The modernist project, initiated by Braque and Picasso at the turn of the last century expressed through the form of Cubism ,which reached its high-point in American Abstract Expressionist and Colour-Field painting of the 50s and 60s, was essentially a process of taking the world apart and re-assembling it in new and extraordinary configurations in order to see all sides of an object at once, to see all aspects of a person at the same time, to reveal all of the world at once. Collage, juxtaposition and fission were the techniques employed to re-vision the world, free from the shroud of claustrophobic convention and the stagnation of an academicised tradition. By conflating the figurative with the abstract Roni Stretch continues this modernist programme in a contemporary and explorative direction.
Although apparently abstract, the early 90’s ‘Zuma’ series of paintings are in fact derived from the landscape of LA. However, various devices are utilised in order to disengage the paintings from the traditional parameters of landscape painting. Firstly, many of the canvases are vertical, as opposed to the normal horizontal format associated with the genre. Then, to the conventional medium of oil paint is added bees-wax and plaster. This imbues the paintings with an acute and potent physical presence by emphasising the surface of the work, the quiddity of the material facture, this flattens space and inverts the usual concern of creating an illusion of depth and optical space. The structural elements, filtered from mid-century architectural blueprints and the artist’s own photographic source material are accumulated at the base of the canvas. This ‘anchoring’ of the composition with the distilled elements of deconstructed architecture serves to privilege the modernist aspects of the work, further enmeshing the paintings within the canon of ‘colour-field’ painters such as Barnett Newman, Jules Olitski and Mark Rothko, with their adherence to formalist concerns with flatness, ‘edge consciousness’ and the primacy of the objecthood of the painting.
One of the problems with abstraction is the inherent emotional detachment of the artist from the artwork due to the foregrounding of the physical engagement with the matière, the physical matrix of the expressive act. Affective engagement with the content is arrested by this detachment, and is then transposed onto the relationship between the artwork and the viewer. Stretch elegantly bridges this gap by the introduction of purely figurative elements into the paintings. The iconography of the football field is utilised as a way into the world of the painting. The signifiers of that most populist of British sports act as visual keys which the viewer can use to unlock the abstract aspects of the work. Although these signs from the lexicon of the grammar of football appear in all of the ‘Pitch’ and ‘Box’ series of paintings the content of the work does not concern the subject of football itself. The white boundary lines of the football pitch are a visual device used to induce an instant recognition and rapport in the viewer.
Until recently football has traditionally been the game of the working class. With rear exceptions the exponents of high modernist abstraction and its principal audience have been the middle classes. By transposing elements of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture Stretch initiates a complex dialogue between quotidian imagery and the specialised language of abstraction. Although the markings of a football pitch are themselves an abstraction, they immediately evoke a figurative image, and are therefore a perfect device for ‘entry’ into an abstract painting. If we can speak of the ‘male gaze’ then surely we can also speak of the equally problematised ‘working-class gaze’ and by inference the ‘middle-class gaze’. Initially motivated by a desire for his working-class father to understand his abstract work Stretch introduced the imagery of the football pitch, thus by a deft transference of access and agency allowing the ‘working-class gaze’ to gain entry into the privileged arena of ‘middle-class’ modernist space.
In the ‘Still-Life’ series the notion of the ‘figurative entry-point’ is articulated in a more direct and challenging manner. The abstract colour-field of the painting is dramatically ‘interrupted’ by the hyper-real rendering of a symbol of absolute physicality and ‘being in the world’, the most simple and concrete element of painting from Zurbarán to Chardin to Cézanne: an apple, or an orange. Suddenly the formalist aesthetic at work is disrupted, the flatness of late-modernism erupting into an atmospheric evocation of the deepest aerial perspective. This disruption is further enhanced by the drawn elements of the composition. The image, in outline, of three footballs – characterised by their familiar pattern of hexagons – and the blueprint-like outline of classical archways add a further layer of visual intrigue to the picture. The paintings are now operating on three simultaneous yet harmonious levels. The fruit appear like a hallucination, or hypnagogic image, casting no shadow and being rendered in a technique which emphasises their surface detail over their volumetric qualities. As with the ‘landscape’ paintings the still-life element is located near the bottom of the picture field, this ‘weighting’ lends a sense of monumentality to the composition. After the figurative jolt of the fruit we are ‘brought back’ to abstraction by the vertical band of strong, flat, opaque colour which always occurs along the left-hand side of the painting. This balancing and re-balancing of the figurative and the abstract has an interesting historical precedent in The Piano Lesson and related paintings by Matisse, the realist elements of the painting induce us to infuse the abstract elements with figurative associations, while the abstract elements cause the figurative elements to function as abstract components of the composition.
Stretch builds up his paintings over many months, in delicate glazes and scumbles, layers, textures and subtle impastos, elements of drawing are added and hidden, the whole moving in and out of focus until a perfect balance is achieved. There is a rich dialogue between the rectilinear, geometric aspects of the work and the soft and atmospheric element built up by this layering process. The life of the painting is held in dynamic tension between opposing aspects of its structure: figurative/abstract, hard/soft, cool/warm, the energy of this tension is exploited to evoke the essence of a place rather than its literal appearance. The edges of the paintings are often emphasised by linear markings or stripes and smudges of colour, this re-stating of Greenbergian formalism firmly locates this work in a modernist tradition, and yet the work is utterly contemporary with its strong reference to the everyday, the urbane and the populist.