| From the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Eric Aho: Red Winter at DC Moore Gallery,
New York, NY, October 8 - November 7, 2009
RED WINTER: ERIC AHO'S ACTUALITY
By Bonnie Costello
October 2009
IN THESE PAINTINGS THERE ARE NO SAFE DISTANCES, NO SHELTERS;
Eric Aho has walked down from the hilltop with its reassuring vistas; he is offroad
now, in pursuit of the actual. With Aho, we confront reality not selectively, in
discrete, familiar parts, or classical unities, but as sensation, in real time. And
reality doesn’t stay still.
The dynamism of these paintings is aligned with their subject matter. Instead of
offering abiding geological forms, as a stable theater for variations of light and
season, Aho places us deep inside extreme, protean states—in a reality not just
leafing and shedding, but burning and freezing. Yet, Aho’s work is not apocalyptic;
his world of fire and ice is less about endings than about processes and
transmutations. Hence, we feel relief and delight as much as terror and awe. We
may stare into the black water of Ice Cut (1930), from 2008 [p. 23], as if into the
grave in Gustave Courbet’s Burial at Ornans,1849–50, but this is not a void. The
river is moving—depth is also flow. And the austere splinters of the broken river
conspire with the sun to bring out prismatic color. There is more mystery than
finality here, which brings the poet Elizabeth Bishop to mind. As she gazes into
Nova Scotia waters she is transfixed; a “believer in total immersion,” she lets her
mind enter that element, and lets it become a metaphor for knowledge itself,
knowledge incarnate in the senses:
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
Dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
Drawn from the cold hard mouth
Of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
Forever, flowing and drawn, and since
Our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
Some of that sense of tentative, phenomenal knowledge, which is not the world
but is both of the world and like the world, comes through in Aho’s work,
whether that door into the dark is made by nature or by man cutting into it.
While there are no human figures or dwellings in the artist’s paintings, they are
not images of a wilderness that exists without us, or nostalgic depictions of a
lost way of life. Here, nature is a space for human action, thought, and feeling.
Someone measured and sawed the ice cut, still fresh; someone perhaps lit the
brush fires, though they rage mysteriously, like imagination itself. Similarly someone—
the artist, the viewer—is present, discovering reality by bringing it into
awareness, adding and taking away in the interchange of perception and creation.
Our rhythms of perception, arriving at sensation and detail, retreating in
change or abstraction, respond to the compositional rhythms of the painting.
The brushstrokes dart across the landscape like a flame, consuming the picture
plane; the image cuts into the canvas, and the canvas crops reality, as the saw
cuts into ice. But these are primal interactions, with little machine or ideational
intervention. If there is any environmental message it is simply that such intense,
primal experiences of actuality are possible and desirable; that we are not prisoners
of our formulations. Aho would agree with Wallace Stevens that “the greatest
poverty is not to live / In a physical world…” The plenitude of even the most austere
images is an antidote to such poverty. But to live in a physical world means
also to engage with it in the full humanity of our being. The painter does this, and
compels us to do the same before his art. Hence, the dynamism of these paintings
is not just set forth in their subject matter; it inheres in the imaginative
making and viewing of the work.
Aho’s confrontational paintings renew the idea that the local is the only universal.
The places we live in shape our thought as much as we shape our environment.
Aho’s Finnish ancestry and New Hampshire childhood have nurtured a boreal
sensibility that sees the world in extremes of temperature, light, and change. The
palette of the fire paintings sometimes dramatically conveys the full cycle of the
seasons, or presents contending forms of hot and cold light, as in Fire Field
(Winter Moon) from 2009. Fire also clears the way for a new idiom.
Aho has memorized this world in great detail, and endows it with strong feeling.
But these are not regional portraits. They pursue essential meanings and laws.
The birches that stand or fall everywhere in his paintings, not only identify the
northern latitude, but with their pink and green highlights become surrogates, in
some subliminal way, for the human figure—that other vertical on the horizon.
