The grid has been universal at many momentous times in art history: from Leonardo Da Vinci mapping out the Renaissance, through the cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque, to numerous contemporary examples. A museum show in New York – the grid city – could easily include a Picasso masterpiece, a Damien Hirst fly vitrine augmented with a wall of six beautiful spot paintings, an important Chuck Close painting of one of his close circle of friends and a room of minimalist masterpieces by Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Sol Le Wit. All gridlocked.
Julia Warr’s grid-defined paintings of
women are images that, as Willliam Gibson would put it, support various
patterns of recognition or, in her particular case, seduction. They send out
different signals. She favours painting the heart of a woman by the lines on
her face. Artists Warr admires include Philip Guston, Vanessa Beecroft,
László Moholy-Nagy, Jeff Wall, Francis Picabia, Hans Holbein and the Flemish
portraitists school, especially Hans Memling and Josse van Cleve ‘because
they are deliberate, controlled, rehearsed and staged’. She also admires
Bellocq’s storyville prostitutes ‘for the opposite reasons’. Identifying
with the celebrated icons of female portraiture – such as Leonardo da
Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503–6) – Warr says her models like Rosa, Tania and
Bikini Girl, are ‘also trapped like flies in ointment. But the paint –
ointment – prevents further contamination or uninvited closer scrutiny by
providing a barrier, through sheer thickness, and repellent qualities –
surface bubbles, uneven application’. In Tibor Fischer’s new book Voyage to
the End of the Room his icon, Oceane, could easily be a Julia Warr model
subject. She is a successful computer graphics designer and ex-erotic dancer
who has wanderlust but never actually leaves her home. She is trapped in her
own inner world. Julia Warr loved David Blaine’s recent extreme stunt in
London, especially the speech upon his release, when he described how he had
learnt more from 44 days living inside a box than he ever had before.
Warr’s work is a daily routine of working, pouring, waiting and playing on
contradictions between objectivity and subjectivity, mathematics and
emotion, hard-core image and soft vulnerability, abstract and figurative. In
the studio, she uses acrylic paint, generally straight out of the tube with
a little colour mixing. No brushes. The earlier paintings were on board but
more recently she has taken to using canvas ‘as it looks more “hand-made”
and is more vulnerable or giving than cool and calculated board’. In ears
(2003), a portrait of a girl against a white background, the grid is really
contaminated. Rosa With Crown (2003) is another superb example of primitive
consciousness elicited by her use of a warped perfection of paint. Indeed,
the paintings work best when the precision of the grid is contaminated by
the fluid aberration that transcends the scientific method of painting,
producing a paradoxical hand-crafted feeling, a pixelated tapestry for the
twenty-first century.
A former fashion model, Warr graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1999. Her paintings celebrate the beauty myth from the perspective of the fashion catwalk where the models are ambiguously masked by the middle-distance gaze and physical invulnerability they are called upon to muster. But the viewer is forced to actively engage with the canvases. The way they are painted is arresting – the particular way the paint/grid is used foregrounds the procedural construct over and above the image.
In 2003, the exhibition The Fourth Sex: the Extreme Territory of Adolescence at Florence’s Stazione Leopolda celebrated the 1960s fashion shows by Paco Rabanne, Courreges and Cardin, and an era that started the explosion of liberty and energy on the catwalk. Several contemporary artists were included: Vanessa Beecroft, Rineke Dijkstra, Paul McCarthy and Takashi Murakami. Francesco Bonami stated, ‘The idea is not a literal depiction of adolescence but to recreate the mental and psychological state’.
Julia Warr says: ‘I’m not interested in beauty or decoration. I prefer directness. I like to generalise images into symbols’. The paintings are inscrutable. Or are they? They deal with confrontation. Because of that, instead of passively looking at the girl in the picture, the viewer is forced actively to engage with the work.
Warr’s paintings examine the vulnerability
of girls as subjects. The surfaces of the works have a haunting pathology
smeared across the subjects’ youthful faces and beauty. Like the skin of a
Marlene Dumas portrait, or a great Francis Bacon painting, they have a
primitive subconscious. Some critics suggest the works are a frozen moment
in time (and Warr has candidly admitted that she is haunted by the colours
of her childhood, meaning she uses a colour palette associated with a
certain time), but surely all great painting is like this. What is special
about Julia Warr is the id. Almost exactly a century ago (in 1904) Freud
published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. In it he explored such
seemingly insignificant errors as slips of the tongue or pen – which we now
call Freudian slips – misreading or forgetting names. These errors Freud
understood to have symptomatic and thus interpretable importance. It is the
slips of acrylic paint on board that are the focus and ultimate power of
Julia Warr paintings rather than the grid. Think id and super ego, the sense
of self.
Peter Fleissig