By Alexander Borovsky

In over a hundred years of its existence, the field of abstract art has been trodden flat. Countless highways, rock roads and paths intersect here. It’s not easy to find a unique way.

What matters is not scope or cost issues, but this: both the builders of highways and the people who create tiny paths toward their homes with their own bare feet – they all move across virgin land, along an unpaved surface. They navigate in the abstract space at their own risk. In any other mode, abstraction cannot serve self-expression, cannot further authorial development and intuition. Of course, one can always use a pre-paved road, comfortably and sometimes even elegantly. Thousands of artists walk old ways, demonstrating high artistic culture, great time investment, often a great taste and sophistication. But they are parrots, not pioneers. They deliver artistic products, and these products can even be of a high quality. But only personal navigation in the abstract space enables one to change perspectives. One’s own and those of others. At least a little. Even one tiny step into the unknown spaces of non-figurative art makes you a navigator, a pioneer. The artist cannot know if she’s about to discover a path or a highway. A new way is being created: this is what matters.  

I believe that Susan Swartz has made her own path in abstract art. I picture it as a path in the countryside, or in the foothills – soft turf, wind-blown grass, thickets on the sides, as close to nature as possible. This, at least, is the impression I gathered from this artist’s personal exhibition at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest (December 2016 – January 2017). This impression deepened during the preparation of Susan Swartz’s exhibition at the Russian Museum.

When I began collecting materials for the present essay, it turned out that I was not the only one to think about her work in terms of ways: Dieter Ronte did not only use the title of a painting, “Personal Path”, in the title of his article, he also employed the cartographic term “mapping”, speaking of the “imagistic mapping of one’s own soul”. My metaphors focus on the local, such as the countryside, rather than the global, for a reason: these images are meant to call to mind smells, sounds, the trembling of tree-filtered sunlight on the retina. If all this does not sound abstract, this is because Swartz’s abstractions are indeed unusual. They are closely connected to the sensorial, to what Michel Foucault called “the materiality of painting”. Her paintings are full of the almost recognizably optical, of the tactile, even the acoustic. It is not by chance that one of her recent series is entitled “Nature Rеvisited”. Revisited, the way you would revisit Brideshead – with a sense of nostalgia, a sense of time…

A white fused surface, ever so slightly warm in colour. On it, scratched with a palette knife or squeezed from a tube, there seems to the silhouette of a flower or perhaps a tiny fountain, created when a drop meets the earth. This is not a sign – the mediation is minimal, the form is alive and procedural, be it in the process of emergence or disappearance. In any case, this process appears to be repeatable, returnable. First, the palette is being reduced to the monochrome. Painting appears as painting here, not as a medium: there are no narratives, only its own, immanent content – colour, materiality, texture, a relationship with time (it was Josef Albers who introduced the concept of a colour’s age into the study of abstraction). But then this monochrome, purely material, unnuanced surface is superimposed by a living silhouette, which seems to be either pushed up by the pressure of the coloured surface, or else drowning in it. This creates a sense of return to the image – albeit on conditions dictated by abstraction. There is a premonition of inevitable contact with the natural – at a new level. The artist, the person is changing. Nature does not let go... Surprisingly, an old poem by Pushkin, known to every Russian schoolchild (and cited here in Oliver Kahn’s translation), can serve as ekphrasis for this contemporary American artist’s series:

I visit once again

that nook of land where I had passed

in exile two unnoticed years.

Ten years have gone since then – and much

in life is not the same for me.

And I myself, a subject to the common law,

am not at all the same – but here again.

The past, as though alive, embraces me,

so that it seems like yesterday I roamed

among these groves.

-Alexander Pushkin

 Later, watching films by Louie Schwartzberg, I was not surprised at the biographical implications of the title “Nature Rеvisited”. Susan Swartz has two workshops, in Park City – a snow-bound town east of Salt Lake City in Utah, near the Wasatch and Summit mountains – and on the wind-blown island Martha’s Vineyard near Cape Code, in the very east of Massachusetts. These tourist towns are almost empty of people outside the season. They differ in climate and geography, but are united in their ecological authenticity, their true state of nature. This is what Susan returns to.

