IT’S IN THE ROOM WITH YOU

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

James Hayward is easily the most highly-achieved California-born painter alive, and I think he may be simply the best so far—he himself would be quick to defer to, for example, John McLaughlin, but I don’t think McLaughlin’s paintings are as forceful as Hayward’s or as original. When I was living in New York in the seventies he was the only California painter about whom I or my friends thought, and since then he’s only got better. He is a painter of immediacy rather than precision. Or as he put it to me recently “When it comes to painting, control can be very over rated. One certainly can't live without it, but it seems to be almost detrimental when it is overt,” a sentiment or theoretical position which to me recalls a title Matisse gave to a short note about some portrait drawings he’d made: “Exactitude is not Truth.”

The immediacy that Hayward is after has quite a lot to do with what paint can make possible. Oil paint is only used to make art, so it makes things possible on more than one level: it has physical properties which are peculiar to it and which Hayward exploits; and as a material it refers only to—or stands for—the practice or form which is painting. Hayward talks a lot about historical painting, Late Titian being for him as for the French Academy where oil painting as an independent form or type of art began, as a blend of the intellectual advances of Renaissance Italy and the technological innovations of the practical if prosaic North. Hayward frequently, or perhaps I should say usually, uses paint in ways for which it wasn’t intended—colors meant only as glazes are presented half an inch thick, without an under-color for them to glaze, colors meant only to be mixed with white aren’t, etc. The result is an intense presentation of the collection of oxymorons that constitute painting: a surface that insists on being a space, a material that functions as color and therefore light (which is immaterial,) a mark that records an action on the one hand but produces one on the other, a static object that one can only describe to oneself as a concatenation of movements.

Hayward belongs to the generation of nonrepresentational painters who set about thinking their way beyond what had become of painting in the course of the sixties. The seventies paintings are almost the opposite of what he’s been doing since the eighties in as much as they are made out of layers of acrylic which have had most of the medium leached out of it by evaporation, and their surfaces are impeccably flat and quite without a visible brushstroke. But like the paintings he’s made since the early eighties they interact with the space they’re in through color. The paintings to which I’d draw attention here were the seventies “Automatic Painting” paintings, which were white with the primaries painted into the white in equally imperceptible amounts so that the painting changed slightly depending on the ambient light in the gallery, because they are a perfect example of Hayward’s attitude to color. It is what connects the painting to the world at large—what the two share. I think it’s easy to understand why Hayward is crazy about Caravaggio and particularly about the fact that Caravaggio’s darks don’t have any black in them.

Like many nonrepresentational painters, Hayward wants the room to be affected by colors he hasn’t seen before. One sees one color but it may contain up to twenty (or perhaps even more) colors. Interestingly, although I don’t have time to pursue it here, he mixes colors up by the tube, echoing Rodchenko and the productivist side of the monochrome tradition in this respect while elsewhere leading everywhere else. Rodchenko thought that the only way painting could redeem its bourgeois past was for it to become monochrome so that each color would be tethered to a plane and thus abolish illusion. Hayward thinks it has to be monochrome and (since the eighties) to obliterate the flatness of the color’s support in the course of engendering a sense of movement and spatiality so that it may have an optimal chance at being present as a force in the room with you. Redemption doesn’t come into it. In addition to working with colors of all tonalities that seem deceptively ‘pure,’ Hayward also likes to work with what are traditionally called ‘muddy’ colors. Similarly complex, these are the colors that video can’t achieve because it is made only of mixtures of light, and muddy colors require chemical interactions between colors that while suspended in oil are derived from all three possible sources— organic, mineral and the chromatically triumphant synthetically chemical. One experiences color in oil paintings as both an intensity having to do with light and one having to do with materiality, and as in the seventies paintings Hayward continues to take both to the furthest extreme he can imagine for them.

If color connects the work to the world, the mark connects it to the viewer. Monochrome painting (when not merely a critical object) seeks to re-engage without clutter the theme of intersubjectivity—of how we relate to paintings as much as beings as things because we see life rather than just traces of production in them—that has been central to painting since sometime before Venice. The mark connects the viewer to the work through the latter’s identification with a bodily movement. It is through them rather than the color that the viewer is situated always in front of the canvas, I think. But the movements aren’t necessarily Hayward’s. The marks certainly reflect the hand and arm and bodily movements that produced them, but this gives way to what the painting actually does, which is to act on the viewer through movements that the mark comes to make because of its color and viscerality and which makes them perform as marks which are not traces, of the painter’s hand or anything else, but conditions of movement within a context otherwise made of color and a thickly brushed surface, the first a quality that vibrates and the second a surface which is also a thickness and hence inherently mobile and uncertain.

