Painting as Means: The Critical Inquiries of Philippe Van Snick

Ironically, in order to do so, the artist has deliberately limited himself throughout his career to a highly restricted formal vocabulary, the basic elements of which are a set of ten standard colours and the basic geometric forms of square, rectangle, cube, and beam. The colours are used individually, in selected combinations, or as an entire set, and consist of the primaries (red, yellow, blue), the secondaries (orange, purple, green), black and white, gold and silver.-1- Underlying and giving shape to these elements are Van Snick's concerns with concepts of time and temporality, as well as his tendency to organize individual ele­ments by units of ten or expand them by multiples of ten, and to con­ceptually structure and unify works in terms of certain fundamental dualities, such as that of light and dark.-2-

The repeated use of basic elements in Van Snick's work, however, does not in itself predetermine meaning. Indeed, the function of and the relationship between the chosen elements in a given work, such as the artist's trademark pairing of pale blue and black, for example, has to be reestablished with every work. These elements are in effect reconfigured by the structure, purpose, and specific context of each new piece. It is as if the artist must start from scratch every time he makes a work. Because the underlying basis for Van Snick's work is experiential and not primarily semiotic or symbolic, each new work determines how we see, read, and are affected by those elements.

The deployment of these basic elements is as discerning and explor­atory in nature as it is varied. The formal rigour evident throughout Van Snick's body of work is first and foremost in the service of the artist's intuition and his acute and highly receptive visual intelligence. What motivates his works and sparks the imagination they give form to is not the desire to realize particular effects or to illustrate a particular the­ory; it is rather the need to render visible and to make available through direct experience significant aspects of our condition in the world. At their best, the works involve a bringing into consciousness that which is ultimately familiar but has largely evaded articulation, categorization, or naming. It is the kind of discovery that is inherently a recognition.

Perhaps one of Van Snick's most significant contributions has been to demonstrate in work after work the contingent nature of our experi­ence of colour. By shifting critical attention to how colour is experi­enced, he enables us to more clearly understand that much of what we think about the phenomenon of colour is based largely on culturally inherited ideas about it, and on the memories and associations certain colours have for us personally. The clear, brilliant hues of the colour chart appear to have become the paradigm for all colours in their essential and "purest" state. It is as if the colour chart is the model by which the mind attempts to grasp the phenomenon of colour. That model, the artist reminds us, is itself inherently abstract, a system of a priori givens.

A 1991 series of works entitled Laura, for example, present each of Van Snick's standard ten colours as intense and highly saturated. Works such as Laura Red and Laura Yellow fairly throb with colour. The unexpected depth, vivid clarity, and chromatic resonance in each work suggests that the artist has managed to capture an instance of colour in a living rather than pure or essential state. What is remarkable about these works is that they can achieve scale and full presence within the confines of modest physical dimensions and conventional materials. Each of the works is a wooden bas-relief enclosed in a deep box frame and hung on the wall like a painting. Eight rectangular shafts of various sizes project outward from the back of each box-like support. These projections are all the same colour (red or yellow, in accordance with the title) except for two, whose ends are painted pale blue and black. On the one hand, all we really see of the dominant colour projections are shadows which surround each of them like a halo. The pale blue and black ones, on the other hand, function as strong accents within a sur­prisingly aggressive and expansive colour field. They serve to punctu­ate and reinforce the presence and intensity of the dominant colour by offering strategically deployed points of contrast, of both a light and dark variety. This range of contrasts helps the viewer optically situate the dominant colour. But because they are extended in front of the back support, the pale blue and black rectangles appear to co-exist in space with the dominant colour; they do not read as figures on a common ground. The Laura works can be said to present colour as a unique kind of space in its own right, one which remains part of the everyday physical world (as indicated by the shadows of the rectangles) and yet is more than simply a layer of vinyl paint on a flat surface.

