Sculpture by means of painting

The word image is a complicated one, with a complicated history. These days we most often use it as a synonym of picture, and in doing so, we allow an ambiguity: it could be a material thing, like a drawing or a photograph, or a mental object – the image in one’s mind. And in between those two there is a still fairly new class of images, though we’ve become so used to them that we’ve almost forgotten how new and strange they are: those images that are less tangible than the material ones, yet not ‘internal’ like the mental ones. I mean the images that flit across all the screens in our lives.

But look back to older uses of the word image and you won’t see it applied only to two-dimensional or no-dimensional representations. The further back you go the more likely you are, I think, to find the word applied to fully three-dimensional depictions, that is to statues or, to put a fine point on it, to idols – the ‘graven images,’ which is to say carved ones, against which we were warned more than once, in the Books of Exodus and of Deuteronomy. The word the various English translators have rendered thus, or more simply as ‘idols,’ is pesel, which refers to something carved or hewn, and throughout the books of Moses may refer to objects made or wood or stone or metal. 

Such three-dimensional images were not only to be worshipped, of course; they could also be objects of scorn. Call them, maybe, effigies then. In any case, within the kingdom of images they comprise a phylum quite different from that of planar depictions such as drawings and paintings. For Charles Baudelaire, sculpture was an essentially primitive art, the carving of fetishes; he believed the practice long preceded the advent of painting – remember, he was writing before the discovery of cave art, which began in Altamira around 1880. Its drawback was ‘a certain vagueness and ambiguity, because it exhibits too many surfaces at once,’ so that it lacks the ‘exclusive and absolute’ viewpoint afforded by painting. (That the great poet-critic was truly attached to this desideratum of exclusivity is shown by his making the same requirement of criticism, which he held should be ‘written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.’ Mutatis mutandis, he might have said the same about painting.)

What Baudelaire called the ambiguity of sculpture, its multiplicity of aspects, is precisely what Daniel Silver takes as the matter of his work. What Paulo Herkenhoff wrote fifteen years ago remains the case: ‘Our gaze can understand the status of Silver’s sculpture only if accepting to wander in his erratic itinerary.’ Herkenhoff is alluding, I think, to more than one itinerary – among them a life itinerary that encompasses South Africa, Israel, and Britain and in fact may be crucial to his art; a psychological or spiritual itinerary, that is, the peregrinations of the artist’s thinking and his feelings about his art as he’s developed his work through time; and the itinerary of the eye itself as it explores the continuous and ever-changing terrain of any individual sculpture. It is this last that most immediately concerns me. Perhaps it’s because this ocular nomadism reminds me of my own poetry, of the lines from my poem ‘A Quiet Death’, ‘the eye wanders / some call it homeless.’ In life, the eye never rests – it moves even when we sleep – and no artist, whether painter or sculptor or anything else, can assert the exclusive empiry over it about which Baudelaire fantasised.

And yet an artist’s formal choices do entice the viewer to follow certain paths, to avoid others – and to move slowly or with speed, impulsively or according to a clear progression, and so on. Material, form, and subject all contribute to this. The eye takes to a rounded volume differently than to a planar form, to a smooth, shiny surface differently than a matte one, to the familiar image of a human face differently than to the rationality of a geometrical solid. Silver’s recent painted ceramic works are what might be called anti-sculptural sculptures, and this is what determines how we see them. We can understand this easily enough by way of the basic dichotomy set out by Heinrich Wölfflin, one of the foundations of aesthetic formalism: these sculptures are – in their very form, before Silver ever touches them with colour – painterly rather than linear. This quality is one that Wölfflin considered typical of baroque sculpture, which, he said, ‘cannot be tied down to a particular view. It at once eludes the spectator who tries to grasp it’ because its ‘restless surfaces’ are all ‘transition and change,’ without stability. Silver’s sculpture has something of this baroque quality, and it is a tendency he shares with certain sculptors who stand between the Baroque and now, from Medardo Rosso to Willem de Kooning and beyond.

To explain this will require a small detour. Look, for instance, at any of the sculptures Silver has made in response to a group of third century Greco-Roman funerary busts found near Beit She’an, in the north of Israel not far from the Sea of Galilee, and now in the Israel Museum . Like most extant ancient sculpture, these limestone objects have been denuded of the colours that might once have adorned them – for by now we are all aware that much of the classical sculpture we know as pure marble was in fact colourful, maybe even, as the journalist Margaret Talbot recently put it, ‘alien, sensual, and garish.’ And of course the stone itself has also been corroded and damaged by the forces of time. These funerary busts at once remind us of the noble beauty of classical sculpture as we know it from, say, the Louvre or the British Museum; and yet they remind us of such works only to remind us of how different they are, for these ‘provincial’ efforts, quite different among themselves, seem to reflect aspects of other styles and periods as well. Some of them touch on the archaic, even the primitive. To what extent this stylistic variation and discrepancy has been exaggerated by the ravages to which they’ve been subject over the centuries is an interesting question, but it is surely at least partly inherent. Some of them must always have had the lumpy and asymmetrical presence they preserve today, while others still retain their classical proportions despite everything.

