Mary Vernon

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

If metaphor is the being of painting, what, in painting, is the being of metaphor? Its name as painting. If the name transmits the being of color, what is the being of the name of color? Its name, once again. The revelation of the Symbolic comes when the “word does not say anything except that it is a word” — when the signifier has no other signification than its own being as a signifier, when naming names only its naming function.

Thierry de Duve 2

Painting consists, strictly speaking, in the intermixture of such specific colouring bodies and their infinite possible combinations—combinations which can only be appreciated by the nicest, most practiced eye, and only accomplished under its influence.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 3

A concern for order informs these seven paintings by Mary Vernon. Order, comprehensible arrangement among separate elements, is a making of sense, in the quotidian perception of the things of the world, in the facture of the world of the artwork, 4 and in the extraordinary moments of perception the artwork enables. Making sense of things is making connections, mediating identity and difference, a manifestation of the artist’s “desire to find, through some formal means, the identity of landscapes, plants, and objects.” 5 Connecting the disparate elements of earth into a world is making a cosmos of chaos, a making of a universe, a one-thing, of the multiplicity of phenomena. The world is always already a world, and yet this is a perennial task for each person, for as Charles Olson noted:

that we grow up many
And the single
is not easily
known 6

It is a task become more problematical in late modernism and postmodernism; indeed, the possibility of unifying the fragmentary into a systematic whole is at issue. 7 In Vernon’s recent works this concern for the order among disparate things has its principal formal manifestation in the interaction of structure and color perceived in relationship. In the contemporary cultural situation, this enterprise entails an examination of the conditions of visual signification.

The appearance of color within these works is constrained within a grid articulating the field of the work and forming an “initial surface which informs all the subsequent decisions in making the work. 8 Vernon’s use of the grid structure has various precedents; a useful comparison is with the “color chart” works of Gerhard Richter. These paintings by Richter from 1966, and the subsequent more ambitious related works from 1971 and 1973-1974, appropriate and reposition the pre-existing structure of the mechanically ordered units of paint manufacturer’s color charts. 9 In Vernon’s works, repeated modular elements sets up a repeated periodic structure that organizes the field. In Vernon’s works, triangles explicit or implicit within parallelograms, sometimes forming the limit case of the Necker cube solid, 10 otherwise constituting a planar lattice of Dirichlet 11 domains. 12 In Richter’s works, a rectilinear grid, regular and comprised of squares, is employed. 13 The salient aspect of the use of grid structures in both artist’s works is the neutralizing effect of the grid, at once flattening the spatial field in parallel to the image plane and sitting up structures of ambiguous depth. The field is rendered isotropic and mensurable 14 by the regularity of the grid. Insofar as the grid is an instrumentality of the mensurable, it serves as a trope of reason, and hence of rationality, echoing the function of the grid in Western art since the inception of perspective systems in the Renaissance. Such additional spatial effects as are introduced into this framework are a function of shifts of hue, value and intensity among the modules of the grid, as well as the clustering in perception of the grid modules.

Color in Vernon’s paintings is constrained within the modules of the framework of the grid lattice. Color, as Josef Albers noted, “is almost never seen as it really is—as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.” 15 The relational inflection of color renders it subtle and supple, a richly nuanced symbolic form. 16 Attending to the use of color as an aspect of form is necessary to any rigorous reflection on the being of painting, whether conducted from within the enterprise of painting or in another discourse. Intrinsic to the facture of the works is the selection of color in relation to antecedent areas of color and in anticipation of subsequent areas of color, and indeed in relation to the entire ensemble of the work. One may distinguish the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic conditions of the use of color. The paradigmatic selection of a color is situated within the domain of the range of a hue. The syntagmatic selection of a color is situated within the domain of all hues. The choice, continually represented in the facture of the work, can be analyzed into a twofold selection: what color, of what characteristics, in relation to the other areas of color forming the field of an image.