Susan Swartz attracted attention in the late 2000s by paintings with representational aspects. These works even had a touch of genre about them, the memory of genre – namely landscape painting. But I would like to begin with an earlier work, “Heaven”, created in 2002. It is non-figurative, already indicative of the artist's free orientation in regard to representation, of her ability to build a material plane beyond narrative and objective references. If you look, you can find objective references here, but above all spiritual ones, as witnessed by the title. “Heaven” has clear sublime, biblical connotations. How does the painting live up to such a title? Visually, of course. The canvas is densely filled with brushstrokes, reminiscent of Pollock filling up a space by dripping. The painting is an object with certain physical characteristics – colours, forms, weight, density – and also a tangle of lines, which can perhaps be unwound.

The contact with this material plane can be sensorial or psychedelic (what Della Pollock called “hallucinatory literalism”), quite devoid of tropes and metaphors. Swartz filled the space with countless brushstrokes, which never become a relief: instead, the acrylic surface appears to have been processed by a painting road roller. This is rather different from abstract paintings as objects, such as those of the hard-edge variety, which creates a material whole expressed by monochrome blocks. Swartz is doing something else. She is trying to create a feeling of heaven with all its connotations and associations – outside of illusory mimesis. She only uses painterly means. Her brushstrokes make some zones lighter, and their very rhythm seems to transcend space at several points. Swartz understands that her kind of abstraction operates in indivisible optics. Therefore, there is more than one funnel of light, more than one hint of a dome – this is, more than one touch of spiritual illumination; these elements are not synchronized.

To use symbolism in abstraction, a form of art that has long been encased in a certain conceptual framework, is a difficult task. Swartz made a promising step forward here. She would continue the issues of “Heaven” later, in such paintings as the 2014 “Joy”. But immediately after “Heaven”, her interests led her elsewhere. The possibilities of representational art were not yet exhausted to her. Crucial impulses came from nature, and even from the memory storehouse of genre painting. Works from the late 2000s and the 2010s, such as “Steadfast Strength”, “Forest Glow” and “Winter’s Hush III”) hark back to classic (by now, we should probably call it “democratic”) landscape painting – something “high” art had not involved itself with since the times of the Hudson River School. Swartz seeks to recreate the state, the temperature of the landscape. She shares her desire to become part of the landscape, emotionally at least, with the viewer. And this non-analytical, emotional communication turns out to be highly effective – precisely because of its atavistic nature. Swartz is a contemporary artist, and she cannot help but reflect (on) the history of the genre. She uses mimesis in controlled doses, not as a goal, but as a device. But why does she need these things: the trees, the texture of their bark, the reflexes on the snow? Especially after the immersion into classical abstraction in “Heaven”?

This development, I believe, follows not a professional but a biographical logic. Swartz is simply too fascinated by this space, by the nature surrounding her two workshops. Her mind if full of visual images asking to be reproduced on canvas. As an artist, she is fully prepared for the horizon of ultimate generalizations, for speculation, for navigation in the world of ideal representations. However, as a human, she is not yet ready to leave behind attachment to a specific place, its living impressions and experiences. Under the sign of genius loci, such works as “Afternoon Shadows” come to fruition. The artist is compelled to recreate the natural sources of her inspiration by directing rays of light into the depicted landscape. It looks as if she was using natural light effects, but at the same time she is thinking about internal, symbolic light sources. Remaining within her own emotional field, Swartz also reflects the complete experience of American luminism – from “natural” (but artistically intensified) light effects to post-impressionistic internal luminance. Such are the paintings “Amazing Grace” and “Purple Majesty”, with their internal light emerging from a hidden source and piercing the middle ground.