The busts that emerged from Silver’s meditations on these ancient artefacts show what he has learned from the action of time on and in them – from how nature continued to sculpt them, as it were, transforming them while leaving something of their original form visible, but also from how the geographical distance from the metropole where stylistic criteria were determined also meant a temporal shift. I always think of Jack Tworkov’s observation that the young Chaim Soutine’s journey from Lithuania to Paris ‘has to be measured not only in hundreds of miles but also in hundreds of years.’ All the more so was the distance nearly two millennia ago between Rome and Beit She’an, thousands of miles, a gap in time – a gap that the sculptures somehow incorporated into their very form through their self-inconsistency. 

In Silver’s translation, as it were, the beautifully discordant characteristics of the Beit She’an busts – in which intention, ignorance, and happenstance mingle in ways we can hardly disentangle in retrospect – take on a more deliberate and introspective quality. They become matter for reflection. And that reflection depends on the quality of surface that Silver brings to his works. These are not continuous surfaces, but rather, ones that are built up from many small but decisive gestures – not expressive gestures but forming gestures, discrete actions of pressing matter into place. The eye wanders, not quite homeless, among these little quanta of appearance, enjoying them as perceptible phenomena in their own right (abstractly, as we say) and as additive units toward the construction of an image recognisable as a face, a head, a body – something with the force of a presence, quasihuman, to which we give life through the act of attention. And these small gestures, which dissolve the form’s solidity even as they create, are the painterly means of Silver’s sculpture. It’s easy to think of each one as contributing to the whole the way a single brush stroke contributes to a painting. 

The surface flickers. The literal solidity of the ceramic supports a perceptual (or perhaps I should say, phenomenological) volatility. The experience of the surface is of constant motion – of course it is our perception of it that makes it so. Each mark is fleetingly related to any other as our eye continually shifts its focus among them. What are nose, eyes, mouth, hair? They are in themselves accumulations of surface differences that in themselves bear no resemblance to nose, eyes, and so on, but the relations among them can hardly be seen as anything but transitory. And yet of course resemblance occurs – a resemblance without resemblance. Again, I think back to dear old Wölfflin, who spoke of a kind of sculpture in which, ‘even without possessing the possibilities which painting on surfaces, by definition the art of semblances, has at its disposal, sculpture in turn has recourse to indications of form.’ That phrase, indications of form, is a beautiful paraphrase ante litteram for what I have simply referred to as the marks or surface differences that so tumultuously occupy the surfaces of Silver’s sculptures. Such indications ‘no longer have anything to do with the form of the object’ – here the art historian refers to the represented object, not the sculpture-as-object itself – ‘and cannot be called anything but impressionist.’

So the sculptures are painterly, and to an intense degree, even before being painted. And then they are painted. And although it’s a difference of nuance, I should emphasize, since we are talking about works in fired clay, that it is a question of painting and not glazing them. While various consequences flow from the artist’s decision to use paint rather than glaze, the significant one from my point of view would be that the colour is added at a later stage of the process – while glaze would have been added before the object was fired, paint is applied to a sculpture that might well have been considered finished, complete. Silver refuses this completion and seeks a different one. And yet I don’t see these works as a hybrid of painting and sculpture. Rather, Silver pursues the project of sculpture by employing the means of painting. Having accomplished a piece of sculptural work he nonetheless presses it forward, as it were, deeper into the realm of sculpture by painting it.

Actually, he uses the rough and activated surfaces of the as-yet-unpainted ceramic as one of his tools for painting. The sculpture bears upon its surface a painted image of itself; object and image are almost congruent, and it’s in that ‘almost,’ that small but precious internal difference, that the haunting power of these works emerges. You might say the sculpture collaborates with its maker in painting its own image. Here the rugged surface takes the paint gratefully, there it shyly avoids the touch of the brush – it is not a neutral receptor of the applied substance as a smooth surface would be. In a way, the paint takes the place of and at the same time both represents and intensifies the play of light over the surface. It insists on its autonomy from the solid form it supplements as well as on its interaction with that form. What we experience is the free encounter between two aspects of one thing. 

I see that, in a roundabout way, I’ve come back around to that question I first began brooding on here, namely the similarity and discrepancy between two- and three-dimensional images. Images are adored and condemned because there is something uncanny about the way they resemble and don’t, show and obscure, finally are and are not what they are supposed to represent. Many of us now believe ourselves to be immune to such irrationality. But art such as Silver’s reminds us that there is always a kind of animism at work in the operations of perception itself. A little like those Beit She’an busts that contain multiple, perhaps incompatible temporalities within themselves, his works look at once contemporary and archaic, primitive and sophisticated – and also both tangible and elusive. They are images, and they are images of images. They’re calmly aesthetic reflections on idols and idolatry – but still they might be idols. (Don’t even get me started about what that means to one who comes from a millennia-long heritage of Judaism.) When I experience their appeal to me, I have to reflect – as like appeals to like – that I too might harbour impulses modern and ancient, crude and complex, clear and obscure.