I once exploded a metal drum full of accelerant and debris at arm’s length. Too eager to ignite the unknown, I tossed the match, not thinking to conceive of some kind of device to light it all up from a safe distance. Admittedly I was ignorant of the contents of that obscure body before I doused it. But I guess you have to be prepared to lose something in the process of discovery, you have to be willing to part with your eyebrows to test the inseparability of matter, to break away from any idea of certainty. 

Here we can only imagine the interstice between the moment of ignition and the surge of intense heat. How everything in that drum would have been divided after the boom, split and moved with such intensity that it shattered into light, radiating outwards to be flung through space at imperceptible speed. Stuff everywhere, scattered bits and pieces flickering, catching the glint of fire or attenuating the afterglow into darkness – the extinction of this light-force into nullity. Grasping onto this afterimage and working its toxic scent through a swerve of words, each part of that body of debris can be realised up close and considered in all dimensions, composed and strung out in a momentary, complex spatial unity. The desire is to hold that negative-shadow picture before it recedes, to fix it into the fabric of the present, enlarged here indefinitely as an inscription of the violent event scratched into being, like an x-ray intrusion tracing the limits between body and void, occlusion and passage. 

Before the advent of Simon’s new paintings on my computer screen the meaning of this incident hadn’t revealed itself. It was vague dead content from my past, waiting to be effected into memory and fleshed out in full colour. Without recognising the poetry of this all-too-real event, these paintings indicated where the writing wanted to go. Although it remains unclear to you and I where it will go from here and how it will end. Because we can’t intuit what this is, or what its future might reveal. It is the artist’s work to perform the nature of prophecy, which the artist often accomplishes in ignorance. 

The art historian Richard Shiff linked this idea of artistic prophecy to aesthetic alienation – where the meaning of the work was not recognised as the consequence of intentionality. It was the outcome of neither an ‘arbitrary’ nor an ‘abstract’ decision by the artist, though its ‘visual poetry’ presents the artist with an ‘immediate, organic imperative’.(1) This demand for meaning comes from outside of the artist (from outside of the self), therefore it remains fuzzy and at the edge of recognition. Its initial incoherence may not be such a problem for the painter, whereas incoherence is a problem for the writer, particularly when circumstances force the writer or reader to reckon with significance as such. 

From distant retrospect, Shiff expanded on the American artist Barnett Newman’s revelatory experience, his big ‘breakthrough’. In 1948, Newman accidently created his first ever ‘zip’ painting, Onement I – a modest, slender painting where a thick irregular band of light-red was applied over masking tape that vertically split open a smooth field of reddish-brown canvas, simultaneously dividing and uniting the compositional field. Shiff cites Onement I as ‘the prophetic object’ of Newman’s future, a painting that ‘demanded that he cede conscious control.’(2) According to this logic, he yields all finality and certitude to the authority of his painting, becoming both deeply implicated and kept at a distance from it. Shiff writes: ‘It was an atypically paranoid moment in his development, when painting spoke, not for him, but to him….Letting a bit of craziness guide him. He did not insist on finishing his work in his usual way. There was nothing continuous about his performance.’(3)

Simon’s new paintings are certainly discontinuous and accidental. They operate through multiple temporalities to insist on the disconnect of hand and eye, and the remove of the painter from the painting. Speed comes first in the flashes of intuitive colour and gesture that are immediately apparent at the outermost areas of these compositions. These occurrences are created by allowing his hand to move to the rhythms most natural and comfortable to it. Simply to engender functional abstract content. Subsequent to this preliminary generation of content is a more laborious modality that is slow and uncertain. It involves ripping and cutting these accumulated remnants, disordering and stitching them edge-to-edge, working almost blind with the backside of the frame, the folds and edges of the canvas and various found fabrics. Once stretched, further modifications are made in the form of ink-spills and frantically running threads, further amounts of fabric overlayed, and added-on. 

Here Simon exposes the very condition of how the paintings are made. We are able to trace exactly how they come into being. The formulation of the work is exposed so obviously that nothing is concealed to the viewer. The ingenuity of these paintings lies in this exposure of their making, the foregrounding of a disjunction between discrete fragments and their recombination achieving incongruous effects. This is a strategy to throw a lot at us, challenging: “find things in that!” In some ways, they are so very much at odds with the way of the world, the way in which they stand in total contradiction to so many adjoining surfaces seamlessly flowing into one another, so casually easing our passage through the data-harvested and monetised space of networked infrastructure etc etc..., threatening to burst the seams of that networked reality – to break the circuitry, transgress the decorum of the sterile gallery and the glib professionalism of the art world. 