Swartz’s emotional attachment to concrete landscapes is crucial. In her later work, it undergoes a twofold transformation. Firstly, there are works with a mimetic echo; some – “Turquoise Reflection”, “Water Study” – point toward their essence as nature studies in their titles. Other titles suggest more complex perspectives: “Evolving Vision”, “Understudy”. Swartz keeps flirting with mimesis, but as an artist, she is never on a tight leash. She abandons the concrete, the textures and silhouettes of trees. Natural impressions are still there, but they are deeply hidden in the colour haze. What matters is the feeling of a mirage, the independent flow of colour planes. This is what connects artistic representation with semantic intention. The word “flow” is key here. Long ago, Rudolf Steiner argued that “the flow of blue or violet is an expression of spiritual reality, just like red or pink represents a material reality.” No matter if colours are really that easy to interpret in psychological terms, let us just notice this keyword: “flow”. In Swartz’s work, colours are flowing, floating, flying.

Rosalind Krauss, a thinker in many ways diametrically opposed to Steiner, writes about deep internal sight nourishing the pre-form. She is discussing Jackson Pollock; in regard to Swartz, I prefer to talk about natural impulses hidden in a haze, a maze of colour. While Swartz does have deep internal sight, much in her colour representation also comes from the external world, recreating natural imprints on the retina – this is quite clear in such works as “Layered Light”. She finds different ways of connecting the theoretical and the observable. Apart from “flowing” colours, she also uses geometric devices. Several works exhibit a certain optical order; this begins with the most mimetic paintings, such as “Blue Fusion” and “Blue Fusion II”. By and by, this orderly rhythm approaches the purely geometrical (“Azure Rhythm”), and finally becomes a network of sorts (“Nature’s Mirage”). Ad Reinhardt, an outstanding mid-20th century practitioner and theorist of abstract art, used two methods to “cleanse” art from external influences, references and allusions – the network and the monochrome painting. Swartz is no theorist, but she is well-versed in the culture of abstract art. Her work reflects the critical demands, but she never lets any paradigm (such as the one described above) dominate her. Apart from networks and monochrome work, a third important device in her work is systematism, seriality, perhaps most clearly expressed in the “Contemplation” cycle. Swartz approaches a paradigm, but then takes a step sideways. There, she finds no trodden path; she happily takes risks to find her own way.

 In this context, the step Swartz takes toward the mimetic is not unexpected. Her series “Serenade of Lilies” is reminiscent of Claude Monet not only in its motif and its multi-year length, but also in the development from the concrete to the abstract. Of course, Swartz is consciously alluding to Monet’s journey from ponds and lilies toward pure colours. In his monograph on Ross Bleckner, the critic Richard Milazzo discusses the inevitability of symbolism whenever flowers are depicted in contemporary art. Flowers always stand for something, be it freshness or approaching death. They form a prominent figurative aspect in the work of such artists as Georgia O'Keeffe, Alex Katz, Donald Baechler, Alessandro Twombly and, last but not least, Ross Bleckner. Milazzo speaks of paintings that are “abstract, but floral in nature”.

To return to Swartz: responsive as she is toward natural impressions, she keeps her emotions at bay in this series. Her goal is to fill out the canvas, to make it tactile. In “Serenade of Lilies” and “Lilies Unveiled”, the geometrical shape, the square, is densely filled by flora. The monolithic essence of this concentration overpowers all lyrical and meditative reactions. The artist is interested in the density of the plant mass, though she also recreates details with panache – leaves submerged underwater, leaves in the form of tubules on long stems on the surface, open and closed flowers, duckweed on the water... Still, visually, this entire mass loses its figurative aspect. What remains is order, a state of compression, a breathing material whole.

