Frances Lerner: After All
Gallery Commonweal
451 Mesa Road, Bolinas CA
November 20, 2019 - January 9, 2020
The purpose of art is mystery.—René Magritte
Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces molded by time, certain
twilights and certain places—all these are trying to tell us something, or have
told us something we should not have missed, or are about to tell us something;
that imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced is, perhaps, the
aesthetic reality.—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Wall and the Books”
You would pluck out the heart of my mystery.—Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2
American culture these days valorizes dichotomous thinking and polemical
extremism as proof of seriousness and commitment, and balance (or compromise) is
seen as inferior—tainted by compromise. The worst are full of passionate
intensity, as Yeats says. When we eventually regain our sanity, perhaps the
values of reasonableness and balance will again come to the fore.
The poetic, introspective art of Frances Lerner, of modest scale and subdued
color, eschews the gaudy assertiveness of art-fair art, and exemplifies the
values of synthesis and seriousness. Lerner’s paintings, prints, and
assemblages (including her recent wool sculptures and paintings) tread the
knife-edge between innovation and tradition with a sure foot; they’re
mysterious, and preserve their mystery, but never descend into theatricality or
flummery. They never “saw the air” with overwrought drama, like bad actors (either
Shakespearean or Congressional).
After All surveys
the past decade of Lerner’s work from four series, which are not displayed
chronologically or thematically. Despite the stylistic differences, and the
time-tripping into which viewers find themselves, the effect is not as jarring
as mught have been expected Lerner’s compelling and consistent sensibility
links everything, so the effect is less cacophonous than dialogic; the sibling
works speak to each other.
There
Once Was A World, with its fairy-tale or fantasy title, comprises
small paintings depicting puppetlike figures in circumstances that are unclear
but intriguing. Lerner: “The main puppet, Lorelei, possibly an alter ego, is my
metaphor for perplexity, paradox, and a woman’s predicament’; she is a
“peasant, immigrant, orphan or artist in any sweatshop, factory or studio,”
balancing inner-driven creativity and everyday practicality, to keep body and
soul alive. The loreleis of German folklore were alluring river sirens that
tempted sailors to their deaths, so Lerner is using the term ironically,
perhaps hinting at majority cultures not only exploit but, adding insult to
injury, demonize their victims. Minus that sociopolitical analysis, the
paintings, inspired by a puppet that the artist purchased at a flea market, can
also be read as commentary on the human condition; we’re all caught between
assertion and powerlessness, like Hamlet’s fellow creatures, crawling between
heaven and earth. “Lorelei and the Witch” (2007-8), “Lorelei’s Earthship”
(2008), “Working Woman #1,” “Working Woman #2,” and “Working Woman #3” (all
2008), “Family” (2006), and “Oeuvre” (2008-9) depict Lerner’s troupe of puppet
actors with varying degrees of pictorial clarity, with “Lorelei and the Witch”
and “Stroll” depicting ghostly vertical presences, while “Working Woman #1”and
“Family” define the forms clearly, but still enigmatically. Implicit in all of
these images is a sense of magic metamorphosis, of matter come to life, but
also vulnerable to dissolution and disintegration: liminal, or between stable
states, to use the current phrase. Lerner’s fine draftsmanship and sense of
form hold these tonal paintings—grisaille, with superadded color
glazes—together. WIth their subdued
palettes and focus on the mysterious inner life of objects, these paintings are
in a line of descent from Giorgio Morandi and perhaps Edwin Dickinson.