More often than not, one finds one's attention being directed towards the fact of the inextricable relationship of light (and ambient lighting conditions) to colour. Again and again, each time in a different way, Van Snick's work demonstrates that light is a basic precondition, a veritable sin qua non, of colour's existence. Indeed, his works consti­tute an aesthetic assertion that, in terms of human perception, colour is a function, as well as a condition, of light. The work shows directly and compellingly that when presented on their own under normal cir­cumstances, colours are neither "pure" nor predictable in appearance. They continually change before our eyes, sometimes almost impercep­tibly, sometimes suddenly and dramatically. In fact, a number of the artist's ten core colours reflect the pure fundamentals of early Modern abstract painting. As if to insure this association with past paradigms and theories, so as to be that much better able to deconstruct them, Van Snick presents the ten as hard, bright, and uninflected.

Slides of the artist's installation in Osaka, Japan, 1995, were taken at different times of day. The images record the passage from late morn­ing into afternoon and then from afternoon into night on a row of ten standard size colour paintings. They have been placed on a wall sepa­rating two facing pairs of large pale blue and black colour areas. In the slides one can clearly see a progression from the brilliant hues of the ten colour paintings to the progressively greying tonalities they take on during this period. At once prosaic and majestic, separated by cement pillars which are part of an archway that frames them both, the pale blue and the black wall partitions reveal transformations of their own. That is, the juxtaposition of the two draws our attention to a distinct set of polarities. The subtle, continually changing dialectic between the two suggests, on a metaphorical level, the very different contexts that day and night provide for our experiences. We see things differently and are subject to different moods and rhythms during the day than we are at night. Each of the large pale blue and black colour areas engulfs us with its own space and feeling. In striking contrast to this, the changes registered on the ten small colour panels are almost empirical, like an objective, impersonal measurement of incremental changes in the environment.

In another, somewhat similar installation entitled Salle Éphémère, presented in Lausanne, Switzerland, Van Snick placed ten colour pan­els on a wall, between a large pale blue wall at one end and a black wall of equal size at the other. The artist has said that it appeared as if the colour panels were brought into the influence of two competing colour fields determined by the pale blue and black walls. During the opening of this installation the artist noticed that throughout the evening peo­ple tended to gather at the black wall rather than at the blue wall.-3-

While the artist often associates the combination of pale blue and black with the concept of Day/Night, it is clear that this binary should be regarded primarily as a generative and pervasive metaphor.-4- Above all, the duality of Day/Night has been and remains an important and inextricable part of the basic thought process behind Van Snick's works. More than a recurring theme or subject matter, Day/Night is a powerful visual and conceptual metaphor that connects the artist with the issues of temporality, contingency, change, and the inescapable diurnal rhythms of everyday existence. It functions as a subliminal reminder to the artist himself of the structure of daily existence. In gen­eral, the metaphorical duality of Day/Night provides a broad and inte­grated framework for Van Snick's understanding of the here and now of human experience. It grounds and enriches the otherwise abstract phe­nomenological concepts of physical presence and immediate experi­ence. In particular, experience is presented in the artist's work as being part of a continuum and not a random, isolated moment. This gives dimension and resonance to the concrete particulars that constitute Van Snick's works. Instead of locking us within the solipsism of private experience and perception, it enables us to recognize the commonality we share with others even as we enter more deeply into the experience presented in the work. In the end, what distinguishes Van Snick's work is its capacity to make the viewer conscious of this denser, more complex, and on-going sense of experience.

Van Snick's wall installations can be said to reduce painting to the basic material condition of vinyl paint on plaster waIIs. The centuries old convention of the easel painting is dispensed with at the outset. In doing so, the artist can instead refocus attention on specific aspects of painting with unexpected rigour and clarity; paint becomes a medium (bearer) of colour that can transmute surface and redefine space. By painting directly on the walls of a gallery, Van Snick is able to project painting's concerns and effects into other, larger dimensions.