The surface of a Hayward is so thick that brush stroke can become a hollowed-out mark, the final brush strokes as subtractive as they are accumulative, in effect being therefore about displacement rather than either subtraction or accumulation. Francis Colpitt describes Hayward as saying that all painting is mark making, but I think his more recent works confirm an earlier observation of my own to the effect that his work is made as much by unmaking marks as making them. As the mark loses itself in other marks, and in the later stages of the painting becomes a hollow rather than a line, it defers to the idea of the surface—correlative but also opposite of the mark—while the surface can equally only defer to the idea of the mark, because marks are all it’s made of: the background of any mark is other marks.

Paintings are public objects with which the viewer has a one to one relationship. Traditional (pre-bourgeois as well as bourgeois) pictorial theory had as much to do with how the painting looks at us as how we look at it, I think we’d nowadays be more inclined to ask the question as one about how it’s there as something more than a produced object. The painting, the wall, the room, the viewer: monochrome painting is the exacerbation of this four-part relationship, in which two discrete entities (viewer and painting) have varying and mutable relationships to the wall and the room, the four being united by light and therefore color. The relationship is between a subject and an object that acts like a subject. Hayward’s paintings can be described as made out of one color by a kind of loose cross hatching which usually ends up with a dominant directionality, typically horizontally inclined at an angle of about twenty degrees, but that hardly describes the sense of movement that is the first or second thing—if it isn’t that it’s the color—that actually grabs one on seeing one of them. Hayward’s paintings don’t expand outwards as do Mondrian’s. Their continuity with the room is, as I’ve said, achieved through color alone (and the stretcher’s rectilinearity). Instead they advance directly towards one.

Immediacy in Hayward means being riveted to a surface both dense and weightless—as with the body as thing and image, or how we see people—and made out of what can only be immediate—color’s either there or it isn’t—and what has to become, as one looks at it, through both asserting and passing beyond its identity as a trace of something that has happened, something happening now that is also not really describable as a thing. The imprecision on which his in other respects systematic work depends has an antecedent in the Venetians who thought canvas especially good for portraits because the flickering light caught by its weave made the figure seem more alive. He wants painting to do what it can do because it is what it is. None of his friends, of whom I am one, finds it surprising that he would assume that that would mean that it could, and more to the point should, achieve an extreme condition of material and chromatic intensity and mobility.

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JAMES HAYWARD, "MONSTER OF MONOCHROME"
September 10 – October 29, 2005
Reception for the Artist: Saturday, September 10, 6-9 pm

"Monster" is a racetrack term. Occasionally, while watching the horses being saddled in the paddock area, one comes upon a horse so charged with vitality, so totally ripe and in bloom, so perfectly conditioned, on their toes and wide eyed alert, that they appear unstoppable, unbeatable, undeniable. Such a horse is referred to as a "monster." And smart money goes with him. Paint, horses and humor are all part of Hayward's lexicon; thus the title of this exhibit. "Monster of Monochrome" is a reference to the vitality and richness of Hayward's current studio practice. Mandarin is pleased to present a suite of his recent efforts, which are among the most rigorous and compelling examples of monochrome to be found anywhere.

The paintings, all pure oil paint, applied quickly with the most archaic of tools, a brush, and are among the most physically dynamic examples within the genre; true monsters of monochrome. The colors range from absolutely pure, to combinations so complex and perverse that Hayward assumes such color has never existed before. They bloom before the eye.

Hayward calls himself the "Emancipator of paint." Paint has been forced to conform to the wishes of artists for centuries. "Let my paint go” is his motto and, while exerting the absolute minimum of control, the paint realizes itself in dynamic new reality. Hayward unleashes the power of paint and reveals its beauty. Much like the jockey on a "monster," his only job is to let it run and fulfill its innate potential.

The paintings have evolved very much out of a Joyceian stream of consciousness, avoiding critique and control for the sake of the painting. He hates to see a self-conscious mark and has evolved a practice of marking which is purely proletarian; no special places and no special marks are allowed. Ideally the last mark disappears into the wholeness of the painting and is lost. The individual marks become like the dapples on a "monster" and are truly beautiful to behold. "The paint does most of the work, but because it occurs on my watch, I get to take a bow," he likes to joke. He makes it all sound so simple as he excuses himself with, "I make my living with a hairy stick and colored grease". So speaks the "Monster of Monochrome."