As already mentioned, the masters of non-figurative art advocated a variety of immanent qualities supposedly inherent in abstraction. Josef Albers spoke about an “age”, Frank Stella about a “weight”. What seems crucial to me in Swartz’s lilies is the fact that the canvas is filled to bursting. Here, movement becomes tactile. The surface seems both viscous and prickly. Tactility acts as a sign of artistic presence, an experience that the artist shares with the audience. In general, the touch, be it real or potential, plays an important role in the poetics of Schwartz – as a confirmation of identity, a trace of autobiography. This is manifested in the next paintings, “Serenade of Lilies II” & “Serenade of Lilies III”. Here, the mimetic surface is extremely thin, and the works can be perceived as pure abstraction. However, these paintings do not correspond to Theo van Doesburg’s proclamations, which had so intensely influenced Joseph Albers and his American followers: “The work of art should borrow nothing from nature, contain nothing sensual or sentimental. […] The technique should be mechanistic, in other words: anti-impressionistic.” Albers’ many adepts demanded total self-reference: no associations, no meanings outside of the artwork itself.

Swartz works rather differently. These paintings transform and combine the experience of an artist's presence in nature, of personal contact with it – both of the sublime poetic variety, and of the everyday, almost automatic, tactile kind. The water lilies and their environment are optically processed into a living structure, vibrating with a particular tonality and the gestures of brushstrokes. This is a very delicate suspension of colours; the composition develops horizontally, in bands. Structures are present both on the whole and on the level if single elements (bands, stripes): the one-vector development, the rhythms of colours. This is not a pattern: development occurs horizontally and outwardly, the original geometry is overcome, the image is optically pulled out beyond the frame. Moreover, the dynamics are embedded in the colour composition – the eye is perceptually oriented toward the surface, which does not let it into the interior. Instead, the viewer is provided with ample room to roam on the surface and beyond it. This calls to mind perceptive memories: touching the prickly surface of an overgrown pond, hesitant to plunge the hand deeper into the viscous tangle of tubers and leaves. And the boat keeps gliding along the pond...

In such paintings from the 2010s as “Hidden Forest” and “Summer Bliss”, as well as in some works from the “Landscape of Resonances” and “Modern Renaissance” series, the dynamic is horizontal. There are no lines delineating certain planes (be it in regard to single brushstrokes or whole horizontal layers); everything merges harmonically: brushstrokes, their tonalities and the spaces between them, their textures and directions. Everything is in balance and in flow: the quality and quantity of colours, of lighter and darker shades, of textural changes. This is neither a pattern nor a rapport, a mirror image. Swartz is not in the wallpaper business, she never works mechanically. The things she creates are hand-made. The repetitions are not copy-pasted; they are echoes, rhymes. On the whole, the acoustic traces of authorial presence matter greatly in Swartz’s paintings – which is why the word “resonance” appears so often in their titles.

  On the whole, presence is a quality that arguably defines the path being created by Susan Swartz. Abstract representation preserves biographical “atavisms” of presence in nature: memories of colours, of eye movements in different situations – walking, jogging, lying down to look at a tree from below… (The memories aren’t always physical. In the “Prayers” series, the different degrees to which praying figures dissolve in the landscape make the image metaphysical.) For Swartz, apperception equals the sensorial plus memory.

  “Creation 7” is a diptych whose components are located not horizontally but one above the other. Representatives of classical gestalt psychology directly linked anthropological aspects (the human straight walk) with the role of verticality in constructing the image (gestalt) of the world: we tend to see vertical structures. This matters in regard to navigating a work of art, to “entering” a painting. The Russian artist and theorist Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin was also wondering about the communication with an artwork, when the viewer “does not see himself on the canvas”: “The artist and that which is represented in a painting are always parallel to each other, usually vertical, sometimes at a slant; the artist’s body becomes an unbending axis”. According to Petrov-Vodkin, the artist (Rudolf Arnheim would have said “the agent of vision”) must transcend this traditional parallelism in order to find new contents.

