Beauty, to writer Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, is stubborn, self-sufficient, containing an "implicit counter-power" of indifference to critique. He commends a beauty that remains independent from what it subverts, slippery in its appearance of mere passivity within the slick surfaces of a contemporary, or 'technological' version of the sublime. Contrary to Gilbert-Rolfe's counterproductive beauty, artist Melanie Authier is interested in beauty's role as catalyst within an experience of a contemporary sublime.
At first, seeing Authier's paintings is like trying to rely on written accounts of dreams. When I visited her solo exhibition 'Vista Blitz' at The New Gallery, the textural spaces within her paintings evoked the too-close miniature worlds of such intimate staring, while promising to finally reveal all after each repeated visit. In a painting called Pendulum, transparent waves in greens and mineral-blues undulate like water alongside hard-edged shapes in plastic orange-pink.
An ear-shaped burrow of strokes in blue are covered in the flecks and pockmarks of surrounding peaks in Black Buzz, alongside a tongue-tooth shape of viscous red and a 'sash' of pink. The hair-like waves of marks in these paintings seem both to swell in autonomous movement while interrupted by the sharp edges of half-stenciled shapes, and they seem like fresh locks of hair snipped blunt in a compulsive cultivation of covert coiffures. In Vista Blitz, the composition evokes the painted lines of an elevated highway collapsed and twisted by an earthquake.
Centipede-like tracks in blotted black-red create a 'C'-shape of foliage around a flat negative space of beige and its outcroppings of gooey sediments and smeared shreds of debris. The final painting in the exhibition, Snake Punch, is like a vortex of colour and technique which curdle towards a shared point of attempted contact, further kept in check by large stitch-like black shapes curling towards the upper right. Delicate purple brush-marks appear to make a hot-pink shape pucker and soften, while three hard-edged shapes of mint-green resemble a manually-operated stage set depicting a stormy sea and its sleepy, cut-out sea-serpents.
Whether sliced into by sharp edges, glazed with a delicate wash, or smeared in swellings of thick toxic colour, Authier's paintings contain a consistency where the flat and the painterly seem tempered by an organic illusionism, a balance which exists alongside what Authier calls a challenge to any sense of compositional order. This consistency is most visible in the paintings Relay and Flipside, where areas of soft brush-work seem gouged into and cut through by the suggestive shapes of sand dunes and jutting glaciers. Sometimes there is a strong formal sense of containment within the paintings, wherein areas of colour, texture, and drawing are interrupted from escaping or dominating. In an interview, Melanie linked this idea of interruption to her interest in activating disorientation, and spoke of wanting to provoke associations of spaces not tempered by more immediate readings.
Of compositional references to landscape painting in her work, Authier spoke of her interest in "emotional exploration of these sites of longing, yearning and desire" alongside both historical and current ideas of landscape. There is a sense that Authier's paintings also exist in a space that writer Jane Bennett might call "in excess", within a "contingent tableaux", and which writer Vivian Sobchack might call the feeling of an inanimate gaze which "fixes us with its "irrational" autonomy" and which "not only eludes but also refuses human comprehension and reduction." This idea of existing in excess links to Authier's interest in "not trying to be sublime", but creating work which "peripherally investigates and engages characteristics associated with the sublime".
Authier's work promises but won't reveal all, differing from painting which might be satisfied to merely point to ideas without adding an element of invention. Asking us to question our preconceived readings, Authier's work stretches ideas of 'beauty' and 'sublime' in ways that can make them habitable amidst a present of easy immediacy and transient meaning.