Certainly in Early Easter, 2009 [p.19], with its black-and-white cross, we feel this
association. The image is entirely secular, and even spare in its precision, far less
expressionistic than one of its antecedents, Edvard Munch’s Birch Tree in Snow
from 1901. Yet, the anthropomorphic feature remains, uniting the body with the
world. Is that tree notch an eye or a kneecap? The whole composition builds on
the perpendicular. The cropped birch in the center foreground, trunk deep in
snow, raises itself in counterpoint to the dark flux. The birch’s black and white
coloring embodies the integration of the snow with the black river; the floating
gray forms hovering above the river like ice-ghosts, convey its movement. We
feel the blue wet weight of the snow in the shadow puddles around the birch as
it melts and drains back into the earth. The wedge of blue sky on the top left
cuts in between the dark tree forms just as the black river carves into the bluewhite
snow on the right. One wants to read the image both horizontally and
vertically, following from left to right the emergent color and detail that marks the
progress of spring, or else stepping across, bottom to top, to reach the other
side of the river. Either way, we stay connected to the earth and its changes, not
gazing out to horizon or beyond branches to a higher power.
Some of these paintings have a conceptual emphasis, which is part of their humanity
and even their violence. We are, after all, the symbol-making species; even the
polarities of ice and fire are dialectical terms in the poetry of elemental forms. But,
in these paintings, iconographic elements tend to be embodiments of the very
experiences conveyed—the paintings symbolize themselves. So while the sawed
edge in the ice-cut paintings elicits a visceral response, it also conveys the artist’s
drive to cut into the surface of reality. The sculptural slabs of Ice Field, 2009 [p.
21], convey motion in nature, but also the breaking up of the picture plane and the
interplay of two and three dimensions. In Owl, 2009 [p.16], disarmed by its density,
the viewer enters the snowy forest. No owl is perched in a tree; trees themselves
are not single objects but merge with their snowy environment. Yet, the painting
communicates the presence of something powerful that we feel rather than behold.
That shadowy but palpable being is bodied forth in the structure of the whole composition
that, while marking a threshold, also faintly suggests a raptor with spread
wings, descending toward us. Are we its prey? If so, it is a sublime surrender. We
give ourselves up in this act of attention. Certainly we feel ravished by these paintings,
and not only the fiery ones. If there is symbolism, then, it evokes a mysterious
metaphysical dimension in the physical world—an immanence that may be our
own animating consciousness—animating the world, and animating ourselves—not
a supernatural or otherworldly source.
While these images emerge from a certain locality, they also emerge from history,
which influences what we see and how we feel. These are intensely personal
paintings; the artist has himself made the ice cut on a pond in front of a Finnish
sauna he built in New Hampshire. Through the winter he and his family refresh
themselves in those frigid waters. But the image is also prompted by his father’s
deathbed obsession with a childhood memory from the Great Depression: harvesting
ice on a rural New England lake for shipment to Boston. The ice-cut
paintings, indeed all of the ice paintings, have the monumentality of obsessive
memory; their scale and point of view are hard to establish; the delicately rendered
ice crust reflected in the water, suggests a vast polar landscape. The
jagged slabs that thrust us into Ice Jam, 2008, for instance, suggest, in their
composition, a challenge even to Romanticism’s craggy perch.
In both Ice Cut (1930) [p.23] and Landfast, 2008 [p.20] from the same series,
the intentional, neatly measured cut, with its sheer walls, contrasts to the undulating
peaks of the crust, both above and, in reflection, below the deliberate
lines. In this ambiguity of scale, the local becomes the universal. The cut or broken
ice suggests the mystery that underlies all our surface arrangements of
reality, but also the perilous unknown of our contemporary history, in which reality
is rearranging itself toward an uncertain future. Yet, these are not melancholy pictures, for the artist identifies with, rather than suffers change. We think of ice as
stasis and art as a freezing of reality—nature morte. But like Richard Serra making
waves out of steel, Aho interests us in the dynamic potential of ice. In New
England, when the ice breaks up, it can make a truly shattering noise—sun and
current together breaking the hold of winter in a violent manner.