In applying the terms paradigmatic and syntagmatic 17 to the act of painting, I am first attempting to suggest, at the level of the material cause of the work in the course of its facture, something of the artist’s agency in selecting and modifying available color within the enterprise of creating meaning. As a simplified illustration: one may array the available hues on the painting ta- ble or palette, selecting among them by dipping a brush in one or an other, and subsequently modify the selected color’s hue, value, and intensity by admixture with one or more additional colors. This act is always already an instance of Gombrich’s notion of the process of schema and correction. 18 Something of this process is evident in the trace of the brush, the touche and écriture of the artist. 19 Throughout the facture of the work, and indeed in the completed work, the underlying grid lattice remains visible, to greater or less extent, through the subsequent paint. The paint film is scumbled, layered. In Kenosha and in Delos, the support is rough in areas, as by scraffito, below the paint film. Edges are distinct but not mechanically crisp. 20 That this is the case, and not otherwise (for the paint film could be uniform, opaque, and the edges taped and crisp) is also a function of choices made in the facture of the work. As Robert Motherwell remarked regarded other bodies of work:

The specific appearances of these canvases depends not only on what the painters do, but on what they refuse to do. The major decisions in the process of painting are made on the grounds of truth, not taste. 21

Within Delos, the spatial ambiguity of the Necker cube solids in the upper register shift the perceived directional orientation of the register: the horizontal lozenges forming the upper face of a given cube module shifts to read as the lower face a cube module. Thus, the register shifts as a whole from reading as a recessive plane of close-packed stack of cubes to an overhanging plane of precessive close-packed stack of cubes. If one attends to the diagonally running lozenges forming the side faces (yellow and blue in Delos) of the cube modules, again the register shifts, with the yellow faces or the blue faces being seen as either tops or bottoms of the several cubes. This reversibility undermines the implication of certainty referenced by the Cartesian coordinates modeled by the edges of the cubes: the direction of they-axis reverses, up becomes down, down becomes up. Once perceived this reversibility is repeatable, though unstable: no single regard is ultimately determinate and final.

Even the virtual volume of the Necker cubes in the upper register of Delos is perceptually unstable. One can regard any of the individual lozenges as parallel to the picture plane, and the two lozenges extending to each side perpendicular to short axis of the central lozenge as being in the same plane. This requires a deliberate act of volition in perception, and is made difficult to sustain by the strong tendency for the contrast produced by the change of value, in concert with the shape of the lozenges to either side of the selected central lozenge (similar to the effect in the Schroeder staircase and Thiéry Blocks figure 22), to bend them out of parallel to the central lozenge and the picture plane. As this moment of the viewer’s regard is difficult to sustain, it is transient, a perceptual flickering within the more stable Gestalt of the structures regarded as stacked cubes. Salt Lakes utilizes a lattice structure similar to that of the lower section of Delos, but applies it across the entire work. The upper rows are largely achromatic, though punctuated with cells of primary and secondary colors in the top row at the right. The second and third rows are joined by repetition of the lattice cells, except where grayed reds and yellow are introduced into the rows and which maintain their singularity. After the achromatic fourth row, achromatic and chromatic grays comprise subsequent rows, with the intensity of color generally increasing toward the bottom row. Warm and cool cells are perceived in shifting clusters. This clustering, in combination with the generally more intense color of the lower rows, produces an abstract atmospheric perspective; joined with the diagonal skewing of the lattice grid, there is a strong sense of landscape space opening behind the picture plane, in tension with the flatness of the field parallel to the picture plane.