Perhaps this is an analogous incongruous effect enabled by the method of collage – as the agglomerative shock of fragments colliding together on an abstract plane. For the famous American art critic Donald Kuspit, it is the feature of collage to be ‘always insistent yet porous, never resistant and substantive.’ ⁽⁴⁾ The work’s surplus of parts competing and clawing for a place in an unfinished scene. Kuspit endorsed this ‘relativistic message of collage’ as a means of keeping things in play, allowing for the assimilation of the many into the one – ‘the fusion of the many into the one.’ ⁽⁵⁾ Concrescence was his word for the growing together of parts originally separated. Collage, was to be ‘in effect never finished, however much there may be the illusion of completeness.’(6)

 The general idea of universal relativity (circularity) is that nothing comes into being from nothing. As the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius noted over 2000 years ago, ‘the contest between the elements is an equal one: now here, now there, the vital forces conquer and in turn, are conquered.’(7) No certain beginning and no end, a truly loopy exercise – described by the Modernist artist Robert Motherwell as ‘veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended.’(8) In light of these recommendations for collage, Simon’s feed-back loop of rupture and repetition might be understood as an optimal mode for sustaining a critical practice of painting – where painting, as Simon performs it, makes uncertainty a method of creation, ‘apparent indeterminacy a procedure’ as Kuspit would have it, where the work’s unity lies ‘as much in the potentiality of its becoming as in the actuality of its presence.’(9) 

Simon effectively channels remnants of his previous actions into singular paintings: each single rectangular field plays host to previous painted bits of canvas, torn and transposed from their original source, their original body. Now they are definitively deprived of circulation and no longer free to associate with the marks and events of the studio. This process of dissection aggravates uncertainty in regard to all his past achievements (of other paintings, studio remnants, scrapped content), embedding these into alien territories. Staking out this convoluted process of division and agglomeration, Simon is disentangled from the problems of invention and finality, the need to conceive of the work in its entirety, making a case for the expanded possibility for painting.  

In effect Simon stages his own ‘derangement’. Abjuring a facile hand and a signature style, he shreds the material components, refusing to let the materiality of paint interfere with what he can do, or even arrive at doing within the framework of painting. Whether this disorientation is conscious evasion, blind opportunism or outrageous risk – cultivated to transgress beyond the limits of aesthetics – I can’t tell. Simon can’t either: “It was just one of those things that happens in the studio,” he told me. With rash embrace of chance, he is able to create a gap between an inherited model of painting and himself. It enables the work to follow its own passage from dubious content to eternally present composition. 

Simon’s new work urges us to consider that neither painting nor writing can go on the same. There are ways of breaking up the framework of legibility, finding new language for what we apprehend but cannot recognise. In recollection of a distant memory, I re-lived a private moment of deranged experience, and reflected on how it might be put to a poetic purpose. My story provided a framework for uncertainty where memory could function obnoxiously as a parasite. In the hope that painting and writing might be seen as inter-related material practices, comparable to a spillage, a zip in the present, or some such portentous sign. This memory – as an indeterminate and inaccessible phenomenon which belongs only to me – it can be worked-over to the point where it gains a sufficient distance from life to be concrescent: not as singular to the frame but fragmented, not privileged but equivalent. 

One thing is certain: the paintings are, and they aren’t a mess, they all have some underlying physical strategy, there is indeed a lack of synthesising imperative, there is surely doubt, and tremendous tension, and an awkward aggression to them. I could very well be wrong. But all this is to insist on the eventuality of mistakes and failures, and the ways these might offer the guarantee of the maintenance and continuation of life, and for Simon, the perpetuation of a critical practice of painting.

Oscar Capezio,
October 2020

1. Richard Shiff, ‘Criticism at Odds with Its Art: Prophecy, Projection, Doubt, Paranoia,’ Common Knowledge, Volume 9, Issue 3, Fall 2003, p. 442
   

2. Richard Shiff, op.cit., p. 446
   

3. ibid., p. 446
   

4. Donald Kuspit, ‘Collage: the organising principle of art in the age of the relativity of art’, in Diane Waldmann (ed), Metres del collage: de Picasso a Rauschenberg (Barcelona: Fundació Joan Miró, 2005), p. 276
   

5. Donald Kuspit, op.cit., p. 277
   

6. ibid., p. 277
   

7. Lucretius (c.99BC - c.55BC), De rerum nature (On the Nature of Things), (2.569-80) quoted in Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2011), p. 186
   

8. Robert Motherwell, ‘Beyond the Aesthetic’ (1946), in Dore Ahston and Joan Banach (eds), The Writings of Robert Motherwell (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), p. 54
   

9. Donald Kuspit, op.cit., p. 277