Letting color riot: On Kelly Allen’s paintings in UICA’s “Coming Home”
Part of UICA’s current exhibit “Coming Home,” Kelly Allen‘s work is packed with slapstick humor, riotous color, and an exuberant playfulness with materials.
For her part in “Coming Home,” UICA’s current show of eight Michigan artists, Kelly Allen presents a few dozen small paintings and textile wall hangings that are packed with slapstick humor, riotous color, and an exuberant playfulness with materials. The canvases include small portraits made of thick, goopy plastisol ink in hallucinogenic palettes. There are larger works with dense piles of color, rendered in swirling oils, that read as landscapes. Fiber works burst with kaleidoscopic rags, beads, mirrors, and bits of clay, looking like tribal artifacts from a distant future.
In her statement for the show, Allen describes the work as the result of a shift in her practice. For years, she made paintings that used precise photorealistic rendering to mimic collaged elements — animals, objects, textures — on stark white backgrounds. The old works were energetic, dense, and candy-colored. I always liked those earlier paintings, but I couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that using such precise control of paint to imitate the appearance of collage was a disservice to the material realities of both collage and painting. Collage is a method of stealing bits of existing images and building something new from the waste of visual culture. Painting, on the other hand, is about pigment, binder, surface, gesture, and time. What can an artist do on a surface with pigment, a solution with which to bind it, the movement of her body, and time? Every painting is an answer to that question. As much as I liked Allen’s old work, I couldn’t figure out why her answer to that question was to produce something that looked like collage.
Thankfully, she moved on, and the results are thrilling. In her statement, Allen describes a shift from using store bought art supplies to reclaimed materials. This seems less important than the way in which Allen’s change in painterly approach demonstrates that she switched sides in an ancient war: the fight between line and color. A contentious debate has raged since at least the time of Plato, with line and its attendant concepts — logic, rationality, philosophy — on one hand; and color and its fellows — emotion, intuition, rhetoric — on the other. The conflict flared in the 17th century French Academy when the battle lines were drawn (no pun intended) between the Poussinists and the Rubenists. The Poussinists, revering Nicolas Poussin’s precise renderings of historical scenes, believed in the Platonic notion that the mind contained immutable ideal forms that could be reconstructed by artists through reason. Line, therefore, was the essence of painting, color was merely decoration added after the important work was done.
The Rubenists, on the other hand, admired Peter Paul Rubens’ vibrant chromatic canvases. The Rubenists believed that color was the most important thing in painting because it could best imitate nature. Color was admired for its ability to enchant and deceive. Drawing, as an exercise in rationality, appealed only to a small coterie of experts, while color was a direct experience and its immediacy was open to anyone. While the Poussinists looked back to Plato, the Rubenists read contemporaries like John Locke, who argued that all ideas were derived from experience. Eventually, the Rubenists won control of the Academy, but the battle never really went away.
Kelly Allen received her MFA in 2008 from Kendall College of Art and Design. It’s a big generalization to make — and odd considering the cultural, political, and technological revolutions that have occurred since the 17th century — but I’ll make the claim anyway: Kendall tends to produce Poussinists. Allen, along with many of her fellow alumni, is a stellar draughtswoman. For years she produced images that were vibrant and dynamic, but seemed to exhibit her mastery of rendering and composition above all else. They were good, but they were careful.
No more. With these new paintings, Allen is drunk on color, and the only way to really see what she’s up to is through direct experience with color in all of its shifting, chaotic, deceptive power. Line is definite, measurable, and stable, and—too often — a crutch. Whenever an artist renders something with a precise line, we can’t help but compare it to the real thing, the verisimilitude becomes a proxy for quality. Is the painting good? Well, does it look like what it looks like? Letting a painting be intoxicated by color, however, completely denies the viewer this safe and rational approach. The only way to really see the painting is to take the pill and brace for the trip. There’s no sense in holding up a photo and darting your eyes back and forth to assess proportion, value, and hue. Your eyes are on their own.
There’s a painting in the show where the battle between Allen’s Poussinist and Rubenist impulses is clearly on view. “Garden 1,” from 2013, is a small canvas with an undulating mass of pistachio, periwinkle, gray, and hot pink surging from the bottom over a white ground. In the upper right and lower left are two bees hovering next to this alien aberration of a flower. The bees are life-sized and depicted with startling precision. They are two tiny visitors from Allen’s past, buzzing in the air around an incomprehensible mass of color, failing to find a place to land. This blending of old and new approaches on a single canvas works because she only does it once. If more of the paintings used this trick, it would get old. As it stands, “Garden 1” reads like a crucial pivot from one method of image making to another. Are there photorealistic faux-collage renderings under that swirling mass of color?
We’ll never know.