In Kenosha, the entire field is filled with Necker cube solids, stacked in a cliff face as if a more geometric Giant’s Causeway. 23Within the field, left vertical and top faces of the cube modules are rendered in the same color, with the right vertical face a different color. This largely obviates regarding the lozenges with long axis parallel to the top and bottom edges of the plane as being the bottom face of a cube module, thus rendering reversibility more difficult than in Delos. In Kenosha, unlike the uniform scale of modular cubes forming the isotropic field of Delos, conjoining adjacent cube modules alternating with nonconjoined cube modules in a three module periodicity shifts the scale of the modules in a 2:1 ratio, 24 each large unit having edges equal to two small units. This results in diagonal interlocking bands, running from upper left to lower right, of three-cube units and of large units consisting of the reverse of three cubes forming the larger conjoined units. The large units, in order to close-pack the volume set up by the small units, fill the negative space resulting from the small units. The three-cube units occupy a volume equal to the large units, which can be regarded as a 180 degree axial rotation of the three-cube units. This shift of scale entails a scalar isomorphism: the smaller is similar to the larger.

In Diary, a single Necker cube module is placed in the center of and emergent from a field articulated by a uniform rectilinear grid of squares, the cube’s yellow, orange and blue faces reiterating the predominantly primary and secondary hues combined in the color harmonic range of the field of squares. Within the squares, smaller squares, parallelograms and isosceles triangles (half or quarter squares) are disposed, referencing the constituent elements of the Necker cube solid. The progression from a simple, flat ground to a complex, perceptually volumetric solid figure, and conversely the analysis of the more complex form into its simpler constituents is a trope of the processes of synthesis and analysis. Like the reversibility of the Necker cube solid, the work as a whole thus figures reversibility. While the ground is parallel to the picture plane, the squares are spatially active, recessive or processive, by the spatial property of their individual colors. This activity of the surface, enhanced by the color relationships between the squares and the smaller geometrical figures within the several squares, a metaphor for the organic processes of emergence, development and dissolution.

Pushan superimposes a central rectangle comprised of a lattice of red, yellow and blue rhomboids skewed to the left over a field of striped diagonal bands. The red cells are constant throughout the rectangle, while the blue cells cluster at the left, with the yellow cells shifting to orange at the lower right of the rectangle. Superposition of the rectangle as figure over ground, its repetition at a smaller scale of the rectangle of the picture plane, and the intensity of color areas in the cells of the rectangle relative to the generally less intense color of the diagonal ground bands, push the rectangle forward it to float over the diagonal bands.

In Marcato lozenge or rhomboid shapes are generated by the intersection of vertical bands with diagonals running from the upper left to the lower right. Underlap and overlap edge conditions are established primarily by value relations between the adjacent modules, although intensity and hue are involved as well. The spatial effects generated by color relationships sets up a tension with the tactility of the flat, painted surface, between signified and signifier.

Ivybind also utilizes modular shapes generated by intersecting bands; extending diagonally across the field from lower left to upper right and from upper left to lower right, the bands form a lattice composed of triangles, with some joined to form parallelograms and squares. Here, as in Vernon’s other works in this exhibition, the periodic structures, 25 the repetition of a variable at regularly recurring intervals while the value of the variable alters, engage the viewer’s regard variously, contingent on the relative perceptual size of the variable elements, and hence is contingent on the viewer’s proximity to the work. In proximal apprehension, the elements resolve into their separate components; these are perceptually grouped into provisional clusters in an effort to attain closure. Since the field is structurally isotropic, any closure remains provisional, and consequently shifts from one Gestalt 26 to another. Regarded distally, the several elements of the structure merge through optical mixture into a color climate, an adunatio. 27 The shift between proximal and distal perception of the works models quotidian perception of the landscape.

Vernon’s works are the result of an extraordinary looking at the ordinary stuff that makes up a landscape. It is a looking intense enough to entail a thematization of looking itself, a looking at the looking at things that overcomes the blind look of seeing oneself seeing. 28 In this enterprise of representing visual representation, the nature of one’s perception as that from which representation springs is manifest, represented. Here, where painting has its being, resides the province of art.

