Color Commentary - Spencer Finch

The difficulty of "seeing yourself seeing," for Finch, is above all an existential experience of perception, and only secondarily an abstract idea that develops out of modern philosophy and art.

It is this palpable, experiential aspect of Finch's work that lends it both its humor and its unique tone. The artist draws on problems surrounding perception as a way to catapult his work beyond the merely formal or merely conceptual into the realm where vision, memory, and desire blend, then separate out again. In recasting a conceptual problem on a visceral level, Finch offers a narrative of perception and a talisman of how our everyday lives are defined by it. That is dearly the object lesson of the early, Don DeLillo-esque Trying to Remember the Colour of Jackie Kennedy's Pillbox Hat, 1995, a series of 100 drawings, each of which contains a specimen of pink; taken as a whole they form an absurdly impossible attempt to capture the exact shade of pink the former first lady was wearing on the day of her husband's assassination. This piece simultaneously bridges and forever separates the palpable event of the eye from the remembering mind. A still more poignant version of this is Ceiling (above Freud's couc h, morning effect, 19 Berggasse, Vienna, Austria, February 18, 1994), 1995, an oval-shaped painting displaying precisely what its title says. Here, the work--a washy replica of the painted ceiling--is a cipher not only for our attempts to imagine what it "must have been like" to have been Freud's patient, but also for a slew of other possibilities. Was this how Freud's patients felt during their fifty minutes? Was looking up at this what triggered the patient's memories? What kind of memories does it trigger in me? Finch's conceptual sleight of hand plays out Freud's famous image for the functioning of the psyche, the magic writing pad. According to him, the unconscious leaves traces on consciousness that are erased but are nevertheless inscribed onto our psyches in the same way that lifting the paper off the popular turn-of-the-century toy erased what had been written on it, but left the impressions in the wax tablet.

Finch's inflection of aesthetic theory with subjective experience is heightened even more in the recent series "Wandering Lost upon the Mountains of our Choice," 1998. In seven glass mosaic-tile paintings, Finch presents blizzard conditions on the world's tallest and most forbidding mountains--K2, Anapurna, Mount Everest--drawing out an allegory of blindness. In these images of whiteout conditions, he plays on the contradiction between the literal surface of these works--the earthy rough-hewn tiles--and the metaphor of seeing that painting always proposes and recalls the deeper terror of blindness in the Oedipal narrative that affirms a paradox between seeing and knowing.

It is this paradoxical understanding dependent on literally blinding oneself that the title of Finch's show, "Up," may refer to. Up is, of course, not only the direction of the sky, but also the orientation in which human beings have long invested their metaphysics and religions, not to mention their art. Today, "up there" is where UFOs, aliens, antimatter, and darkness lie, an out-and-out contemporary cosmology that veils the terrifying sublimity of deep space. It is perhaps this sublime endlessness that Sky (over Roswell, New Mexico, 5/5/00, dusk), 2000, a rhinestone-studded, irregularly shaped aluminum panel, wants to remind us of but also deflate. Aristotle once credited looking up at the sky with the beginning of philosophy. One might add, however, that it led also to Greek astrology. It is perhaps the combination of philosophy and astrology that Finch's glittering painting evokes in a supremely self-effacing gesture. His art is the surface of everything we can't know but can clearly see--a vote, in oth er words, against the sublime and in favor of the more limited earthly pleasures of the beautiful.