PUBLISHED ARTICLE 2000 Wiregrass Museum

"GARY CHAPMAN: Recent Works"
The Wiregrass Museum of Art

A commissioned essay for the brochure and exhibition.

The "Incident Series" marks a significant conceptual and technical departure from Gary Chapman's previous work. The works on exhibit, mostly created over the past year, give the viewer the opportunity to follow Chapman's artistic development and the elaboration of the series. Mondrian's Departure (1997) is the jumping off point for his intensive exploration of real time and space and heightened emotional states. The initial phase is represented by the Second and Fourth Incidents (1998)--disturbing, melodramatic friezes of expressionistic heads in which four grotesque, grimacing figures are played off against a detached, inwardly-focused central figure.

In 1999 during Chapman's sabbatical residency at the Ucross Foundation ranch in Wyoming, the "Incident Series" evolved decisively: he began isolating a single, intensely absorbed figure against a landscape background. Drawing and painting are reciprocal activities for Chapman. At Ucross he worked simultaneously on drawings and paintings of single heads. In the charcoal and ink drawings he explores figure/ground relationships, focusing on mark making and dramatizing the background. In Incidents Three and Four, painted in oil on panel, Chapman accentuates the texture and luminosity of the landscape background which serves as a dramatic foil for the detached figure. Evolving from the drawings and small-scale paintings of isolated heads, the more recent works have become larger and more complex both technically and conceptually. In Fall 1999 Chapman began working on a larger scale and incorporating gold leaf, fusing painterly brio with the dramatic texturing and monochromatism of the drawings. The accentuated horizontal fromat of Girl with a Stick and Mary (2000), which enhances the spatial illusionism, recalls the wide-projection format of film.

In these technically accomplished paintings, Chapman creates rich, multi-layered backgrounds, consisting of layers of burnt sienna paint and gold leaf, overlaid with translucent landscape elements. The radiant, brownish-gold surfaces, unevenly flecked and distressed, evoke the worn surfaces of nineteenth-century photographs. Against the luminous landscape backdrops, Chapman projects isolated heads or abruptly cropped figures, suspended mysteriously in a life-altering but indeterminate moment. The painterly elusiveness of the gilded surfaces, in contradistinction to the close-up physical immediacy and absorption of the figures, produces the pictorial tension and psychological indeterminacy that characterize these works in which the complexities of representation and perception are foregrounded.

Chapman, who is passionate about the craft of painting, is extremely interested in the history of painting techniques. He has begun experimenting with painting on solid sheets of brass as in the Eve for Annette (2000). Copper, commonly utilized for small-scale works until the early 1700s, was prized for the smoothness of its surface. In contrast, Chapman utilizes far larger sheets of brass and exploits the inherent properties of the metallic surface. The brass, like the gold leaf grounds, creates works whose reflective surfaces actively engage the viewer, changing dramatically according to the lighting and viewing angle--surfaces that recall the luminous gold backgrounds of Byzantine icons. The opaqueness and solidity of the highly detailed foreground figures further accentuates the separation between figure and setting. In these paintings the intricate gold frames Chapman used for his earlier altarpiece works have been metamorphosed and internalized in the luminescent backgrounds.

Although the isolated heads from the "Incident Series" are portrait-like in their particularity and close-up format, they are numbered rather than named and inscribed in a series. The larger, more ambitious works are no longer called incidents; the model is identified in the title, as in Mary or Eve for Annette. Although painted from posed photographs, the works are not portraits in the traditional sense of the term. Despite the fact that they are detailed likenesses of specific individuals, they are peculiarly opaque, evasive portrayals which underscore the unreadability of the human psyche. Yet, paradoxically, Chapman insists upon the intensity of the epiphany the subject is experiencing--horrific, erotic, or spiritual--presenting a sort of blasted allegory in the postmodern sense of the term posited by Craig Owens--an extra layer of meaning that complicates or obfuscates what is being represented.1 With their richly layered, "photographic" grounds and passionate yet opaque figures, the "Incidents" are fragments of a larger discourse about representation, suspended between portraiture and narrative, the specific and the universal. With their closed eyes and inward focus, the physically close but psychologically remote figures simultaneously connote immanence and transcendence, interpolating the gap between seeing and knowing and the problematics of representation.

Girl with a Stick is emblematic of the complex symbiosis of technique and content and the ways in which Chapman's recent work engages issues about perception and representation. The horizontal landscape creates an expansive cinematic field, animated by the diminutive figure of his daughter Sadie, grasping a fishing pole, whose determined expression engages the spectator. Rather than suppressing the gaze as he does in the other pictures from the "Incident Series," he foregrounds it. The miniature figure, cropped to half-length, is smaller in relation to the background, and actively engaged rather than inwardly absorbed. Chapman exaggerates the chiaroscuro effects, suffusing the little girl's face in shadow. The sense of heightened illusionism or hyperreality, accentuated by the isolation and cropping of the figure, adds poignancy to this stunningly naturalistic depiction of the precarious world of childhood which stands apart from the more consciously staged "Incidents" involving adults.

Chapman has described his work as a "natural blend of the macabre and the beautiful" and this and other dualities are highlighted in his recent work. I am struck especially by the dialectic between heightened expressivity and elusiveness and immediacy and distance in the "Incident Series" in which the human face is a hieroglyph and the life-altering moment remains a tantalizing mystery. A figurative artist working in the postmodern age of digitalization, Chapman insists upon the validity of the craft of painting and the tangible beauties of paint while continuing to explore the expressive parameters of the human figure.

Heather McPherson
Professor of Art History
University of Alabama at Birmingham

A commissioned essay for the brochure:

GARY CHAPMAN: Recent Works
Wiregrass Museum of Art

1 Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism," in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1986), 203-35.