Mary Vernon is Associate Professor of Art in the Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University, where she served as Chair of the Division of Art from 1987 through 1995. Vernon is a Fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture and is Contributing Faculty member of the Pacifica Graduate Institute. She received the Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Arts degrees from the University of New Mexico. Among her solo exhibitions are: Wichita Falls Museum of Art, Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, 1993; Western Texas College, Irving Arts Center, 1992; Oak Street Gallery, Denton, Works on Paper, 1988. Recent group exhibitions include Memphis College of Art, Montserrat College of Art, 15 x 15 x 15, Louisiana State University, 1996; Contemporary American Art, Budapest and Székesfehérvár, Hungary, 500X Gallery, Rachel Harris Gallery, and The McKinney Avenue Contemporary, 1995. Her work is included in the collections of the U. S. Embassy, Bucharest, the Wadley Regional Medical Center, and numerous private collections. She is represented by Paul Rogers Harris, Dallas, and Kevin Curry, Dallas.

Mary Vernon's web page at Southern Methodist University
Mary Vernon's web page at w3art.com

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. Thierry de Duve. Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage From Painting to the Readymade. Trans. Dana Polan. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 125. Return
   
3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1970), § 554, p. 224. Return
   
4. For the notion of the artwork as world, see Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in trans. Albert Hofstadler, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 15-88, and Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 57ff, et passim. Return
   
5. Mary Vernon, “The Work,” Artist’s Statement for the exhibition, August, 1997. Return
   
6. Charles Olson, “Maximus, to himself,” in ed. George F. Butterick, The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p.56. Return
   
7. Rather than rehearsing the passage from the Enlightenment belief in the efficacy of reason to our present situation, I shall advert to only a few of a considerable body of texts which address several aspects of the issues entailed: Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), Stanley Rosen, The Limits of Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980, 1985), Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1987), Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), Lawrence E. Cahoone, The Dilemma of Modernity: Philosophy, Culture, and Anti-Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). But compare Cicero, De Oratore, III.vi.24; perhaps the issues are perennial rather than peculiarly postmodern.
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8. Mary Vernon, ibid. Return
   
9. Michael Edward Shapiro, Gerhard Richter: Paintings, Prints, and Photographs in the Saint Louis Museum of Art. The Saint Louis Art Museum 1992 Summer Bulletin. (New Series, vol. XX, no. 2, 1992).
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10. The Necker cube was first described in 1832 in the work of crystallographer Louis Necker. Typically depicted as transparent or as a wire-frame model, the solid as utilized by Vernon may be regarded as a limit case in which’front’ and ‘rear’ corners both coincide with the optical axis of the viewer such that three lozenge-shaped faces are visible. See M. D. Vernon, The Psychology of Perception (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 174, fig. 33a. Return
    
11. Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, mathematician, b. 13 February 1805 Düren (then within the French Empire, now in Germany), d. 5 May 1859, Göttingen, Hanover (now Germany). After teaching at the University of Breslau in 1827, and the University of Berlin from 1828 to 1855, Dirichlet succeeded to Gauss’s chair at Göttingen; among his students was Georg Friedrich Gustav Riemann. A brief online biography, with bibliographic links, is at http://www.groups.dcs.stand.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Dirichlet.html. Return
    
12. See the accompanying artist’s statement. Dirichlet domains are tessellations of whatever shapes, completely covering a plane, forming polygonal regions in which each point in the region is closer to the region’s data point than to any other data point in the set; see P. J. Green and R. Sibson, “Computing Dirichlet tessellations in the plane,” The Computer Jour. 21 (1978), pp. 168-173. For a formal mathematical definition of a Dirichlet polygon see http://www.csc.fi/math_topics/DH/node5.html. Conse- quently, line segments forming liminal zones between regions lie along the perpendicular bisector of the two data points. Intersecting points of these polygonal line segments are the circumcenter of circles on which lie neighborhood data points. These properties are nicely illustrated online at http://www.eas.asu.edu/~vizier/toc/tessy/whatis.html. The Dirichlet cell, initially proposed in 1850, has proven useful for modeling natural phenomena and the investigation of their geometrical combinatorial and stochastic properties, and in computer construction and representation in many disciplines, and is known by several names, often being referred to after the person first applying it within the discipline, e.g., [M. G.] Voronoi (1908) [see http://www.iko.unit.no/tmp/term/node6.html], [A.H.] Thiessen (1911) in climatology, Wigner-Seitz (1933) in metallurgy, Blum’s transform in biological shape and visual science.
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13. Some of Vernon’s recent works, not included in this exhibition, likewise use a rectilinear grid.
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14. As the grid as instrument of mensuration predates the twentieth century, I cannot concur with Rosalind Krauss’ assertion that the grid is eo ipse emblematic of modernity, if by ‘modernity’ is meant “the art of our century.” [Krauss’ emphasis.] Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1985), pp. 8-22. Return
    
15. Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), p. 1.
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16. By ‘symbolic form’ is meant the articulating schema by which a coherent whole is instantiated through connection of the cognitive, affective, technical and social practices of a culture. The term is used here in an approximate analogy with Erwin Panofsky’s treatment of perspective as a symbolic form in “Die Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form’,” Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg 1924-1925 (Leipzig, Berlin: Institut Warburg), pp. 258-339 [for an English trans., see Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (New York: Zone Books, 1991)]. Panofsky adopts the notion of a symbolic form from Ernst Cassirier; see Cassirier, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Language; Mythical Thought; The Phenomenology of Knowledge, 3 vols., trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955, 1957). Return
    
17. ‘Paradigmatic’ and ‘syntagmatic’ are terms appropriated from the general project of semiotics, and deriving from Ferdinand de Saussure’s work in linguistics; see Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, trans. Roy Harris (LaSalle: Open Court, 1986). Since Saussure, both the terminology and the project have greatly expanded: ‘paradigmatic’ corresponds to Saussure’s usage of ‘associative’ and to Roland Barthes’ ‘systematic’; see Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers, Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968). The paradigmatic plane entails an operation of classification, and is a function of metaphor; the syntagmatic plane entails an operation of division of signs, and is a function of metonymy. Return
    
18. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960, 1961). Return
    
19. Touche refers to that which is personal and individual in an artist’s brushwork entailing the consideration of style in a subjective sense; écriture entails objective elements of style. See J. P. Hodin, “The Painter’s Handwriting,” in ed. Georgy Kepes, Sign, Image, Symbol (New York: George Brazilier, 1966), pp. 150-167; see also 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
    
20. The horizontal edges in Salt Lakes and the diagonals in Marcato are exceptions, being the cut edges of the plastic tape forming the immediate support for the paint film. Return
    
21. Robert Motherwell, “The New York School,” paper at the Mid-West Conference of the College Art Association, 27 October 1950, University of Louisville, in ed. Stephanie Terenzio, The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 76-81. Return
    
22. The Necker cube, Schroeder staircase and Thiéry blocks all exhibit reversibility. A convenient illustration of all three figires is found in William R. Uttal, A Taxonomy of Visual Processes (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1981), p. 821, fig. 10.39 Return
    
23. The so-called Giant’s Causeway is a geological structure composed of exposed basalt forming a headland on the coast of Antrim, Ireland. Return
    
24. The units of modules are two cubes wide; to so regard the modular width is to take it as if rotated with a face parallel to the image plane; represented isomorphically, three cubes are involved in each perceptual unit. Return
    
25. On periodic structures, see William C. Seitz, The Responsive Eye (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1965), pp. 30-31. Also see Cyril Barrett, Op Art (New York: Viking, 1970), pp. 38-50, et seq.
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26. See Wolfgang Köhler, Gestalt Psychology: An Introduction to New Concepts in Modern Psychology (New York: Liveright, 1947). Return
    
27. The notion of adunatio, the union of the many in the one without the many ceasing to be many, was appropriated by Johannes Scotus Erigena from Dionysius. See H. Bett, Johannes Scotus Erigena (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), p. 83. Return
    
28. Allusion is to Octavio Paz, “Más allá del amor,” Octavio Paz: Early Poems 1935–1955 (New York: New Directions, 1963, 1973), pp. 20-23. Return