Swartz probably did not consciously intend to enter the discourse of phenomenology and gestalt psychology. Still, she undoubtedly reflected a synesthetic bodily experience: a frontal parallel position, dynamic tension, maximal closeness… The increase – indeed, the doubling – of the vertical field in “Creation 7” is a signal of a stable gestalt-uniting consciousness, the visual image and the material means of embodiment. At the same time, it is a farewell. Longitudinal division marks the beginning decline of the artist's interest in the kinaesthetic. The next step is geometric seriality: fragmentation of the motif into geometrized sets. Swartz had created series before; however, it is only at this point that “sextets” arise, along with complex numbering and indexing (an obvious reference to the numbered works by Jackson Pollock in the late 1940s and early 1950s). This reflects a certain movement of the artist away from close contact, from the memory of her own presence in nature to generalizations of a more abstract kind. Her art becomes a matter of visualizing the universe, studying the relationship with it. By definition, such works cannot be close and warm – this is a space odyssey, not a walk along a forest path.

There is a great divide between, say, “Personal Path 2” with its nearness – the fused, concentrated world of light and shadow, the tactile immediacy of wood textures – and the “Contemplation” series. The title of this multipart project can refer both to thinking about something and to looking closely – but the latter meaning is less befitting. This painting is not made for a close reading; there are no details to discover, nothing concrete to focus on. What we see is a space abyss, an irregularly pulsating material substance. Dozens of compositions are inscribed into the same geometric form marked “Contemplation”; this multiplicity “rhymes” with identity. The series’ paintings are identical in their sense of detachment, their unwillingness to engage in kinaesthetic experience or any physical contact. This abstinence is compensated by carefully designed colour nuances: a complex original blend, exquisite gradations of heat and coldness, dots of luminescence hidden in a suspension of tones. A substance of the cosmic order, a universe, cannot have a focal point; its pulsation is irregular, its materiality is miraculous.

Swartz’s recent works – “Contemplation”, “Irregular Mist”, “Reverie”, “Burst”, “Fragmented” – are optically similar. This optic gives the viewers no hints, does not facilitate their penetration of the artistic substance. This optic is almost self-sufficient. Swartz does not seek the kind of phenomenological materiality sought by abstractionists gravitating towards the monochrome. But her latest compositions, which could be described with Clement Greenberg’s term “allover”, have a new kind of universality. This universality consists in the special fusion of lines and colours. Her line does not separate the surface; it is thin, fragile, and it does not represent or delineate. Visualization is not directed outwards (that is, toward the real world or the viewer), but inwards, into one's own optics. The artist is very serious about this. The titles of her works often contain words like “fractured”, “textured”, “fragmented”. These refer to various optical operations. What purpose do they serve; what is behind the processes of reconfiguring optical modes? Albers wrote about the psychological effect of abstraction, Pavel Filonov about the “psyche of painting”. Both seem to have implied internal processes in non-objective art. Do they have access to the viewer?

I believe they do, despite the importance of the immanent. Of course, optical operations are in many respects a matter of self-adjustment, but in their convincing repeatability, they set a certain plane for the viewer’s navigation in the space of abstraction. This navigation can be motoric, meditative, in standby mode, etc. The strange thing is: though Swartz has covered a long and unique way toward universals, mediations and abstract concepts, for her this journey does not end in a point of no return. On the contrary, there is a need to constantly come back to one’s own experience of presence in nature, to nourish one’s spirit. This is, in fact, what the “Revisited” series is all about. The Russian audience will like it. After all, it has some experience in the perception of abstract art. And much experience in understanding meditative lyrics of memory. Swartz loves, as Pushkin puts it, to “visit once again”. Or, to cite Frost, to “take the road less travelled”.

-Alexander Borovsky,

Russian Art Critic & Curator of Contemporary Art at the Russian State Museum

AN ARTIST’S ROAD LESS TRAVELLED

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AN ARTIST’S ROAD LESS TRAVELLED

Susan Swartz: The Persistence of Lyric Abstraction

A Unique Scenery, A Doorway to the Heart

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