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Back to Reviews Excerpts from a catalogue essay by Gerrit Henry There are many wondrous and remarkable things about Susan Abbott’s paintings. As one example, she paints “still lifes”-traditionally rendered in relatively small format, up to 80” wide and 60” high. For another, each of her sublimely everyday epics is executed-on those gargantuan scales-in watercolor, that most difficult and exacting medium. Abbott’s command of watercolor technique has been described simply, by one critic, as “awesome”. Thus she is the proverbial “master of all she surveys”. And what she surveys from a kind of close-up bird’s eye vantage point are the multitudinous objects and effects of contemporary human living. All the objects she paints hold importance for Abbott in that they impose, as she dubs it, “narrative content” on the pictures. Sometimes, no matter what the legibility of the medium, the message can be deliciously obscure. A 40” by 60” “Dream Table” sports the text transcript of an open journal-surrounded on a barely visible tabletop by long and blossomy cut gladioli, gardening shears, a gardening glove, Tarot cards, an upside down white Noh mask, even a reversed copy of National Geographic. Individual items in the still life relate directly to the text; yet the text itself is surreally ambiguous as it describes the content of a dream (Abbott’s own?) in which she meets her dead grandmother and is shown around the old woman’s gardens with detailed instructions on how to care for them (so had the grandmother often advised Abbott when she was alive). Alarmingly, toward the end of the narrative, the dreamer realizes her aged relative is wearing a mask, “ill-fitting, lopsided.” The dreamer asks the old woman what death is like; she responds by taking away her mask and “showing me empty space.” The dream is chilling; the inclusion of objects related so closely to it in some way only points to the utterly mysterioso import of the dream. The trompe-l’oeil painters Peto and Harnett seem far away with their homely cards and missives. Abbott, who has two degrees in art and studied with the redoubtable figurative abstractionist Grace Hartigan, is no reactionary realist when it comes to observing-very much through her aerial formats- three dimensionality in two dimensions. In fact, her works, too, can be read as “figurative abstractions.” They are conceptually and objectively, truly “all-over” examples of fine 20th century vanguardism, rear-guard realist style. A careful anarchy is her rule of order; Abbott’s subtexts comprise what are really her only texts. This is not to overlook the obvious skill, dedication, and love expressed in these vast “lost and founds”. Artistically, nothing is lost here. For all their ambiguities, these paintings are finally celebratory of their own fine lack of disclosure, of a grave and gracious contemporary import. |
