{"id":2397,"date":"2022-06-25T20:54:53","date_gmt":"2022-06-25T20:54:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dartmagazine.com\/?p=2397"},"modified":"2022-06-28T19:52:49","modified_gmt":"2022-06-28T19:52:49","slug":"the-impenetrable-in-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dartmagazine.com\/?p=2397","title":{"rendered":"The Impenetrable in Art"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Steve Rockwell<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Pat
Pat McDermott, You see it<\/strong><\/em>, 2022, acrylic and mixed media on panel, 15 x 15.5 x 1.75 inches (38.1 x 39.4 x 4.4 cm)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At the artist talk for his \u201cYou see it” exhibition at the Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto, Pat McDermott emphasized the direct experience of his work as a key to unlocking its import. The artist avoided references to contemporary art criticism, but elaborated on the Lascaux cave art as his primer. Although interpretations of pre-historic cave art will likely be subject to our own prejudices, there is a belief that ritualistic trance-dancing may have been part of this early art, shamanistic rituals inducing visions. Cambridge professor of classical art and archeology, Nigel Spivey, points out that the dot and lattice patterns overlapping the representational images of animals resemble the hallucinations induced by sensory-deprivation. Regardless, we can infer that the Lascaux artist communicated to the cave community directly and powerfully, to the extent that their lives somehow depended on the reception of its message.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Pat
Pat McDermott, I beseech you<\/strong><\/em>, 2021, acrylic and mixed media on panel, 15 x 15 x 1.75 inches (38.1 x 38.1 x 4.4 cm)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Kazuo
Kazuo Nakamura, Rectangle Series<\/strong><\/em>, 1988, drawing<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

McDermott\u2019s approach to his art carries this sense of the essential, a life-long journey to the \u201ccore\u201d of our being, which he maintains is \u201cuntouchable\u201d and \u201cunreachable.\u201d This drive for answers to primal meaning in art brought to mind the work of Kazuo Nakamura, particularly to an exhibition from nearly two decades ago at the Cutts Gallery. In a review of the artist\u2019s work, writer Gary Michael Dault characterized the almost monastic fervour of Nakamura\u2019s painterly researches as being the result of a steadfast conviction that \u201cThere\u2019s a sort of fundamental pattern in all art and nature\u2026 in a sense, scientists and artists are doing the same thing. This world of pattern is a world we are experiencing together.\u201d Nakamura\u2019s 1983 oil on linen “Number Structure and Fractals” can be viewed as the graphic depiction of the life of numbers, each organism containing the seed of its own being. By 1980, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot had produced high quality visualizations of sets of complex numbers while working at an IBM research center, fulfilling Nakamura\u2019s 1956 vision of artists and scientists working in tandem.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Kazuo
Kazuo Nakamura, Number Structures and Fractals<\/strong><\/em>, 1983, oil on linen, 71 x 101.7 cm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps this drive to the core of our being has no better illustration than the Renaissance itself, set in motion by Filippo Brunelleschi\u2019s engineering miracle, the Florence Cathedral, his invention of perspective being a product. Inspired by Roman architect and engineer, Vitruvius, Leonardo da Vinci\u2019s “Vitruvian Man\u201d drawing blended mathematics and art, demonstrating the harmony of human proportion, centering the point of perspective, here, at the naval. Clearly more than a presentation of male anatomy was intended. Leonardo believed that the workings of the body was an analogy for the workings of the entire universe \u2013 a\u00a0cosmografia del minor mondo<\/em>. To the Renaissance polymath, this knitting together of the lines of sight was a miracle: \u201dHere forms, here colors, here the character of every part of the universe are concentrated to a point; and that point is a marvellous thing.\u201d For a shining moment, engineering, architecture, mathematics, and science found its expression through art, producing some of the greatest creative minds of all time.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Guiseppe
Guiseppe Morano, Watch: Time: Fly<\/em><\/strong>, 2018, acrylic on canvas, 48\u201d x 96\u201d<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Present at McDermott\u2019s talk was interdisciplinary artist Giuseppe Morano, to whom I owe a bit of gratitude for linking and contrasting Nakamura\u2019s art with McDermott\u2019s. I had become acquainted with Morano\u2019s art at the Artist Project a few years ago, his work being singularly based in numbers and mathematics, primarily a digital printing of black numbers on white primed canvas. At the exhibition Morano\u2019s homage to Vincent van Gogh\u2019s \u201cWheatfield with Crows\u201d the artist precisely mimicked the wing position with each crow in Van Gogh\u2019s painting with the hands of a clock, and printing the exact time that the wing alignments signify. As I said of the work at that time, \u201cIf Wheatfield with Crows\u201d was indeed van Gogh\u2019s last painting, we can picture the crows taking flight at the sound of the fatal gunshot.\u201d Morano had converted the crows into time stamps, serving here as winged metaphors for the series of events leading up to the tragedy. His “Happy Birthday: You\u2019re so special\u201d work is aesthetically neutral to its implied subject, until we recognize that the 366 sets of numbers printed randomly in columns signify the birthdays of every person who has ever lived. Your joy or disappointment at his gift to you may depend on whose birthday you were fated to be near, at least as how they were dispensed in Morano\u2019s numerical universe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Guiseppe
Guiseppe Morano, Happy Birthday: You’re so special<\/em><\/strong>, 2018, 72″ x 36″, acrylic on canvas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

McDermott\u2019s \u201cYou see it\u201d exhibition is an invitation to penetrate the \u201cunreachable\u201d and \u201cuntouchable.\u201d With few exceptions, the titles of the artist’s work emphatically address \u201cYou.\u201d A solitary work begins in the first person: \u201cI beseech you.\u201d Yet, how much of the objective world can be inferred from any given work of art? If 605 of the more than 900 animals depicted by the Lascaux cave artists can be precisely identified today, then their art is hardly delirious phantasmagoria \u2013 rather an accurate encyclopedic cataloguing of the biosphere upon which their lives depended. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Presented here is a fragment of the see-saw of art history \u2013 the visual style of the moment being a sum of the artist\u2019s thoughts, set against the nourishment of insight and aesthetic meat upon which the viewer is invited to feed. \u201cYou see it?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Steve Rockwell At the artist talk for his \u201cYou see it” exhibition at the Christopher Cutts Gallery in Toronto, Pat McDermott emphasized the direct experience of his work as a key to unlocking its import. The artist avoided references to contemporary art criticism, but elaborated on the Lascaux cave art as his primer. Although … <\/p>\n

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