Latent Heat
Ian Hunt – July 2005
A breathy purity I stalk
Of unheld colour, not grouted with dead stuff:

Colour as honesty, shakiness, seduction, sudden fate;
As irrevocable, steadied to humming greys.

Denise Riley, from Goethe on his Holidays.
The first function of any writing about an artist is deictic: it is to point at the work. I apologize for using in my first sentence a rare word to talk about the act of pointing, derived from the Latin for the index finger, but it helps me feel bolder about making such an admission, obvious as it might be. This writing points towards the work of Yuko Shiraishi, which it considers good and affirmative: if not of life exactly then certainly of aliveness, and its offer of 'unheld colour, not grouted with dead stuff'. Her work does seem to combine the identifications of colour the lines by Denise Riley above makes: colour as 'honesty' (something better than good intentions: acts of affirmation have to admit to impediments); colour as 'shakiness' (the fate of the necessarily embodied brushstroke); and 'seduction' (no gloss required). If we allow such drama, colour experience may be considered also as 'sudden fate' and as 'irrevocable'. Abstract paintings possessed of frontality are necessarily instantaneous, sudden, in their first address to the viewer.
Certain types of work make one more aware than usual about what one says, and more wary. The disappointment that follows from a failed or partial verbalisation of anything that deeply matters is familiar enough. It is not just the writer's or the artist's concern, it is any viewer's also, and it may show in their hesitant shifting from foot to foot or a hesitation about filling painting's silence with words in its presence. Robin Purves: 'Writing is something that befalls painting, being provoked into existence by painting's silence, as a categorical catastrophe of surplus exegesis or as the undadorned and provisional recognition of "what works", which might yet allow yellow (say) to be nothing but itself and nothing it is not.' These difficulties are not based on superstitiousness. Nor does a wariness about speaking mean that the work is actually difficult. Good works of art – by van Gogh, Giovanni Anselmo or Blinky Palermo – need not be. Though I shouldn't go too far in making this ease seem continuous with the rest of experience, from which it is somewhat separate. Art involves rule changes. Imagine breathing water instead of air:
Breathing water is easy
If you put your mind to it.
The little difficulty
Of the first breath
Is soon got over. You
Will find everything right.
Despite the insistence that the 'little difficulty' of breathing water can be overcome, this poem (W.S. Graham's 'Falling Into the Sea') retains, by virtue of not admitting to it, a slight disquiet at crossing the boundary from above to below water. It also evokes for me here a thematic insistence on a horizontal division in some of Yuko Shiraishi's recent work. This is of more than formal significance for the artist, and more than an echo of the architectural projects she has been working on to make actual swimming pools: it figures for her those boundaries between living and dying, sanity and insanity, which are understood as substantial and significant ones but also as traversable by anyone. The installation made for the smaller gallery at Annely Juda, Anableps anableps/Cuatro ojos(Yuko, what is the title), consists of a horizon line that functions as a clear marker of imaginary water. Most viewers will find their eye level is positioned at or below the line which defines the blue of a fictional pool. Colour boxes, faced with glass, make an exhibition as though of surrogate paintings. The reassurances and affirmations of colour are disconcerted: colour here is presented as shifty, not quite available. And you are removed from the tactile aspects the paintings allow us to enjoy: opacity and transparency, the latent heat of a warm ground. As Richard Grayson has demonstrated, the dominant technologies of representation are apparent even in work such as Yuko Shiraishi's, whose paintings might at first be seen as antagonistic to anything abridged or lacking in immediacy. Simple as it is, the installation was visualised first with the aid of a computer. The realization of it as a space retains a slight digital chilliness, in addition to the temperature this particular blue entails. A particular inspiration for this work needs to be noted: a South American freshwater minnow called Anableps anableps (or more straightforwardly Cuatro ojos, 'four eyes') , which is one of the few creatures to have evolved an eye with a retina in two parts, that enables it to focus perfectly on prey both above and below the waterline using the same lens. Quite a feat, to see above and below in this particular way, but human vision based on straightforward binocularism isn't necessarily disadvantaged by comparison. According to Merleau–Ponty, 'the inner horizon of an object cannot be become an object without the surrounding objects' becoming a horizon, and so vision is an act with two facets.' We may not have four eyes like the Anableps, but evolution lets us make good use of the two we have.
Shiraishi's move to exhibiting flatly painted installations as a co–presence alongside the studio work allows a strong dialectic to emerge. The paintings do affirm and compensate. A distinct shakiness of manufacture is evident, an admission that no colour will ever be applied with complete evenness, but this is the paintings' principle of honesty. They would never deny being made by the hand but do not want to advertise it too much, or sentimentalize what it involves. This approach also makes a satisfying contrast with what Barthes analyses, in his incomparable writings on Cy Twombly, as 'this fatality: my body will never be yours. From this fatality, in which a certain human affliction can be epitomized, there is only one means of escape: seduction: that my body (or its sensuous substitutes, art, writing) seduce, overwhelm, or disturb the other body).' Barthes has worked towards this point from the way we read the inimitable gesture and touch of Twombly's work back to a single body. There is surely something that is inimitable also in Yuko Shiraishi's paintings, but it does not advertise as Twombly's gesturalism does. There is certainly a seduction of the viewer. (I'm still not sure if its use of colour could qualify as 'sudden fate', though one recent work is titled Brink. I'll leave that question to you.) But that which is inimitable in her painting is the way in which evenness of coverage of the surface, a certain tolerance of anonymity, is aspired to but not reached. Genuinely aspired to, all the same. This matters. Touch shows as something inevitable and pleasurable, but which is also required to operate under the limits of a modern discretion: it is perhaps only allowed to announce itself discreetly as a by–product of the task of building up areas of colour to the requisite density and opacity. As a work by Dan Flavin conveys to viewers that they too could go to a store and assemble exactly such a work from easily available components, paintings that show an aspiration to evenness of coverage play down the artist's facility and uniqueness. They do this in favour of an offer to the viewer of a form that can be appropriated: the feeling that you could do this too, or that the boundary that makes you in this case an observer rather than the producer of the work is not untraversable.
