Remember that a painting-before it is a battlehorse, a nude woman, or some anecdote-is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order.


Maurice Denis 1

Art has never offered solutions or answers, but it has expanded our consciousness by asking the right questions. I suggest that the questions it now asks begin more and more to concern the relationship between reality and language than the relationship between reality and illusion.

William V. Dunning 2

The eight paintings in this exhibition of works by Linda McCall reiterate the perennial dialectic of painting: the movement between immanence and transcendence. This dialectic is enacted simultaneously in several aspects: the object-ness of the painting enacted in the materiality of the medium and the illusion of the image as non-object re-presenting absent objects, physical planarity of surface and perceived depth, mark and metaphor. The dialectic of painting extends to encompass all the paired oppositions that one may predicate of painting: light and dark, thin and thick, transparent and opaque, chromatic and achromatic, warm and cool, linear and painterly, slow and fast, gloss and matte, and so forth.

To consider the elements of painting in terms of sets of paired oppositions is to consider painting as an enterprise having its operation analogous to the operation of language regarded in a semiotic model derived from Saussure's linguistics. 3 As William Dunning has noted:

Painting in the postmodern period, however, may come to be perceived as linguistic rather than illusionistic; accordingly, the most interesting area of investigation may now be the relationships among the reality of the canvas, the sign, and the reality of the sign. . . . The new "linguistic" painting might be understood . . . as the aporetic relationship among three new elements: (1) the world outside the painting, (2) the manner of signification of this world in the painting, and (3) the manner in which this signification might be reconciled with the flat surface of the painting (which, it must be remembered, still remains part of the outside world.) 4

What is perhaps most useful in Dunning's conception of a linguistic painting is not an approach to the facture of paintings or a resultant category of paintings, but rather an approach to responding to paintings. To shift Dunning's trichotomous division of elements to the arena of viewer response enables one to utilize the framework in response to works that one would not regard as 'postmodern' in any sense other than a jejune chronological sense, and indeed in response to works irrespective of their historicity. The shift from the work itself to viewer response to the work is an assertion of the role of the viewer in the facture of signification, and is consequently a move from positing meaning as singular and determinate in the object of the artwork, to positing meaning as multivalent and determinable in the artwork as interaction between the object of the artwork and the viewer.

The referent of McCall's works, "the world outside the painting," are commonplace moments of everyday experience, architectural spaces, inhabited by a few figures and various objects, quotidian moments that might be neglected in direct vision. Here, within the world of the work rather than the lifeworld, these moments are rendered arrestingly apparent in and through the mediated visuality of the paintings 5 by the tautness of the compositions, and rendered the more dramatic by a use of light and dark that approaches tenebrism. These works are malerisch in Heinrich Wölfflin's technical sense: 'painterly' in the utilization of form dependent on areas of colored light rather than linear drawing. 6

The marking of the surface is direct, loose, energetic: brushstrokes remain brushstrokes even as they serve as signifiers of their referents. This respect for the integrity of the brushstroke has several consequences. First, the effect created by this directness is that of painting alla prima, an effect not obviated by the disclosure on close examination of the presence of scumbling and glazing. Second, the integrity of the particular brushstroke serves as a twofold trace of the presence of the artist in the facture of the work. Insofar as each brushstroke retains its particularity it is a signifier of the at-once-ness of alla prima painting in distinction from the facture of a painting in multiple sessions. This sense of at-once-ness is a trope of directness, spontaneity and rapidity, and by implication, seeming effortlessness of execution. Insofar as each brushstroke is left in its particularity ab origine, it is a signifier of uniqueness and a trope of both the singularity of the situation of facture of the work and the singularity of the agency of the artist in that facture. As such, the particularity of the brushstroke underwrites the distinction of écriture from touche: the former consists in that which is personal and individual in an artist's brushwork, while the latter entails objective elements of style. 7

McCall's works in this exhibition use an arch motif (not always literally an architectural arch per se) or flanking verticals as framing devices, serving at once both to emphasize by reiteration parallel to the image plane the flatness of the image plane, and to open the virtual depth of the image plane by serving as a repoussoir: establishing the position of the extreme foreground, all else is pushed back into space by the implicit overlapping of the repoussoir device. These framing effects are rendered in dark values and relatively cool colors, with the middle distances generally lighter and warmer. Insofar as light and warm areas tend to precession and dark and cool areas tend to recession, the spatial position of the framing repoussoir devices in contravening these tendencies effects a push-pull tension in perceived depth. The framing device within the image serves not only to emphasize the literal flatness and virtual depth of the image, but also serves to demarcate the portion of the image seen as if through or beyond the framing device as an embedded image, an image within an image. 8 This effect renders the embedded area as a representation within a representation, and thus enables a level of criticality with regard to representation as such insofar as the effect of recession is defined and enhanced by the flattening effect of the enframing device.

