Close Reading Notes: A Secondary Text in Support of the Primary Text
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Begin with the contour or silhouette, a shadowshape. Mass is delimited through articulated and dearticulated surface. Some areas are painted, others are not. A comparison emerges almost immediately due to this opposition. Why treat the surface unevenly leaving, in some areas, broad swatches of the original facade showing? Investigating this “underpainting,” perhaps a patterned floral wallpaper, reveals little influence over the painted areas. The background pattern repeats such that any momentary compositional resonance between treated and untreated surface shifts and skews when reinstanced in other areas of the same image. There appears to be motivation outside that of the underpainting directing the treatment of the surface.
The painted shapes conform to a unique pattern. Under the influence of parabolic, polar, or perspectival manipulation, a grid form typically appears within the painterly treatment. This grid manifests as painted polygonal squares which grow or shrink in varying ways from one edge of the painting to the other. In between, sometimes in broad absent chunks, emerges the “underpainting.” In addition to the grid form, organic silhouettes occur on and around the contour edges. These new silhouettes are less patterned, less predictable, and resemble plant life: stems, blossoms, leaves, and shoots.
The paintings begin imitate figure/ground exercises typical of technical drawing or painting classes. These exercises aim to introduce students to concepts of arranging and defining space within the picture plane. Often, at universities and academies, the students practice outdoors, a hunk of charcoal in one hand, engaging various shrubbery or architecture with a keen eye for contour. Here the traditional “figure” is often associated with the darkened, articulated, or treated space whereas the “ground” remains fresh, dearticulated, white paper. Kell’s paintings sit in a studio next door, an extension of these demarcating practices.
But are these paintings simply figure/ground exercises in the traditional sense? Viewing is troubled by some anomalies, extraordinary behavior on the part of the paintings. The figure/ground relationship is made more complex, more nuanced, by relationships between both the colored overpainting and the patterned underpainting. Here the untouched, chaste ground proves mythic as the additive paint redefines new compositional elements within the underpainting and is, in turn, redefined likewise. Perhaps even more so than the painted parts of the surface, the unpainted areas are radically redeveloped in the treatment process.
The paintings are thus balanced such that the eye is not drawn to any specific compositional moment. At times it is difficult to interpret whether the treated areas are in fact the “figure” or actually the “ground.” The original surface of the painting blends with the newly introduced pigmentation, the two pallets weaving together then unraveling again. The paint itself is sometimes misunderstood as part of the original background or the inverse. Even the framing devices, if present, are potentially confused when paint overlays and recomposes their function. In this manner the painting begins to animate, waffling back and forth, an oscillating fabric, a rearticulation of sensuality.
Extending and building from this formal confusion is a contextual one. What is represented in these images? A leaf, a wire, a bird, a twig, a fan, a vine, a grid? Though possibly abstract, Kell paints greenhouses. The steel construction and plant life are often represented in the patterned background whereas the treated surface, the paint, signifies glass or air. Already Kell inverts typical figurative painting techniques by choosing to articulate space rather than figure. In this way these paintings are not within a figural tradition though representational.
And if Kell’s paintings are representational, then what exactly do they represent? There is this vague notion of a greenhouse. The viewer can imagine where the parts might conjoin. However, the representation itself oscillates like the formal contours. Organic plant life flows in and out of steel construction and synthetic elements. The difference between the two signifiers is compared, contrasted, and reconciled. Within this confused oscillation, the traditional oppositional structures seem to melt together. Plants appear as manmade as the steel construction while the architecture feels more or less organic.