Graham Giles: The wall and the gap
by George Szirtes

‘What is Painting’ is the question put, and, tentatively answered by Julian Bell in a comprehensive survey of ideas about painting: ‘painting’ that is, as distinct from ‘art’. Certainly, painting is a complex activity, and the resultant object called “a painting” is open to all sorts of readings. There are many people who, since the invention of photography, have declared that “painting is dead” and even now its death is pronounced with some regularity every five years or so. Nevertheless we look at certain paintings and are moved or delighted, as we are with every human endeavour. Our attention is engaged, not so much by ideas as by a material object that, for all our knowledge of its having arrived in the world through certain processes (the history of painting as an activity, the history of the painter, the commercial and cultural circumstances that have resulted in this particular painting being offered to the viewer in this particular place, etc.) continues to hold a certain place in the now, and now again present. We experience its innocence as well as its history: it is its innocence that makes it valuable to us.

It is, you could argue, hard to achieve that innocence in an art as well documented, as thoroughly marketed and sold, as painting. The artist, personally, could hardly be an innocent: the artist, in this respect, must be a canny creature in order to survive at all, especially in a world as knowing, self-conscious and ironical as ours is. And it’s true: most of our contemporary art is knowing, self-conscious and ironic, nor might that matter very much were it not that our knowingness were so narrowly circumscribed, our self-consciousness often clumsily contrived and our irony far too easy. We are a shallow-breathing generation and painting tends to look a bit too much like hard work, a bit too much heavy-breathing.

But there stands the painting, breathing heavily, engaged in some kind of conversation with other heavy-breathing paintings and the even more heavily-breathing world that weighs on it and delights it. The very paint is heavy; a sticky, smelly, awkward sensual gunk that soils and insists on remaining itself even in the act of representing or suggesting something else: sky, water, skin, light, earth or grass. There is something intransigent about it that refuses to disappear into weightless electrons. It carries its history of representation on its sweaty back, trudging through caves, chapels, galleries, forgotten attics and bourgeois drawing rooms. And there is the miracle and contradiction of it: in being itself it is so many other things; it is through its very heaviness that it carries us away.

Graham Giles springs out of the same painterly roots as his inspirational teachers at the then Regent Street Polytechnic, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossof and Dennis Creffield. It is, in many respects, a heroic generation, for whom the expressive power of paint - or simply the mark - is part of the project of presenting the world in a transcendental, almost eschatological way, as though our experience of it were one of the ‘last things’. One can see how such a perception might be engendered by the currents of Existentialist thought that dominated Europe after the Second World War. Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon are part of the same landscape. One says ‘transcendental’ but the implied mysticism, if there is any, derives from the perceived human condition, and is presented in vestigial, broadly humanist terms. somewhere in the footsteps of the late Rembrandt. The war’s legacies include Coventry, Dresden, Hiroshima and the entry into Berlin and Belsen. The intensity of the painting is partly a reflection of such encounters: a humanist cry, a gesture, in the face of the Last Things on the foregoing list.

It is also a lyrical cry, or rather, an affirmation, however troubled, of the power of the lyrical, which rejoices in the greenness of grass, the wetness of water or the intoxicating effect of a high wind. In other words, in that which posits nature as delight, solace, or, if nothing else, a last resource. It is not an art, nor could it be in our times, to make high romantic claims, but it could argue that where humanity and nature establish some functioning modus vivendi, such delights and consolations are available and empowering.

Such, in any case, are some of the consolations and rewards of landscape painting. Landscape need not be an escape, nor, as in so many amateur works, genuflection to a nostalgia, which is, in itself, more often than not, a nostalgia for social, as much as spiritual values. The very term ‘landscape’, like the term ‘picturesque’ has specific historical roots. But that is not to argue that these historical roots trap the landscape artist in a closed nostalgic system. The lyrical, with its freshness, delights and consolations, remains a live and possible mode of feeeling.

I argue this at some length because fashion is against lyricism and landscape painting, indeed against painting altogether, and because the paintings of Graham Giles deserve far more serious attention than they are likely to get right now.

Giles’s main subject in recent years has been Tuscany: hillsides, valleys, rivers, farm buildings and walls dipping from light into shadow. His palette has been, and continues to be rich but restrained, his application sensuously painterly, but less overtly expressive than an artist like, say, David Tress; the mark-making less gestural, the atmosphere less thick. It is rather, the very tension between sensuousness and restraint that characterises Giles’s work, the restraint owing perhaps something to Corot, while the deeper shadows in violets and purples suggest late Monet, Bonnard, and, at a further remove, aspects of German expressionism - Lovis Corinth, say, or Emil Nolde. In terms of subject the pictures might appear to serve as vedute, or views of places that are attractive in themselves - which is why, no doubt, a caustic, intellectual critic would view them with a degree of suspicion - but the paintings transcend this, looking instead for values beyond received notions of the picturesque. And this is vital, because, as ever, subject has to be pointing beyond itself, into a territory that is both personal and fresh, both inward and outward, if the viewer is to experience art as more than decoration, more as a form of meaning than as a record or as series of well-worn obeisances to an ideal state.

