Constance Mallinson
Artweek
December 17, 1983Cumulative Landscapes
Los Angeles/Robert Ewing
Constance Mallinson has become known over the past few years for abstract paintings in which repetitive design motifs, arranged in grids or bands, materialized through the tiniest of flecks and strokes of pure hues. But constrained within this minimalist structure was a landscape sensibility that expressed itself in a feeling for rhythmically varying densities of tone, suggesting an atmosphere of natural light, movement and space. In her latest paintings at Neil G. Ovsey Gallery, Mallinson has abolished the constraint. The result is an outpouring of landscape ideas that are literally dizzying in concept and execution. Although aspects of these can be linked to her earlier work, what is most striking in this exhibition is the manner in which Mallinson has achieved an entirely new, imaginative reordering of her esthetic sensibility.
The best of these paintings are not singular views of a particular vista or expressions of a particular phenomenon. Instead, each painting is a kind of hodgepodge encyclopedia of various types of landscape, presented as we have come to know them through popular culture. Each canvas is covered in patchwork fashion with a series of small landscape vignettes (as many as sixty to eighty scenes in a single paining), with every vignette a copy of another image. Scanning these large paintings is like looking into a kaleidoscope filled with mixed tourist views from National Geographic and drugstore postcards.
Weltanschauung, for example, is a typical compilation and, as its title implies, a summation if ever there was one. Besides the requisite skies, mountains, lakes, waterfalls and meadows, there are rows of palm trees, a petrified forest, hot-springs geysers, Dutch windmills, oil derricks, urban skylines, Big Ben, a Monet haystack, Church's Niagara, Smithson's Spiral Jetty and, smack-dab in the center, a shard of a Clyfford Still. Certainly Mallinson's wit is not the least of her virtues.
These paintings, clearly, are about ways in which we receive the constant flow of images from our surrounding culture and how they then condition our responses to nature and image making. But the paintings are neither images of despair or irony, nor are they mere conglomerations of fragmented images – they do not add up to a postmodernist essay. Mallinson transforms the ubiquitous nature of cultural imagery by taking it at face value.
Each vignette or fragment of a landscape is a representational scene built up into clearly recognizable parts and phenomena by a fairly loose stroke. The approach is varied enough, adapting itself to the requirements of the particular image and ranging from silhouettes to quick cursive strokes to long drags of paint that echo landscape forms. The viewer's eye willingly enters each space and, just as willingly, moves along, led by Mallinson's carefully constructed liaisons and juxtapositions. Mountain slopes become shorelines which become horizons over meadows – all in an easy flow from one view to another, though witty juxtapositions of impossibilities sometimes provide a change of pace.
Moreover, for each painting Mallinson has utilized a landscape convention or organizing principle that gives the work a landscape "feel" apart from and with more resonance than the fragmented scenes. In Trees, patches of parallel forms in a heavily textures ground resemble the blotchy appearance of rough bark. For All and For None is a panoramic vision with shorelines on the bottom, skies and clouds at the top and passages along the way that travel from meadows to waterfalls to mountains. And Black and White United States (charcoal on paper) is a "map" with swamps and alligators of the deep South in the lower right corner and the Cascade range peaks in the "Northwest," or upper left corner.
Mallinson's energy and artistic intelligence shine through these works with a clear radiance. If, in part, they are about received images, they are also, as a much-larger part, about "the artist's ability to reaffirm our deepest instincts and transcend cultural limitations.