The democratic effect of minimalist art (and art such as Yuko Shiraishi's that acknowledge minimalism's compelling power) is still frequently made fun of but there was and remains something in it. Better perhaps to think about architecture for a moment to re–emphasize what is at stake here. Good modern architects remain suspicious of rhetoric (though they can be good at drama), and as they attempt to solve the problem of how best a building is to be used, many remain haunted by the idea of a styleless style. In practice of course it is never achieved, though the honesty with which it is not achieved is legible, whatever the decade, the budget, the informing ideas. The life a modern building acquires in use, and the pleasure it offers, is most convincing when given to people as their own idea. Most architecture is experienced inattentively, but well designed buildings allow us to appropriate them for pleasure in use without realizing that that is what we are quite naturally doing. You take the covered way by the field open to the air, a built equivalent of a line of shade trees, to enjoy the feeling of being outside and inside at the same time; you sit on the bench with its back to the spacious stairwell, you don't have to actually look in that direction, in fact not doing so allows you to feel surprised by the friend you have arranged to meet, and for whom you have arrived early. These are properly architectural questions. It is not possible here to look in detail at Yuko Shiraishi's work with architects, notably her superb collaboration with Allies and Morrison on the BBC Media Centre, but, even if briefly, it's important o note that her work shows a deep connection with the pursuit of the never to be achieved style–without–style that still informs good modern architecture.
Shiraishi's compositional procedures in her recent paintings involve a tolerance of systematic exploration (of the orders produced by varying widths and numbers of bands, for example) that is at the same time idiosyncratic, productive of individual works, but not, at first sight, wildly or demonstrably so. But to reiterate any idea of restraint is to risk making them seem more well balanced than they are. There is discretion but also drama here too, the drama by which unheld colour is enabled and disclosed. Narrow yellow bands find yellow in the pink–orange ground, orange when thinly painted, pinker when fat. A jade ground appears to admit no previous ground colour to show through; but the warm brick–pink lines find out the yellow in this seemingly absolute green. A stained magenta ground should not feel cold, but it does. And there are encounters that paintings hold out as possible but which never quite happen. In (WORK IN PROGRESS, CHECK TITLE), a warm green is overlaid by bands of lilac. The variation in ground colour means these bands are sometimes lighter, sometimes darker than the green, but because the lilac bands are themselves edged top and bottom by lilac of a paler hue, you never get a chance to make that comparison of weight fairly and squarely. You can see it from a distance, know that the two colours are teetering in a fine balance, but on this occasion can apply no detective's truth–test by close examination. The surface is more eventful than many of the other paintings, but paradoxically you are sent away from it, back to the long view, to grasp the balance that is at stake in the painting. It's important also that sometimes the pencil and crayon lines show, and that the means by which edges retain colour in an identifiable area are manual, not mechanical. The edges remain straight but the density of the paint either side can never quite find uniformity, to which it does not entirely aspire. The optical shimmer interacts with this variety of pressure so that the near view cannot be reconciled with the view from further off, as the interior of a Judd box can't be put together again with its exterior. But the resources of the painting, here an insistence on multiple horizons, mean that the slightest tilt of the head releases the ground colour from its status as 'ground', which cannot be thought its definitive identity.
These are paintings for daylight; or for the times of day, evening and morning, when local colour is allowed more to show as what it actually is by the prevailing pull of those hours to the bluer end of the spectrum. Though even as such times hold out the promise of knowing and fixing colour 'as it actually is', you know the absurdity of that thought too, that any colour could be definitively secured and identified. And there is no need for that to be a grand or exalted dilemma either, it can be as ordinary and affirmative as water; or as any day can be, when you allow it or when it is allowed. In L'Heure Bleue by Edward Gorey, the first illustration shows two creatures, our heroes, seated in tall armchairs by the French windows. Their room, with its over–active wallpaper and carpet, opens on to a balcony and the insistent blue of evening. (Goethe: 'But as we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.'). What one creature says to the other is first a thought that aspires to be as profound as blue, and second a sentence, perfect in its punctuation, that bumps back to earth: 'It is not the living, it is the being lived on. / I must remember to write that, along with some other things, down.' They can't find the words for blue, but that's all right.
Denise Riley, 'Goethe on his Holidays' from Selected Poems, Reality Street Editions, 2000.
Robin Purves, 'Denise Riley passim', The Gig 9, Willowdale, Ontario, September 2001.
W.S. Graham, 'Falling into the Sea' from New Collected Poems ed. Matthew Francis, Faber 2004.
Richard Grayson, 'Making Space', Tuesday is Cerise, Northumbria University Fine Art Press, 2005.
Maurice Merleau–Ponty, 'Phenomenology of Perception' [1945], tr. Colin Smith, Routledge, 2003, p.78.
Roland Barthes, 'Cy Twombly: Works on Paper', The Responsibility of Forms, tr. Richard Howard, University of California, 1991.
Goethe from 'Art in Theory 1648–1815', eds. Harrison Wood, Gaiger, Blackwell; Edward Gorey, 'L'Heure Bleue', Amphigorey Also, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.