The space of terror and healing – beautiful Imbunches for a troubled time

 

These new works of Dillwyn Smith’s were sewn together, piece by piece, bit by bit, one after the other.  When they start to work on our eyes, the first question that springs to mind is: has all the colour gone out of their world?

A Dillwyn Smith show a quarter of a century ago was all about performing colour.  With a brush in his hand Dillwyn, with his perfect touch, was a master of colouristic paradox. The surfaces were impossible - wet and dry, soft and hard, shallow and deep, clean and dirty, screaming and silent, these works could make colour contradict itself.  Surfaces possessed secrets passed on from the tactile mysteries of Turner at his most greasy, and Gainsborough at his most slippery.  And so, when the brushes and the oils were put aside, and the painter stepped away, and started spraying his colours on from bottles and pipes, my first reaction was fury.  Was this new way of making paintings anything more than a big water fight, were these things paintings at all?  It took me a long time to understand that the work was not about giving up control, but constituted a new stage in a long journey towards truth, and truth in painting is a very shy creature.  And so for nearly twenty years the paintings followed this, more or less, new path.  They were records of pure feeling, laying down liquid cables of pigment, dissolving the gap between thought and expression.  But they were not ‘action’ paintings as such, more like palimpsests.  Marks and gestures were buried in there, so too were symbols, which only came to the surface through long-term processes of perceptual erosion.  The effects could be mistaken for restraint, they could never be accused of melodrama.  As a viewer you had to be very patient.

And then, when I saw this new work, for the first time, I felt robbed again, for the second time, robbed and stitched up.  These, it seemed to me, were not paintings at all, they were quite literally ‘fabrications’, and the colour this time really had gone out with the tide.  The creator no longer flings a pot of paint in the public’s face, but rubs our noses in raw materiality.   These paintings proclaim themselves as mere objects, they inhabit the surfaces of industrial mass production, they are unadorned linen, cotton duck, nylon gauze, straight off the roll on the factory floor.  You can see the wood they are stretched over, wood that could give you splinters.  Here is a world that is down-trodden, a winter landscape of frost and frozen clay, of dust and ashes.  And if a few vague, timorous, failing stripes of colour do fight their way to the surface, they appear self-parodic, hanging out the futility of a fragile optimism. Is this another example of an artist who has, like so many before him (Pollock, Beckett),  painted himself into a corner, and thrown the baby out with the bathwater, until the game isn’t worth the candle?  A language of cliché, exhaustion and mumbled half-truth.  If this were a new movement would it be termed Deadendism?

Not so. As I stood in the studio, watching as these works were carried back and forth and laid out around me, the difference between the back and the front transfixed me.  These weren’t backs and fronts but interiors and exteriors, these sculptural-paintings, or painted sculptures, were all about insides and outsides.  Joseph Beuys commanded us all “Show your wound” and proclaimed his first exhibition to be a performance involving himself and his mother, his birth was the ‘Exhibition of a wound’.  Well these new paintings of Dillwyn smith might be an exhibition of multiple wounds, which needed many, many stitches to heal them.

When we think about art and sewing then it’s traditionally a female domain, from darning socks, to haute couture, to the log-cabin quilts now long celebrated as the first purely abstract art of the civilised West.  Yet looking at Dillwyn Smith’s paintings I don’t see the act of sewing being used to compete with any female space. The major celebratory space for male sewing emanates from the surgeon’s hand.  Surgeons cut things open, do what must be done, and then and stitch them back together again.  Stitching up a body is a strange sort of sewing.  Drawing up a wound with thread involves healing two edges by smothering them in punctures, pulling what has been torn, back together again, with a moving line.  The sewing we see in Dillwyn’s taught surfaces speaks through its tension: it concerns healing but there is also horror. The picture’s guts have been pulled out and stuffed back into them, but they are not healed, they bleed quietly inside, they have been stitched up all right, but they are stitched up all wrong.

 

We are back in a world of paradoxical surfaces.  These pictures are immensely peaceful on one side, and screaming ruination on the other.  They have the calm dumbness of trauma victims, they have been sewn into silence.  Suddenly a scene comes to mind,  the violence of enforced immobility in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev.  A figure is bound up in a white linen strip, tied down, the mouth is still accessible, and molten lead is ladled into it.  The linen head remains white and calm, what goes on inside is indescribable.  Ariel Dorfman, when asked to communicate the effect of the military Junta in Chile, alluded to an old tale which the peasants still believe in.  ‘When a child is abducted by Witches in order to break the child’s will, the witches break the child up, and then they sew the body parts back together in an abnormal way.  The head is turned round so the child has to walk backwards, and the ears, eyes and mouth are stitched up.  This creature is called an Imbunche.’ Dorfman saw the Dictatorship as such a witch, a witch which had made Chileans ‘in a way like Imbunches, they are isolated from each other, their means of communicating suppressed, their connections cut off, their senses blocked by fear.’

 

These paintings are Imbunches for our world now.  They have been taken apart and put back together, from the outside they look just fine, quiet, serene, peaceful, aesthetically biddable, but on the inside they are all cut up.  Dillywn has created an aesthetic which articulates repression, quiet agony, a space of terror.  Once you know what is going on inside, the exterior becomes increasingly terrible.  These quiet patches of grafted tissue, joined together and stretched tighter than drum skins, are tense, wracked, on the point of breaking up, of going under.

‘What colour are you?’ these paintings ask of me, ‘Are you black, or brown, or white?’  Dillwyn walks along the colour line, white skins so transparent you can see through them, rub up against black skins which are also, impossibly, see through, like silk stockings.  And then suddenly there is opacity, and then there are the strange energies and traces of colour that has to be taken on trust.  Colour reduced to a drop in the ocean?  Where does colour go, at the point of its dissolution, does it cry out for conjunction, for an end to its pie-bald wandering and fragmentation?   Finally these pictures express sadness, they mourn, but mourning is a way of healing.  I see tears (boo-hoo) that become tears (rents), and I see scars that turn into tears (tears).  No crocodile tears, no histrionics, just tears mended, and coloured forms softly united.

                                                                                                MARCUS WOOD