There remains the question of the reconciliation of the signifiers of the world referenced in the work with the flatness of the support. That question, one may urge, has been at least implicit since the first marking of a flat surface, in what one might hypothesize as a 'proto-ur-painting.' As Maurice Merleau-Ponty has suggested, "the very first painting in some sense went to the farthest reach of the future." 9 Their seem to be at least three possibilities for the reconciliation of signifier and signified, of seeming depth and actual flatness: (1) to suppress the signifier, so that the painting aspires toward a condition of transparent illusion in which only seeming depth obtains and the actual flatness of the support is denied, (2) to suppress the signified, so that the painting aspires toward a condition of apparent flatness commensurable with its actual flatness, (3) and a reconciliation in which neither signifier nor signified are suppressed, but rather remain in a reciprocal tension that acknowledges their equiprimordiality. The first option is that of trompe l'oeil regarded as a limit case. The second option is that of reductivist, purist, essentialist works regarded as a limit case: e.g., Rodchenko's Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color and Pure Blue Color. 10 The third option is the result of a dialectic in which neither thesis nor antithesis, neither signifier nor signified, assert a hegemony, but in which both are sublated in a synthesis in which each is the exact correlative of the other. This correlation of signifier and signified is, at the level of he painterly sign, "the slow and patient and disciplined search for the one and only form that fits the underlying experience." 11 It is this third option which McCall exercises in these works.

Linda McCall is an alumna of Brookhaven, completing the Bachelor of Fine Arts at Southern Methodist University and the Master of Fine Arts at the University of North Texas. A former adjunct instructor at Brookhaven College, she is now a member of the faculty of Ursuline Academy, Dallas. Her work was include in the 1998 Critic's Choice exhibition, Dallas Visual Arts Center.

1. Maurice Denis, Théories: 1890-1910, 3rd ed. (Paris: Bibliothèque de l'Occident, 1912), p. 1. [Initial publication under the pseudonym "Pierre Louis" in Art et Critique, August, 1890.] Reprinted in Linda Nochlin, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism 1874-1904: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 187. Return
2. William Vance Dunning, Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), pp. 232-233. Return
3. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (La Salle: Open Court, 1983). Return
4. William Vance Dunning, Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), p. 228. Return
5. For the distinction of vision and visuality, see Norman Bryson, "The Gaze in the Expanded Field," Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1980 [New York: Dia Art Foundation, Discussions in Contemporary Culture No. 2], pp. 91-92. Return
6. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950). Return
7. See J. P. Hodin, "The Painter's Handwriting," in ed. Georgy Kepes, Sign, Image, Symbol (New York: George Brazilier, 1966), pp. 150-167; cf. Henri Focillon, "Forms in the Realm of Matter," The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles Beecher Hogan, George Kubler (New York: Zone Books, 1992), pp. 95-116. Return
8. For the concept of an embedded image, see Norman Bryson, Mieke Bal, "Semiotics and Art History," Art Bulletin 73:2 (June 1991), pp. 174-208. Return
9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind," The Primacy of Perception : And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 159-190, ad fin. Return
10. Rodchenko's three monochromes, Chistyi krasnyi tsvet (Pure Red Color), Chistyi zheltyi tsvet (Pure Yellow Color), and Chistyi sinii tsvet (Pure Blue Color), were exhibited in the September 1921 exhibition 5 x 5 = 25, held at the Klub userossis kogo soiuza poetov, Club of the All-Russia Union of Poets, Moscow. Rodchenko wrote in the catalogue for the exhibition: "At the present exhibition for the first time in art the three primary colors are declared." Quoted in John Milner, "Material Values: Alexander Rodchenko and the end of abstract art," in ed. David Elliott, Rodchenko and the Arts of Revolutionary Russia (New York: Pantheon, 1979), pp. 50-54, [reprint of exhibition catalogue Alexander Rodchenko, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford]. Later, Rodchenko remarked "I reduced painting to its logical conclusion and exhibited three canvases: red, blue and yellow. I affirmed: it's all over. Basic colors. Every plane is a plane and there is to be no representation." Quoted in online resources for the exhibition Aleksandr Rodchenko, Museum of Modern Art, New York, June 25 - October 6, 1998 at http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/rodchenko/texts/death_of_painting.html . Return
11. Rudolf Arnheim, "Form and Content," Toward a Psychology of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 13. Initial publication in College Art Association Art Journal (Fall, 1959), pp. 2-9. Return