Have you ever laid on the grass face down with your eyes open? When you’re that intimately close to the ground, you can’t really see the grass. Rather, you see the blurs of rich, vibrant green and fuzzy, pointed spires pushing out of the earth and enveloping you. If you’re truly absorbed in your observation, then you’ve arrived at the moment at which you will feel as close as you ever will to being part of and at one with the universe. The paintings exhibited in the retrospective of Jennifer Bartlett at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA) titled “Jennifer Bartlett: History of the Universe—Works 1970-2011,” on view until October 13th, evoke this very feeling.
The exhibit contains few works, emphasizing quality rather than quantity in the way that it fills up its large exhibition space in the Fisher Brooks Gallery of the Samuel M.V. Hamilton Building of PAFA. Bartlett works consistently on a monumental scale, painting seemingly mundane subjects such as rowboats and wooden crates in a larger-than-life size. This zoomed-in perspective gives viewers the opportunity to thoroughly absorb every detail of the depicted object, devoting rapt attention to it in a way that would never occur in real life.
Unlike Chuck Close, an artist who also works on a larger-than-life scale and paints hyper-realistic portraits that bring viewers startlingly close to the subject’s face, Bartlett’s paintings are not meant to mimic photographs. Even as she renders her images in exquisite detail, she maintains the painterly quality of the works. It appears that Bartlett is not interested, as a significant number of Modern and Contemporary artists were and are, in tricking the viewer into seeing one thing in order to teach them to see reality in an unexpected way. Rather than seeking to educate viewers through this subversive method, Bartlett invites us to examine the world through the lens of paint in meticulous detail. As a result, one appreciates the so-called little things in life and realize that every single object we might see or with which we might interact in this world possesses infinitely more complexity than we may have ever suspected.
This complexity is revealed in all of the various colors, textures, and brushstrokes that Bartlett uses to capture each scene or object she depicts, which is quite easy to examine given the large scale in which Bartlett creates paintings. The artist dazzlingly demonstrates in her 1987 oil on canvas “Boats,” for example, that a simple white rowboat is not only white. It actually contains a rainbow of hues, including dusty pink, light mocha, and ice blue for the parts of the boat cast in light and muted caramel, deep lavender, purplish blue, and slate grey for the parts covered by shadow. Viewers can see that Bartlett proves that the real world really does visually operate using a multitude of colors to create the perfect one if, after standing close up to the painting, they move farther away from it. At a distance of at least 10 feet, the painting looks almost photographic—not quite at the level of photorealistic paintings, but close. As a final reinforcement, Bartlett includes as part of the artwork a physical, three-dimensional model, made with enameled wood and steel, of the two boat halves she depicts in the painting. These boat halves, painted ghost white, serve to compare with Bartlett’s painted versions of them. The opportunity for comparison allows viewers to realize that although we might have expected a white boat to be painted in just white in order to make a painting look more realistic, in fact it requires an army of colors to produce our visual reality.
Bartlett employs the exact same effects in “Pool,” a 1983 oil on three canvases that show an empty swimming pool with detritus at the bottom from three different viewpoints at different distances from the pool. In the canvases farther away from the pool, the refuse sitting on its bottom possesses only a couples of shades of brown. Then the canvas with the perspective that is closest to the pool’s bottom contains a myriad of hues: there is crimson, burnt sienna, rosy pink, golden brown, and scarlet dark as night, all flowingly painted in a way that reaches abstraction. And, surprisingly, Bartlett convinces us that this is in fact visual reality. She appears to suggest that realism, and the notion of realistic painting, is the true abstraction of the universe’s looks.
Bartlett teaches viewers another lesson about how we should visually consider the universe through “Atlantic Ocean,” a 1984 work made of enamel over a silkscreen grid on baked enamel steel plates. Rather than creating one unified canvas of the Atlantic Ocean, she cuts the painting into equally proportioned squares, training our eyes to consider each individual square of the grid instead of being too quick to only consider the painting as a whole. Her application of paint, which seems to ooze out of her brush and elegantly flow onto each square while maintaining self-control, makes each square an exquisite artwork in and of itself. The fragmentation of “Atlantic Ocean” helps the viewer to appreciate every single second of the canvas when he or she might typically notice only the main subject.
The other parts of the show present other series of Bartlett’s works, and it becomes apparent as the exhibit takes the viewer through four decades of her career that she is not a portraitist, and she only includes humans indirectly in her artistic narration of the history of the universe. In her 1991-92 oil on canvas “Eleven P.M.,” in which the only objects depicted are a handful of change, a clock, various scraps of paper covered with scribbled notes, a cat, and doodles, there is only an implied presence of humans. Although humans are involved only secondarily in the painting, Bartlett draws attention with gorgeous rendering to these products of the human spirit: our implementation of currency, our compulsion to draw, and the utility we find in making notes to be read on another day. Thus she acknowledges that while humanity is not the focus of the universe, we have indeed played a role in it which is visually beautiful.
