NICOLE CHARBONNET LANDSCAPES AND HEROES
by Michael Plante
[From Exhibition Catalogue for Nicole Charbonnet Landscapes and Heroes]
The paintings shown in this exhibition mark a new direction for Nicole Charbonnet. They provoke a different set of feelings — of sensibility even — than what we have come to associate with her work. The close-hued pastel yellows and pinks have yielded to a darker palette of greyed-blues, umbers and greens; the peeled and hollowed flower shapes that characterized an earlier, more abstract vocabulary have transmigrated to a heightened level of complexity. Present here is a greater pictorial legibility, a seemingly programmatic iconography and not unimportantly, the depiction of a deeper space. Taking these changes into account, Charbonnet, nonetheless, has maintained her commitment to the tradition of modernist painting. The success of her paintings, paradoxically, rests in their ability to sustain visual curiosity while resisting the visual pleasures associated with a decorative surface. I take “decorative” here to mean that current of modernist painting that dispensed with perceptive depth in favor of an all-over deployment of color or line. Charbonnet’s deepest space is still the space of the modernist canvas, not the space of illusion. The current of visual pleasure driven by Charbonnet’s lush colors and mysterious, torn and abraded surfaces are poised against a sub-dermal text—usually constructed from appropriated poetic passages—that refuse the viewer the satisfaction of any straightforward interpretation. As Charbonnet puts it: “The surfaces retain or reveal a ”memory” of preexisting stages or structures, resulting in palimpsests, as some images, colors, textures are obfuscated, while others remain visible, how-ever shaped or shaded by previous or subsequent gestures or events.”1
Charbonnet’s images are constructed from layers of collaged newsprint, posters, wallpaper samples, children’s storybooks and such—all lurking below and above layers of pigment, gesso, cement, and sculpting paste. The finished paintings bear witness to Charbonnet’s act of tearing into the images, and then rebuilding them. This is a performance of painting. The collaged elements often extend beyond the edges of the canvas, documenting temporal stages of her process. But the paintings are never finished in a “slick” way— certainly not on the level or what the French call “raffine”—as Charbonnet will continue to efface them again with sanding/scratching, and over painting. Importantly, Charbonnet’s performance rests strictly within the realm of art making; she is not an expressionist, nor a diarist in the manner of DeKooning or Pollock. She reveals little about herself, highlighting instead, the act of making art.
Landscapes and Heroes are two different subjects of Charbonnet’s recent work. They intersect in unpredictable ways, teasing different levels of meaning through their juxtapositions. Yet, as individual paintings, each is compelled to succeed on its own terms white testing a narrative subject matter ranging from the explicit to the ineffable to the tragic. Charbonnet announces her intellectual program, at least metaphorically, in the painting, This Road of 2002. The work is divided into three horizontal sections: the road at the bottom, the sky above the horizon line, and the quotation above it all. “I’m a connoisseur of roads. I’ve been tasting roads all my life. This road will never end. It probably goes all around the world;” is painted in a cursive hand, with the occasional brush stroke in blue or orange, with tears and abrasions characteristic of Charbonnet’s style. The quotation and the scene are taken from the Gus Van Sant film, My Own Private Idaho (1991). In a sense, This Road is a kind of film still; however, one painted from memory As it is absent the main character that w.e remember occupying this road, it transforms into a generic road leading nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Perhaps the artistes self-reflexively illuminating the many choices available to her, and by extension to her viewers, with the “open road,” a consummately American symbol.