An important part of the story of abstraction is the linking of the lan­guage of scale with the spiritual, of being transported by the experi­ence of a scale of "pure" colour which appears to engulf the viewer within another dimension of existence. Van Snick treats large expanses of uninflected colour in a down-to-earth, almost literal manner. This is not to deny the powerful and resonant effects of the experience of colour on such a scale. Quite the contrary. However, in the case of Van Snick's wall installations, intimations of the spiritual or the sublime are presented within the framework of aesthetic experience, as an internal, inherent part of it, available in the here and now of that experience, part of its resonance and both its overall and residual effects. Terms such as "sublime" and "spiritual" indicate how our culture tends to catego­rize such an experience. In Van Snick's works it is still regarded as belonging to and recognizable in terms of the ordinary and everyday; it is not to be regarded as part of a religious epiphany. As the artist has stated in an interview, "an extremely physical experience ...can lead to a perception that can be spiritual and hallucinatory."-5-

If anything, this type of experience serves as an analogue for the transcendental. One is tempted to appropriate T.S. Eliot's memorable phrase, "objective correlative" - suggesting a link between two distinct worlds or dimensions - in order to characterize what is going on. The connection or flash of insight that suddenly appears to link them may be the way the subconscious has of indicating phenomena, conditions, or aspects of existence for which a conceptual framework or even a name does not as yet exist. The experience or perception, and the insight it presents us with, may signal something to which we need to pay further attention. It may, in other words, turn out to represent a way out of the box of contemporary rationality and dominant systems of thought. It is one way new knowledge and understanding can originate and come into the world. Time, for example, is experienced in Van Snick's work as an open, continually changing, forward-moving pre­sent. That is, his work presents time's arrow strictly within terms of the human experience as a way to ground purely conceptual abstractions within a lived reality.

Toronto Asymmetric Orange, 1999, a wall installation Van Snick pre­sented at the Art Gallery of York University in fall of that year, is shown under artificial indoor lighting rather than natural lighting, which the artist normally prefers for such large-scale works. In keeping with these works, Asymmetric Orange isolates large areas of colour that cir­cumscribe and define each of the gallery walls in the installation, cre­ating distinct colour masses and colour volumes. Because the light remains the same, however, Asymmetric Orange presents us with a sus­tained view of what we could normally only glimpse for short indeter­minate periods of time in the wall installations presented under natural light. This work in effect suspends time and allows us to see a specific aspect of what happens during the passage of time.

Because of this, Asymmetric Orange enables one to see the complex­ity and diverse range of Van Snick's investigations. Indeed this work is a testament to the artist's ability to transform the wall installation into a format of tremendous elegance and economy. Simply by looking at the walls from various positions and distances, the viewer's perceptions and experiences can and do change substantially. It is not a matter of the artist constructing a series of discrete optical or theatrical effects; clearly and concisely, different information is being imparted. Over the course of viewing the work, one finds oneself drawing on and being made aware of the vast array of cognitive, perceptual, emotional, and corporeal resources that are called into play automatically when we enter and adjust to a new place or environment. In the large front gallery of the Asymmetric Orange installation, for example, one confronts the expanse of a long pale blue wall. The impressive formal economy of the work is evident in the adroit way in which Van Snick uses the relation of one wall to another in order to make very different statements. On the tar right, for example, a narrow vertical white unpainted strip separates the long blue wall from the adjacent black wall. This gap between the two walls calls our attention to them as two distinct and contrasting colour masses, each acting as a palpable counterweight to the other. Looking at the far right end of the blue wall however, the viewer becomes aware of the surrounding area and, as a result, the blue wall itself appears to be a large horizontal coloured patch running along the bottom half of a much larger white wall that intersects with an adja­cent, empty white wall. The vivid sense we suddenly have of physically being within a very specific, somewhat cavernous architectural space, reminds us, rather bluntly, exactly where we are.