There is a point at which subject becomes multi-faceted, a complex symbol, which is the point at which it becomes interesting. Often, under these conditions, it becomes the object of an obsession: a cathedral for Monet, sunflowers for Van Gogh, a figure by a window for Vermeer, a vase or a bird for Braque. The subject becomes interesting because, for some reason unknown to the artist, it has assumed overwhelming importance. In Giles’s case it may be a wall or the end of a building: the way it stretches, the way it receives light. That is where, beyond technical considerations, meaning, for the time being at least, resides. It is trying to tell you something and you have to listen very hard to understand what that might be. Walls are divisions: we are on one side and something kept from us is on the other. An old wall is almost an organic form. It has softness, features, dints, warmth: in the soft Tuscan landscape with the hot sun beating on it it is like a gentle refusal. Giles’s paintings of 2001 return time and again to a particular wall leading down from a house along a roadway. The wall is a mess of hectic blues and purples; the road pours towards us in varieties of Naples Yellow; and beyond the wall we see the tops of trees and the landscape falling away. There is a kind of aching in this that is revisited in the various handlings of the subject. The aching is embodied in the handling of colour, texture and form, the form more rounded, the texture more slippery, the colour more hectic, more musical and plangent than a postcard view would indicate. The paint is that which is between the subject and the viewer: it is the medium of feeling the view is negotiated through.

If one returned to Giles’s previous work, say his treatments of the sea at Walberswick, one would see a more determined attack on the subject, almost, in some cases, taking a leaf (but only a leaf) out of Nolde’s book. Great impasto white light zig-zags towards us acrosss the sea, from a smeary orange and white sun on the horizon. Here you might find a line of palings, part of a fence, that serves as a repoussoir object, something we are deliberately invited to look beyond and over. In later paintings too the repoussoir theme - a tree in the foreground perhaps - crops up. These are old painterly devices that go back to the Baroque period.

The walls however work a little differently: you cannot look far beyond them. They are not repoussoir objects, but subjects. Our attention is on them.

Something even more interesting has been happening in the recent work. Giles has been producing pictures in pairs, the one continuing the scene on from the other with a slight gap between, the right hand picture floating a touch higher or lower than its partner. This might remind us of panoramic photos or of the kind stereoscopic prints for which we could buy viewers in order to enjoy a 3-D effect. Frivolous as these associations may be they are not entirely beside the point, in that the idea of both was, in their mechanical ways, to give us more - more width, or more depth. The paintings in this case also give us more, but the nature of that ‘more’ is complex and ambiguous. If the idea was simply to show more of the landscape then a bigger or wider canvas would have done: the current arrangements though invite a kind of dialogue between distinct elements, or rather, two distinct stages of an experience. The wall still figures largely but now we have a slight sense of unbalance, tipping to left or right, with that odd gap or caesura between. The gap IS the dialogue and all the more fascinating for putting us at an odd angle to the pictures, to the experience of the scene itself as articulated by the process of painting.

There is no point in weaving portentous theories around paintings that clearly function much as paintings have always done. We know they are paintings, traditional works of art and craft, and we respond to them in the light of our experience of other paintings. The double paintings though are somewhat different: we are not quite prepared for them as diptychs, and because we are not prepared, they shock us a little. And this is to the good. The shock recovers something of that innocence we require in order to see things afresh, the innocence I talked about earlier.

I have already mentioned the post-war project of locating human values in a world that seemed to have surrendered them, a world that offered no meanings but for the gestures we ourself might make. It would be stretching a point to claim that Graham Giles’s paintings set themselves any such conscious agenda, or even that they were full embodiments of their notional aims, but it is not stretching a point to consider them from the perspective of the place they might have started from and the way they are instinctively facing. On the simplest level they are clearly fine paintings that employ a lyrical and sensuous language, but it is interesting that they should prosper most by pressing at the limits of the known vocabulary of that language: pressing, if you like, at the wall they are facing, and discovering gaps in a language to escape which is to escape into nothing. In doing so, in looking into the void between, they refocus the traditional yet transcendental values on either side of the gap: the hill, the road, the wall and the tops of the trees beyond.