Landscape with Heroes #1, 2002, is less obvious in its reference to the Coen brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000). One again, Charbonnet presents us with an empty road that curves off into the distance. In this case, the painting is a filmic scene waiting for the characters—the heroes of the film—to enter the state. Or perhaps they have already left. All we can trust is the road itself, seemingly endless through the use of atmospheric perspective. Painted from memory, the picture represents the indeterminacy of the relationship between landscape and the passage of time, or as a screen on to which we project our own desires and longings. The idea of the hero, as well as the sea, the desert, and ironically, the road or highway, are all images that ignore boundaries between past, present and future.”2 Layered beneath the image on the canvas, Charbonnet has inscribed a poem fragment from John Ashbery: “For there is a key, and it leads to your door. Yet it is only by repetition, something the seasons like a lot. As you get up to go, you mutter and that”s it.” The road, combined with Ashbery’s text, reveals much about the pictorial representation of landscape. Simon Schama has argued in Landscape and Memory that the cultural production of landscape is a rediscovering of what we already have, “but which somehow eludes our recognition and our appreciation. Instead of being yet another explanation of what we have lost, it is an explanation of what we may yet find.”3
The ambiguity of Landscape with Heroes #1 is exchanged for the more direct description of place in Climb Ev’ry Mountain and A War Between, both 2002. A War Between is a scene Charbonnet recalled from the Steven Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan (1998). She uses the techniques of grisaille—a monochromatic painting carried out mostly in shades of grey—to represent the opening scenes of the film when American soldiers storm the beaches at Normandy. The scene is centered between two margins of brown color, above and below. She has collaged and painted a range of material, buried beneath more collage, and then torn away to reveal parts of the deeper layers. The central section is actually a separate canvas glued to the surface of the picture. This wartime landscape is peopled with heroes, American soldiers fighting the good fight. The opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan were filled with gory and horrific images of dismemberment and human self-sacrifice—the most basic tenets of heroism. The text that Charbonnet used is once again taken from Wallace Stevens: “Soldier, there’s a war between the mind and sky, between thought and day and night. It is for that the poet is always in the sun, patches his moon together in his room to his Virgilian cadences.” Here the poet, or in this instance, the artist, stands apart from the fray, observing it all from a place in the sun.
In Climb Ev’ry Mountain, the title of a song from the musical The Sound of Music (film, 1965), we are presented with a scene from a much earlier musical. The Wizard of Oz (1939). The painting is once again divided into three areas, with the subject of the painting depicted on a separate canvas pasted into the center of the composition. The palette of blues and grays is carried over from the landscape paintings, though upon closer observation. Climb Ev’ry Mountain is both a landscape and a painting about heroes. This is the scene where Dorothy runs away from home, with her suitcase and Toto, in search of the place over the rainbow. Charbonnet has again presented her audience with a road leading into an endless horizon. But the scene is filled with potentiality: we know that Dorothy is entering upon a journey—a liminal zone where she will discover her own individualized values—as she sets off to “climb every mountain, forge every sea.” Charbonnet’s intersection of the most famous musicals in American history is both a joke, and a comment on the futility of not only the happy ending but any ending at all. This is metamorphized in her performative painting process—where we can find no beginning and no end. Dorothy’s future journey into this dream place is inscribed in the painting with lyrics from “Over the Rainbow,” the signature song of the film: “Someday I”ll wish upon a star, and wake up where the clouds are far behind me. Where troubles melt like lemon drops…” etc. The painting covers layers of collage, and the text is nearly impossible to read. This intentional difficulty is part of Charbonnet”s strategy to simultaneously reveal and obfuscate the sources of her work.