As for the orange wall, it is for the most part an extended plane whose colour density is opaque, even thick, rather than hard like the black wall, or amorphous and foggy like the blue wall. The undeniable intensity of the orange appears to absorb light, to register it more as a form of suf­fused heat than as a flat, brilliant surface glare. The orange wall turns out to form a hallway connecting one gallery space to another. If its imposing scale recalls the mural-size abstract paintings introduced by Pollock, Newman, and company, the sight of either end of the long orange expanse abruptly ending without ceremony or explanation and giving way to the empty space behind them reminds us rather emphat­ically that what we are in fact looking at is a wall. That the orange wall seen from either end appears in extreme perspective further serves to reinforce this very literal, feet-on-the-ground view of things.

In Van Snick's installations it is clear that each wall creates its own internal spatiality at the same time as it redefines the architectural space it occupies. Every colour has a specific field, a specific density, a gloss or a mat surface that reflects or absorbs the available light. At the heart of Van Snick's work is a rigour that is empirical rather than formal in character which makes it abundantly and unambiguously clear that, at the very least, we are standing in a room and not a con­trived optical environment. Everything we observe in looking at and contemplating the installation's walls, both individually and in con­junction with the others, is part of our experience of the world. The resulting work in the end addresses the larger issues of how one responds to the space one is in and how one is affected by it on many levels. Our attention is focused and, in being focused, is made critical and aware of itself.

Of the early works included in the AGYU exhibition, (0-9) Epingles de signalisation, 1974, and (0-9) Wires and Black Bamboo, 1979, trace a sig­nificant early phase in the artist's thinking, one in which the conceptual orientation and scope of that thinking is firmly established. These works also foreshadow the artist's expansion of his work into actual physical space - of which Van Snick's wall installations, such as Asymmetric Orange, can be seen as further developments.

In (0-9) Epingles de signalisation, 1974, what appears to be small clusters of pale blue pinheads introduces us simply and directly to the idea of number, in the sense of being more than one thing. As it hap­pens, each cluster is made up of ten pins. By keeping the number the same in each cluster the artist deftly illustrates how different ten can look, even when reduced to the most rudimentary components and the simplest configurations. There is a strong suggestion in the work of the relationship between number and unity; after all, many things grouped together can count as one. Number as a general concept appears to provide an orderly systematic means for expanding a given work, either incrementally one by one, or in terms of multiples. As Van Snick increases the number of clusters the piece moves out into physical space: the cluster of ten individual pale blue dots itself becomes a unit and, as such, part of an even larger cluster.

Even in this work from the beginning of his career, Van Snick reveals essential aspects of his language as an artist. The viewer's engage­ment with and experience of the work, while limited in this particular case to the perceptual and the cognitive, is central to the work and its meaning. Individual components of the work are treated as physical objects in themselves. The work's strategy is inherently sculptural, of the Minimalist variety. There is a concern with how actual ordinary things exist in the world, a world that we as viewers share with them. The underlying concepts that organize the material and components of the work are concepts that are a fundamental and inextricable part of the way we see and act in the everyday world.

(0-9) Wires and Black Bamboo, 1979, further exemplifies the tendency to articulate space by the simplest means. Divided into two distinct areas of a large wall, (0-9) Wires and Black Bamboo also individuates the components of a cohesive and visually coherent whole (configura­tion). Black Bamboo refers to the section of the work consisting of ten slender bamboo leaves coated in black ink. At once both object and image, the leaves appear to veer off in different directions. Together they create a visual field that seems charged with a restless kinetic energy. Contradicting their pastoral character as an image from nature, this particular collection of leaves might easily be mistaken for an illustration in a science textbook on the behaviour of subatomic par­ticles. In the Wires half of this work, each of the nine separate abstract shapes have been formed by bending a single wire in various direc­tions. Sometimes the wire arcs gently as it moves out into space and then returns to the wall; in other shapes the wire juts outward and then sharply ricochets back. In either case, a thin shadow is formed that echoes the wire so that what, for all intent and purpose, could have appeared to be a line drawing suddenly takes on three dimensions. Interestingly enough, the wire pieces appear to describe the path or trajectory of what had been a moving line or point rather than depict an image or sign. Seen at a distance and as a whole, the impression one has is that of a host of dynamic, apparently random events occurring at once. Furthermore, because of their relative autonomy, each piece requires separate attention from the viewer. Taking in the work in its entirety, the viewer is slowed down. Wires in effect introduces duration, and hence the dimension of temporality into Van Snick's formal vocab­ulary, an element that has grown into a major preoccupation in the artist's work.