In Minor Characters and
Sympathetic Criminals, Lerner expands her cast of characters beyond Lorelei
and her family, to suggest narratives, albeit complicated and enriched by the
artist’s abstract shreds-and-patches (to quote The Bard, again) patterning and color
relationships. The enigmatic dramas of “Loom-Weavers” (2011-12), “Sympathetic
Criminals” (2010-12),. “Benches 2”( 2011), “Benches 3” (2011), “Occupied Couple”
(2011), “Saddled Head” (2011-12) and “Family Business” (2012) also feature
larger architectural spaces, suggesting stage sets. In “Loom-Weavers,” the
tapestry apparatus is generalized to abstract sculpture, almost architecture, while
the woven branchlike patterning on a loom in the background carries over into
the window traceries and even the ceiling. In “Sympathetic Criminals,” Lorelei
sits slumped in a corner, hands upraised,
accompanied by a doll-like male companion in an indeterminate uniform
who stands and regards her; occupying the left foreground is a large cloth or
quilt of patchwork resembling window mullions and stanchions, a motif that
recurs in “Occupied Couple.” “Family Business” depicts Lorelei and a small
girl, both wearing headscarves, making their furtive way through an ambiguous
space littered by vessels and spars that suggests both factory and stage, with
a painted backdrop (or is it a large window?), abutted by a riser (or bed?), revealing
a generalized cluster of buildings.
The Unlikely Companions series
has an unlikely title, since the figures that formerly populated Lerner’s
enigmatic dramas now disappear, with the semi-abstract backgrounds coming to
the fore. Lerner: “For somewhat unknown reasons, I began buying old bellows,
drawn both by the way they operate, feeding the fire with air [, and] the
bellows’ rounded petal forms and angular shapes (similar in some ways to the
misshapen Lorelei).... [M]y impulse was to pull the ...bellows apart and
reunite them, forming a sort of hybrid.” The anthropomorphic bellows, which
breathe and vocalize, appears in a transitional work, “The Arrest” (2015), with
the huddled puppet couple, hands up in a shrug or surrender, beginning to unravel,
as the background space obtrudes. Later works from this series—“Nineteen
Sixty-Nine” (2013), “Syzygy” (2013-14), “CInders” (2014),
“Locomotive”(2014-15), “Fortune” (2014-15), “Underground” (2015), “Puppet Torso
Armor” (2015), and “Bees”( 2015-16)—read as mechanistic abstractions in the
Dada-Cubist-Futurist style, with echoes of Duchamp and Picabia, but done in
Lerner’s muted brown-gray palette and velvet-soft painting strokes: intimist
metaphysical subversion, reminiscent of San Francisco’s Gordon Cook. During
this period, Lerner began exploring unorthodox materials—wool, cast concrete,
and found objects—in sculptures and wall collages or assemblages that add materiality
to her concerns with time and mortality. “Cinders” (2014), “March” (2015),
“Dickensonian” (2015-16), and “Bee Bellows” (2015-16) are probably influenced
by the contemporary interest in abjection, but Lerner’s balancing of form,
drama, and psychology keeps these small works, as well as the untitled “wool
paintings” from this period, from the easy one-note irony to which other
artists succumb.
Since 2016, Lerner has returned to figuration (at least her
idiosyncratic version of figuration), working in oil on paper. “Garret” (2017-19),
“Work Break” (2018), “Rollers” (2018-19), “ and “Waiting Room (2018-19) evoke
the animated-matter imagery of the Minor
Characters period, while “Headquarters Blossom” (2017-19) recalls the moody
abstractions of the Unlikely Companions
period. “Horses” (2018-19) and “Blue Horses” (2019) add an equine motif,
perhaps an homage to that painter of spiritualized animals, Franz Marc? Concomitant
with this return to the artist’s psychic homeland is a new direction. Lerner
became interested needle felting, which is transfixing crumpled felt repeatedly
with a threaded needle until it assumes a complicated and unpredictable form.
Deconstructing hats, Lerner creates small sculptures like “Slice” (2016) that
retain, despite its minimalist form, some vestige of human use and life.
In an era when art seems to have become thoroughly corporatized and
commodified, mere easy fun, Frances Lerner’s practice stands for the value of
self-expression and meaning. It is not “standing athwart history yelling Stop”
(to quote WiIliam F. Buckley’s trope on opposing the stampede of New Deal
liberalism), but, to those who believe art can and should be a serious affair, as
Anselm Kiefer has declared, it’s heartening. Make art great again.