The great analogue of consciousness is light, and many of these paintings can
be said to be about light, about radiance—how it changes reality, and how it
pours its abundance without selection into every surface and hollow. For Aho,
light’s generosity—oozing out from a moon to illuminate clouds as if they were
wings, or the sun breaking through in a snowstorm—is unlimited and indiscriminate.
In Orchardist, 2009 [p.8], as in the darkest of Francisco Goya’s paintings,
light struggles against gloom. But light is also destructive, for if it brings forth
the green shoots and the pink, blue, and orange highlights that modulate these
stark white, black, and red worlds—its energy, like the artist’s, also destroys,
eroding and corrupting organic forms, charring the white birches and sending
up smoke screens.
Aho is less interested in an articulated landscape than in light itself, or perhaps
the work that light makes visible in all its different moods from noon glare to
midnight gleam. Light overrides the boundaries of substance; it spreads even
where fire has not reached so that the tall bare spruces in the background of
Red Winter, 2008 [p. 3], are illuminated orange against the contrasting blue sky.
Yet light is not only a visual matter; it has temperature. The infusion of color in
these canvases brings the temperature up or down, and in subtle ways: blue in
fire is the hottest point; pink on ice reflects a January sun. Light also has texture.
Aho’s handling of texture, with heavy impasto in some places, and scraping
to underpainting in others, becomes a vocabulary for communicating the force
of light and the urgent quality of perception. Is there even perhaps a sound to
light—the implied crackle of the sparks in brush fire, the audible silence of the
luminous forest?
Any artist builds on the past and looks for what is useable in his struggle within
the present. Aho is not locked into artistic alliances, but draws ideas wherever
they are vital, making something new. The boreal fires that consume the canvas
have an all-over quality that can make one think of Jackson Pollock, but they first
burned into Aho’s imagination from a painting by Rembrandt, Rest on the flight
into Egypt, 1647, where a tiny camp fire illuminates a circle around the figures
who hover in a dark, expansive wilderness. His interactions of flux and form animate
the struggle between figuration and abstraction. His dialectic of ice and fire
is not just iconographic but painterly—a vacillation between reduction and elaboration,
or between the minimal and maximal intervention of paint. This dialectic
links Aho’s works to the breakthroughs of Modernism—in the fire paintings we
see Goya’s struggle and suggestion, breaking out from the strictures of classical
form; and the ice paintings and forest paintings evoke Paul Cézanne’s quest for
essential structures where mind and nature converge. Aho continues Cézanne’s
insatiable pursuit of the actual beyond the limits of descriptive realism, into the
picture plane. But while the space of his new work is foreshortened, and while
even the non-objective art of Kasimir Malevich may echo in the black squares and
white-on-white of the ice cut paintings, Aho seems little interested in the flatness
of abstraction. Rather, he actively works to return a sense of depth through variation
in the level of description, with some areas of the canvas resolved into near
transparent illusion, and others loose, thick, or unresolved. The physical world is
an infinite resource to plunder for fresh forms, and figurative values give a complexity
to spatial relations, which is hard to achieve in pure abstraction. Wallace
Stevens comes to mind again: “One might have thought of sight, but who could
think / Of what it sees…?” Content matters not only topically and formally, but
experientially, and it is in the union of subject matter and material handling that
the existential content of these paintings comes across.
Such an emphasis on actuality and immersion distinguishes Aho from some of
his contemporary peers, for whom painting is imbued with irony, built out of quotation
and distortion, and virtual reality has supplanted experience. Nor has his
art much to do with current environmental protests, or proposals for a new ecology
of man and nature. The contemporariness of his innovative work consists,
rather, in the new ways it calls us into the inevitable and fluent presence of the
actual, making the work itself an environment for the viewer, not just a spectacle.
Aho’s project finds many unexpected cohorts in painting, such as Lucien Freud,
Alex Katz, and Cecily Brown. But he finds even stronger affinities, as unlikely as
it may seem, with artists working outside painting, in new media forms, from
video to architectural installation. Both James Turrell’s ruminations on light,
space, and time unfolding in a fabricated framework; and Anish Kapoor’s spare,
elegant entwining of the real and the invented, have contributed importantly to Aho’s approach to his own medium. In all of these works we become a part of
what we see, but not masters of the maze. We navigate their art as we navigate
reality; we project our forms onto it; we reflect in it and on it; but it continues to
disarm us and absorb us within its enormity.