In Laura, 1991, the culminating, final piece in the Laura series men­tioned earlier, Van Snick virtually reinvents a format he has used before in order to return (suddenly and unexpectedly) to the issues of bound­aries and containment that were at the heart of his 1970s work, In doing so, he has in effect engaged himself and the viewer in a more abstract consideration of the concepts and experience of those issues. Specifically, he has initiated a collision of expectations and precon­ceived ideas. The visual order established by the contiguous areas of colour has been sabotaged by the physical boundaries created by the collection of various size rectangular shapes within the shallow wooden box frame. The borders between contiguous areas of colour are continued along the sides of the rectangular projections and across their faces. That is to say, the boundaries between the ten colours are preserved throughout the piece. Even the trademark pale blue and black rectangles are themselves partly covered over by the pattern of colours in the back of the box. As a result, the shadows surrounding each of the rectangular projections no longer demarcate the presence of a concrete physical thing as they had in earlier version of the Laura series. Instead these shadows have become so much redundant and even distracting visual information.

There is, on the one hand, a sense of convergence in the way the ten "background" colours are put together. The black, purple, and dark blue areas situated at the perimeter of the work appear to surround, set off, and frame the converging, bright, warm colours. Indeed, there is a moment in viewing this work as a whole - standing roughly front and center - where all the shapes, shadows, and colours line up and every­thing in the work comes together and makes "sense." The work sud­denly appears to achieve definition and stability. However, one soon finds that the slightest deviation from this frontal position ushers in rupture and sensory confusion. Within the confines of a single work, therefore, the artist has brought forcefully together both the experience of formal order and the experience of chaos and randomness. The implicit link between sensory order and rationality and the equally deep rooted connection between sensory overstimulation and the irrational are given equal presence in one object. Furthermore, simply because we can eventually locate the precise point at which the confusion appears to resolve itself into a coherent system does not give us the meaning of the work. Indeed, the work is not a puzzle that requires a solution; to think so would be to trivialize it. Instead, what the artist has placed before us is a vividly concrete and specific example of a self­evident, rational system going out of whack before our very eyes. The work is proof that the inherent sense of security a rational system con­fers on any experience, site, or object can fail us as soon as another perspective or dimension is introduced.

As Van Snick's work matures it becomes more literally and concretely concerned with the viewer's experience of space and with objects in space. So much so, that individual paintings are often used solely and explicitly as physical objects that serve simply as con­stituent parts of a much larger construction. (Van Snick's ability to extend his investigations while restricting himself to his basic set of elements depends to a great extent on how these elements are seen and put to use. That is, there are times when the artist's signature pale blue and black are used formally, simply as structural components.) In the Symmetric and Asymmetric series of works of the 1980s, the mono­chromatic paintings that make up the works are little more than painted stretched canvases which are there simply because they are a conve­nient way to organize discrete areas of colour on a wall. Even the pale blue and black canvases function strictly as formal constants in these works. As it happens, however, it is pale blue and black rectangular canvases that determine whether a given Symmetric/Asymmetric work is to be regarded by the artist as symmetrical or not. Strictly speaking, all of these works appear to be asymmetrical. However, if the work con­tains a pair of blue and black canvases that are the same size and par­allel to one another these works are to be considered symmetrical for the artist's purposes. In Symmetric and Asymmetric Silver, 1987-88, or Symmetric and Asymmetric White, 1987-88, in the AGYU exhibition, for example, just such a pair appears to establish the locus for a kind of gravitational field for the work as a whole. It creates a stable point around which surrounding canvases are distributed at different lengths and in different directions across a large area of the wall.

