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Aaron
Fink Critical Praise |
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excerpt: Aaron
Fink: Out of the Ordinary
A giant strawberry presses against the edges of a large canvas. Slightly elongated, it rests on its side with the indolence of a neo-classical odalisque; dabs of black paint become seeds punctuating its crimson skin, while the curling tips of the roughly brushed green cap coyly shield its gently rounded top from prying eyes. From a distance, the form is dazzling and lusciously solid. Close up, it dissolves into a heavily worked painted surface made of thick scumbles of vivid paint. Deeply scored sets of parallel lines cut into the image and ground, imparting life to otherwise buried layers of underpaint. Meanwhile a splash of solvent dissolves one section of the fruit into a river of flowing color. This monumental strawberry is the creation of painter, Aaron Fink. The world according to Fink is one in which things are not what they appear. At first glance one sees a lushly painted embodiment of sensuality and Eros. But upon closer inspection, we realize that it is embedded within a canvas which has been blotted, scraped, and otherwise manipulated. Initial sweetness masks an undercurrent of fundamental creative and sometimes violent forces. The explosive energy with which Fink literally attacks the canvas informs us that destruction is inherent in creation. For Fink, art is the progeny of a dynamic system in which change and metamorphosis are revealed through acts of deconstruction. The emotion in Fink's work is rooted in the apparent contradictions it sets up between artistic illusion and physical actions of the painter which simultaneously create and undermine that illusion. Fink isolates objects like this voluptuous berry, not to conjure a sense of their concreteness or physical reality, but to destabilize our sense of their place in the world. He makes us understand both how convincing and how unreal painted representations can be. An early influence, Rene Magritte, created a meticulously realistic painting of a pipe inscribed with the words, "This is not a pipe." The subject matter of a work of art is one thing, Magritte tells us, while its material reality as an amalgam of paint and canvas is another. Meaning, meanwhile, floats somewhere between the two. Fink says, "There is an inherent contradiction in painting between the image and the materiality of the paint. On the one hand there is the object depicted, the image that gives the sense of illusion. On the other, there is the flatness of the two dimensionality of the canvas surface upon which the material, i.e., paint, is applied." A kinetic tension is created by this sense of illusion and rendered space and by the denial of this space when we remember that this is, after all, paint on canvas. This is further complicated by the creation of an actual space upon the surface created by the layering and the removal of paint. As when one watches a log's various stages of incandescence and transformation in a fireplace, we have the sense of looking through time (and space) as some areas of the painting come forward into the present and other areas recede when the paint is blotted or scraped away to reveal an earlier underpainting. Fink attempts to create a synthesis of these contradictions. When we move from one painting to another, we discover that these images isolated on the canvas are not self-referential tropes. The same basic shape reappears from painting to painting, reinventing itself as a wave, a hat, a cup or the base of a light bulb. The steam from a cup of coffee or tea becomes sculptural and solid, made of undulating shapes which reappear elsewhere as the petals of a rose or the smoke from a cigar. We begin to realize that, for Fink, all things in the visible world are linked. As Plato put it, "All nature is akin." Nothing can be understood in isolation. The simplicity of the painted image is an illusion. As a result, Fink's paintings and graphic works, which tend to center on a limited number of common, everyday objects, raise the issue of meaning in an urgent way. Why does the artist obsessively return to the same themes? And why does he subject benign domestic objects to near destruction? What are we to make of his earnest dissection of various berries, smoking cigars, steaming cups, gargantuan roses? Are the objects represented in Fink's works merely arbitrary motifs which allow him to explore a variety of painterly and graphic techniques? Or do they persist in his imagination because they have some important private or social significance? And if so, what are they meant to convey to the viewer who is not privy to these personal reflections?
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Copyright © 2005 by Hard Press Editions |