Aho’s new way of encountering nature involves an often radical and unfamiliar
handling of space: the image is largely foregrounded, yet deep; cropped geometric
forms lay down frames, but leave them open such as in Ice Cut (1930) from
2008. We do not easily slip into distances; the entry to the actual is difficult, and
Aho finds new ways to challenge fictions of transparency. In fact, he often introduces
a gap or obscurity. In Ice Jam, the eye is thrust into the picture by the
white slabs of ice, but propelled horizontally into the black water that only eye,
not body, can cross. Yet the water is a surface too, a black mirror, here matte,
there gloss, on which the white forms of the other side lay down their image. In
Fire Three, 2007 [p. 4], as in Fire Field (Winter Moon), 2009, smoke veils much of
the scene, provoking more anxiety than reverie as clouds in the distance seem to
be consuming the trees. Yet the forest pictures, while in many ways the least literal,
offer a threshold. The unity of these scenes is not rational; it works by
dispersal, the disjointed rhythm of the retinal field creating dynamic, flickering
patterns. And yet desire does seek a path. In Sun Through Storm, 2009 [p.13],
the radiance pulls us through.
If perspective is not fixed, neither is scale, or the relation between the scale of
the illusion and the scale of the canvas. Some of these images are close to
actual proportion, but the little paintings remind us that dynamic grandeur and
wide brush gesture can be accomplished within an intimate frame. The scale of
the pictures has a lot to do with the freedom to explore, to avoid predictable and
over-tight composition. The sense of discovery has led him to add on sections to
his canvas in one case—Ice Field [p.21]—in a happy coincidence given the fragmented
nature of its subject matter.
Ultimately, what Aho puts into his spatial frame is the sense of time and motion.
Modern painters have often attempted this and meant different things by it, of
course, from the kinetic rhythms of futurism to the drips and sweeps of gestural
abstraction. Aho employs a variety of means, representational and formal, to
heighten the sense of flux. While he often paints en plein air, he pulls as well
from the dislocated images of memory, painting with memory, not just from it.
The serial nature of the paintings adds a sense of the artist’s exploration,
whether in the tighter, angular ice paintings; the modulated, emergent forest
paintings; or the roaring, darting fire paintings. In the ice paintings motion inheres
in the jostling shapes. In the fire paintings, too, there is a strong push-pull
dynamic; consider Sky Vent, 2008 [inside cover] where the planes of red funnel
down into the black center cauldron of the consuming fire, while the smoke vents
upward at a wind-induced slant, toward the sky. Does Aho’s painting offer us a
hearth or a hellfire? Or is it something of both?
The title for this show is taken from a poem of Wallace Stevens:
He is sitting by the fidgets of a fire,
The first red of red winter, winter-red,
The late, least foyer in a qualm of cold.
The emotions provoked by these works might not seem those of the fireside. But
this is the paradox of painting—the peace we are brought to in the contemplation
of art is one with the turbulence into which it offers entry. The most important
time here is the time of painting itself, with its existential risk, though without a
claim to autonomy. Consciousness is in a forest, finding its way, all smear and
blur and shimmer. Perception is still happening in the viewing, which demands
duration, for the painting is not just the afterimage of an event; it is the event.
BONNIE COSTELLO
Bonnie Costello is Professor of English at Boston University. She is the author of many
articles on modern poetry and five books, including Shifting Ground: Reinventing
Landscape in Modern American Poetry (Harvard UP 2003) and Planets on Tables:
Poetry, Still Life and the Turning World (Cornell UP 2008). She focuses on relations
between the arts and has written essays on visual artists, including Giorgio Morandi,
Joseph Cornell, and Abelardo Morell. Costello has been a recipient of fellowships from
the Rockefeller, Guggenheim and Bogliasco Foundations, and she is a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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