Van Snick's wall installations discussed earlier advance the move into actual physical space as they continue to explore the issue of the temporal and the nature of experience. The artist has said, "I try to make the concept of space intelligible."-6- One more way Van Snick has done so is by transposing the elements the viewer encounters from the vertical to the horizontal plane. This simple shift has resulted in an extreme and dramatic change in the spatial orientation of the viewer. In Small Passage (Day + Night), 1987, Lille, France, the large expanses of pale blue and black walls have been transferred to the floor. Installed in a public space with steady pedestrian traffic, the two areas of evenly painted canvas are intersected by a narrow wooden walkway. As a result, the viewer is set apart from and in the middle of the surrounding areas of colour. The association with a body of water, particularly in the case of the blue, is strong and inevitable but it is also disorienting. Normal expectations are subverted. Inert, blank, and silent, the areas of colour refuse to be anything other than what they are. Spread out before the viewer, they are physically present in a way that they have never been before; because of this, their essentially visual nature as colour has never seemed more abstract. Stepping out onto and into the blue and black spaces is physically possible and, yet seems a kind of violation.

In its own way, Instability of Fundamentals, 1990, presents an equally strange and disconcerting experience of something familiar that has been radically recontextualized. Again there is a pronounced discon­nection between the visual and the physical. One's sense of space is at odds with what one sees. In this work various size blocks and slabs painted pale blue, black and yellow are each set atop two ordinary saw­horses. The arrangement of these forms recall the wall pieces of the Symmetric/Asymmetric series of canvases. However, the sheer formal elegance and authority of this installation as a whole is compelling. The saw-horses, which one might expect to appear downright absurd and comic, instead plainly and effectively ground the otherwise abstract purity of the work's simple geometry and plangent hues. Paradoxically, the law of gravity is convincingly acknowledged and the solid blocks of Van Snick's standard colours have never looked more ethereal.

Van Snick's monochromatic paintings of the late 1990s may repre­sent a more concerted turn to inner, subjective experience than his pre­vious works. The artist has said that he feels that his use of mixed colours, as opposed to the standard hard bright hues of his earlier work, place him in a more vulnerable position. The reason he gives is that the final colour is by necessity solely determined by the artist him­self; therefore his choices reflect his taste, feelings, and mood at the time the painting was made. At the same time these monochromes maintain Van Snick's characteristic emphasis on concrete materiality through their treatment of both surface and support. In its own way this work is an attempt to acknowledge and at the same time ground the subjective side of our experiences. Unambiguously paintings as such, Paysage-Visage, 1998, and Pancarte, 1998-99, appear at least for the moment to mark something of a retreat from the artist's spatial and temporal investigations. It is almost as if he is taking another extended and critical look at a medium that has, for most of his career, been a staple of his formal language as an artist.

Minimalism's radical insistence that the work of art be regarded as an actual physical object that occupies the same space and time as the viewer has had a profound influence on the development of abstract painting since the late 1960s. For Van Snick, however, the physical pres­ence of an art work is more than that of a material object considered in isolation. He believes that the work of art must include the viewer's encounter with the work. According to the artist, "the main issue of my work has always been to introduce the physical into painting, in an extreme way ...it is highly necessary to see the works in reality, to expe­rience them. In my work ...there is this requirement of the concrete experience."-7- Van Snick, as an artist, chooses to remain open to expe­rience as fully as possible. Above all, the perceiving body is at the cen­tre of his working method and it has a central role in the reception and interpretation of his work.