very searching questions. So much so that the contingent nature of his images imports an unexpected robustness into the gallery. That derives from thought that is sort of made palpable on the surface, and from the intensity and deliberation of the artist’s studio that is carried into the realm of the onlooker, of the gaze and thus the wider world. On going public, this work does not retreat into convention but holds its ground, within whatever idiom that term is interpreted.
Form is the specific way an individual chooses to manipulate conventions of style for a desired effect. Whereas Barthes called this ‘writing’ in the literary setting he was addressing, ‘painting’ (with its baggage of metonymic cultural connotations) is arguably not its equivalent term in visual art (or in English). But let it here stand for the unique and creative act. Being creative is a continuous process of change and reaction, emerging from a combination of isolation and communication with activity beyond the individual, with ideas and other images, those media and structures that Elliot does not eliminate from his painting.
One question that Elliot asks himself is whether abstraction, or painting as a whole, needs to be hermetic. The concept of purity, I suspect, is not viable for this artist. Consequently references occur not only permissibly but essentially. The loneliness of the long-distance non-objective painting almost haunts a painter who is prone to pair-up canvases, or show them in threes that may, or may not, be related so as not to deny the chance of correspondence. At one time he did paint ‘what he saw’; as a student on the English south coast, he and his cohort were taken to the beach ‘to paint a picture’. This experience convinced Elliot of two probabilities. The first was that Worthing was not part of international art culture. The second was that dependency on the visual facts of physical surroundings was not his aspiration for painting.
So this is not a painter of the world in its material form. The image has an existence distinct from representation. Like a current of water that detects a crack imperceptible to the eye, the natural inclination in painting is to penetrate, circulate and frequently crop up where it is either not expected or is fervently unwanted. In how his painted surfaces present themselves is an acknowledgement that painting is not wholly knowable and, consequently, inclined to contradiction, defying adoption of its own ‘shape’. Elliot carries out his reflection on painting in the vicinity of neutrality, with a canvas like Untitled 25 the deepest into that neighbourhood. The images that gather around it remind me of pins in a map on a weather-room wall that probe the climatic effects of highs and lows, of density and transparency, of content and objectivity that can occur at different points away from the epicentre.
Awkward and revelatory at the same time, painting has a phenomenal quality of its own. I think it is a consequence of this quality that Elliot has not eliminated mannerism. It is there for all to see in marks made almost lush with the addition of Liquin to the medium. Extending the stroke in this manner with non-standardised specificity (traditionally associated with craft and labour) can seem like ‘Painting’ with a capital letter, like amplifying the plastic effect histrionically, like decoration. It is uppermost in Untitled 21. When he mentioned painting’s ‘boundedness’, these notions imposed by modernism were, I suspect, the conceptual ones he had in mind beside physical, aesthetic and technical limits.
To my eye, this variation in how paint is applied communicates ambivalence inescapable in painting between content and practice, between metaphor and metonym, and between ‘thingness’ and history. Canvases like Untitled 11 on which the star’s anatomy is built up only as far as a precarious balance of forms, marks and voids, of positive and negative, even of found and lost (though that may be more romantic than these images can tolerate), demonstrate thought in action as well as the challenge to make another picture. Surfaces can be dry or smoothly primed, the painting on them fluidly easy or bluntly obtuse. I have not mentioned colour yet because, it seems, surface makes colour, at best, secondary. Fluorescence as a value supersedes yellow, green or magenta (the colours in which fluorescent paint is mainly supplied); sheen supersedes bronze and silver, the colours of most metallic paint.
Making difficulties for oneself and indulging sensual pleasures are two thoughts that arise, while the specie of dabs, rhythmical and nominally horizontal, implies handwritten lines (conceivably mirror-writing, with its suggestion of secrecy, as marks can be right to left) that, although clearly not anonymous, do not make letters and, so, do not make signs and cannot project accountable meaning. Elliot’s images more often conform to the conditions of our cognition of them (instead of the other way around, the route of representation).
Elliot makes me aware of internal mechanisms. Correspondences insinuate themselves, like the water in that earlier metaphor, between surface and observer. Kant would have understood their interpolation as mildly problematic. The words that Elliot uses about his images are instructive: ‘porous’, ‘transference’, ‘mutate’, ‘distort’. This is the vocabulary of change and the opposite of stasis, and it underlines both the contingent nature of these paintings (how none ‘feels’ definitive) and their acceptance of ‘ongoingness’. Suspicions abound that no device in these images began life with Elliot; he transposed them from existing sources, the most obvious being the ten- pointed star.
         He lifted the star from a pattern book while studying for his MA in London. That act of reduction from the assumed demands of originality and integrity to what art really is, a synthesis of sources, freed up his surfaces. He appropriated the form as a geometric principle that he could manipulate while maintaining the integrity of the shape. An important quality of star-forms is their infinite extendibility, their assumption of massive or minute scale while retaining their essential dimen- sional relationships. Then he began to recognise the device in other applications, on Islamic tiles in the V&A and on manhole covers in central London. He was not altogether surprised: like pollen or seeds, forms exist to get picked up and carried on and spat out, if necessary, in order to grow in new territory.
         What I find reassuring and encouraging is that Elliot has stayed with painting and not resorted to the objects of the world for a medium. What I detect in parallel with an acute, lively painterly sense is an artistic conscience at work. His grounding in the history of modernism is sound, and he knows the root that painting took with Cézanne or Duchamp into opacity well enough to perceive a fresh turning will offer itself in the future. Others have jettisoned the medium or transformed the pictorial act into an empty shell. To stick with it is important, and to filter the wider discussions about it through the personal (Elliot’s fascination with the physical process of making paintings) is the unique part. That’s creative and that’s what this thing should be about.

1 The artist in conversation with the author, London, April 2009. 

2 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (tr. Annette Lavers), Hill and Wang, New York, 1990 (ed. cit.), p.12.