Carnival Vertigo in Work of Truman Marquez
by D.F.Coleman appearing in: New York, New York 12 September 2007
Carnival Vertigo in the Work of Truman Marquez By D. F. Coleman ©2006It is hard to get a Truman Marquez image out of your mind. A Truman Marquez painting essentially speaking is meant to resist comprehension. Yet it comes out at you frenzied. It pummels you, it cajoles you, and it tumbles along, happily assuming its roly-poly poses. Notwithstanding the veneer of Marquez’s aggressively surrealistic, vertiginous, fun-house atmosphere that confronts the viewer in the preliminary stages of beholding the work at hand over time something haunting, even unsettling, permeates the work. This is the result of the artist’s highly sophisticated pictorial intelligence, which recognizes the value of indicating spatio-temporal involutions reminiscent on some level of the teasing work of Escher’s in order to draw the eye and the mind to the space of possibility that can only be aroused by enigma and paradox. The artist’s overall ideological ambition is to frame philosophical issues, which obviously compel him. These are set within an order of the mind intent on circulating questions around the designations of sameness and difference, separateness and integratedness, volition and the involuntary, destiny and fate. The artist is compelled by the presence of emerging (or emergent) energy; his intention is to bring into visual play visual analogies that refer to the affects of causality, as well as to the condition of dependence/interdependence/independence and to human agency itself. In Moral Divide for example the artist manages to incorporate the sensation of game-like space being co-habituated by floating globe-like structures. Their sieve-like openings allow us to peer within each sphere, into a private domain. Depictions of books, gravityless, hint at the insinuation of culture gone mad, of rationality now viewed as irrelevant and incidental as tumbleweeds whirling through ghost towns of yore, while natural laws are held in abeyance. This is a tough work, as it seems to be intent in depicting interior frames mind, caught adrift. It is work, which welcomes uncertainty and approves of unpredictability. It is a topsy-turvy, gravity-less world, which is depicted. The sensations of floating, separating, being broken up in pieces held aloft by womb-like yet permeable membranes, evoke the anxiety-ridden condition of being adrift in an ocean of time-space. This is depicted as exhilarating on one level yet one is clearly open in terms of being seen, open to the judgments of others. In some way Hold the Emperor Accountable deals a bit with this theme: the notion of exiting our everyday world and entering a continuum of non-separation from the things around us, being those things and those things being us In this image Truman Marquez allows us entry into a vision that signals the emergence of a new world. This world has internal worlds within it obvious for all to see, yet these internal folds in time and space are co-existent and self-contradictory, simultaneously. Marquez implies not only that the spatial body is dynamic and that this dynamic is the very condition which allows the world to become manifest in and through consciousness. In a broad sense Marquez depicts a determinate world where objects can begin to co-exist simultaneously. The artist teases out another riddle from this presupposition. He seems to be questioning the very condition of dynamic spatiality and effect on the body. Here I use the body in both its narrowest and its widest sense; body of being, human body, body of mind, space, thought, time etc. Is the body in control of its own physical destiny (or determination)? And if so how are we to picture the indeterminate horizons (both internal and external in the sense of physiological and in terms of outside stimuli) which signal to becoming manifest to us that the world is emerging. On another level Marquez’s Hold the Emperor Accountable work seems to suggest that there is a supra-mundane world that not only co-exists with the world of empiricism and intellectualisms but also is bound within the groundedness of reality. The slippage from ties of social conditioning is further implicated through Marquez’s depiction of unopened manacles hovering in space unencumbered by the condition of usefulness, the signifier of restriction itself set free. Hold the Emperor Accountable explores through various depictions the spatiality of the body itself and mobility. Its vision asserts that there is a continuum of thought-perceptions which validates and nullifies the condition of what might be called “the sensory givens’ of physiological and somatic existence. There seems to be on the part of the artist a desire to suggest the condition of subjectivity and objectivity held in balance: “I” and “Me” conflated. In some way the narrative that is suggested in this remarkable work is that the phenomenal body does not so much respond with its habitual gestures, with the body as “author” of its movements. Instead we receive the distinct impression from examining the painter’s imagery that the body (as object) seems to be “triggered off” by a situation, a situation over which the subject-object body has no control. Such concerns relating to the synthetic unity of the senses and sensory powers (and others) can be seen in Marquez’s painting The Painter Contemplates the Fifth Wall.” It depicts a painter holding his brush and palette, his body and gestures existing (or trapped?) in a tri-partite continuum consisting of floating spheres. In the painting the viewer can observe that this abridged and condensed body image has been placed in a four sided space. Its walls are covered by four paintings which highlight strong moments within avant-garde painting: pivotal landmark paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol. The floor line, not surprisingly, represented by a quadrille which is painted to resist one-point perspective, abnegating the Brunelleschi-space that refers to harmonious control and self-determination through rigorous and consistent spatial mapping of the ground, let us say, of existence. Instead, treatment of the floor, the ground of experience, consist in making it appear to tip over onto itself, indicating a journey into doubt and slippage and brings into focus temporality itself within our lived-world experience. The artist alludes to the questioning of ontological premises and brings into play a set of considerations referring to the task of the artist which is to integrate himself (or herself) within the stream of teleological history and historical conventions. This task also includes the recognition that at some point a resistance of this quadrant of “knowingness” must be put into play. This refusal allows the artist to innovate (thus renovating the past) through present actions. Optimally, Marquez seems to be implying, the artist should end up, culturally speaking, as being seen in a space which is in advance to knowledge (and history) itself.Truman Marquez’s paintings are remarkable images, which contain spaces that refer to primary temporality seen as a dynamic unity whose dimensions overlap one another while never co-inciding. His work suggest that he has given great care to recognize that questions leading to subjectivity and non-coincidence immediately introduces our awareness that time guarantees its openness to the Other, the very condition which allows for shared participation in the common creating of meaning. What we can all share in the viewing of this work is an artist engaged in the process of creation whose very subject is creation itself. This tautological, self-referencing engagement on the part of the artist leads the viewer to a space of wonderment, carnival vertigo.
D. F. Coleman is an arts writer based in Manhattan.