Dorothy Gale is the hero of the narrative in Climb Ev’ry Mountain, as in The Wizard of Oz. She leaves the world she knows in search of adventure and a better life. Above the central section of the canvas, Charbonnet has collaged several images of a woman with her arm bent at the elbow, flexing her bicep. With this repeated collage the artist, perhaps unwittingly, comments upon Dorothy”s strength. Rather than being a drab little girl, the character of Dorothy demonstrated to boys and girls the world over the potential embedded in their choices as they walked down the road. In this way, the fictional Dorothy is what Ralph Waldo Emerson termed a “representative character,” that is, “a public figure who appears to re-form the body politic through her words and actions.” The idea of the hero as a representative character is most poignant in St. Jerome and Three Views of the Lion. The painting has three areas of focus—though not stacked like most of the canvases in this exhibition. The landscape is lifted from Piero Delia Francesca’s fresco, Legend of the True Cross of the 1450’s. In the landscape passage there are two lions, and a third one placed in the upper right corner, probably taken from a diagram book. The woman flexing her bicep is featured in the lower right portion of the canvas, much larger and more dramatically rendered than she was in Climb Ev’ry Mountain. Though Charbonnet has engaged us wdth her appropriation from Piero”s fresco, it is within the buried text that the true hero of the painting emerges. The quotation is from Anne Frank this time: “Deep down I believe that all people are good.” It is repeated at least three times across the span of the canvas. The translation from the diary is “…I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” Charbonnet may have taken the quotation from a different source. This is one of Anne Frank’s final diary entries, dated July 15, 1944 (she was captured by the Germans 20 days later, and died in Bergen-Belsen in March of 1945). Anne Frank became a hero, a representative character, through her diary, which allowed generations of people throughout the world to comprehend—emotionally and intellectually—the enormity of the Holocaust, World War II, as well as the nature of good and evil. As in Climb Ev’ry Mountain, the hero is once again a young girl, a fact not lost on Charbonnet.
In After Durer, Charbonnet appropriated Durer’s drawing of a bird’s wing. It is painted in tones of brown and grey and occupies the central portion of the canvas against a background of green. In After Durer, the subject matter and the poetic text are beautifully matched. The quotation is from Emily Dickinson: “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul / And sings the tune without the worlds / and never stops at all.” Besides the wing’s heroic scale, the reference to Emily Dickinson uncovers another heroic personality, and certainly a representative character around which a great deal of vital feminist poetry, imagery and social history has been sited during the past three decades. Emily Dickinson’s poetry appears repeatedly throughout Charbonnet’s ouvre; in Nostalgia #2, Nostalgia #3 (“This world is not conclusion; / A sequel stands beyond, / Invisible, as music, / But positive, as sound”) and in two large-scale paintings of animals.
Charbonnet has painted an enormous kangaroo with a baby in its pouch standing in a field of daisies in Australia (Landscape with Heroes #3). The Dickinson text reads: “We never know we go—when we are going / We jest and shut the door; Fate following behind us bolts it, / and we accost no more.” In Safari (Landscape with Heroes #4), a large-scale zebra, like the kangaroo, stands in a landscape populated with flowers. It, too, hovers above a Dickinson quotation, “I sing to use the waiting, / my bonnet but to tie, / and shut the door unto my house, / No more to do have I.” The artist may be enlarging something as prosaic as a vacation photo, or images from a children”s book. Ultimately it does not matter. In her words: “These paintings are about memory and desire. Using ”found” images (from books, TV, movies and other paintings) reiterates what my process of painting expresses: mainly that what and how we see is created indirectly not only through our own memories and longings, but also through other people”s perceptions, projections and desires. Surprisingly, incorporating filtered imagery, cultural artifacts and archetypes felt just as cogent, subjective, intimate and personal as working with old family photographs.”6 Charbonnet’s recollection of Anne Frank’s quotation may be from the diaries, a play, or a movie. Importantly, it is a recollection, a memory and not a transcription. Nicole Charbonnet is not a postmodern artist engaged with issues of direct appropriation from a particular source. Rather, her project is less specific and more ineffable—even romantic. The confidence of her subject matter rests in the subjectivity of her memory, and her ability to transform the recollection of what she has seen, read, heard, desired and experienced into the substance of art.
1 Nicole Charbonnet, “Artist”s Statement,” April, 2001.
2 Nicole Charbonnet, Interview with author, 1 April, 2002.
3 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 14.
4 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men (1850; reprint Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1988), 26.
5 Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (New York: Prentice Hall, 1993).
6 Nicole Charbonnet, Interview with author, 1 April, 2002.