Scott Bailey: Crimson Lucy Till
It is impossible not to become immersed in the sheer theatricality of Scott Bailey's paintings and to search for significance or meaning in the imagery he creates. The subject is, as much as anything, substance itself - Scott explores the material possibilities of paint, the character and life it contains - but there is also an aspect of performance in the making of the works. As with any good drama, there are contradictions and dichotomies running throughout his work: intention vs. spontaneity, surface vs. depth, motion vs. seizure.
Foremostly these are action paintings, with an obvious precedent in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, but Scott has an intention when he begins a painting, and then relinquishes control of its outcome and allows the paint to take its own form in response to his gesture. With great thoroughness, he prepares each colour to a specific viscosity, applies it and then maneuvers the surface of the canvas (tipping, tilting, folding, scrunching it), so the paint responds - through gravity, through pressure, through friction - in its own unpredictable way to the action. The most recent work, still in progress, is a series of canvases each a mere 30 cm wide, but 3 metres tall, on which he has poured his paint from the top, and then allowed gravity to run its course. Thus Scott's paintings are at once both an experiment with and an homage to the materiality of pigment suspended in a medium.
In many of the recent paintings, Scott works directly onto the unstretched canvas, and has exploited the qualities of the folded or crumpled cloth, so that the paint follows the material's topography. Scott is exploring the theatrical possibilities of fabric, exploiting the dynamic rhythms of folds - the ridges and crevices, the shadows and highlights - and the resulting paintings frequently appear to reproduce these qualities. There is an obvious precedent in baroque religious painting, by artists such as Rubens and Caravaggio, where luxuriant, often red, swooshes and swathes of fabric, which have an integral theatricality of their own, frame a dramatic scene, often a nativity or a death.
All things remind us, as Nietzsche pointed out, that sometimes depth can hide on the surface of things. There is a tension in Scott's paintings between surface and representation - the painting becomes a space where surface and depth shift. Viewers have always seen imagery of underlying structures, the strata under the surface - previously, analogies were made with geological formations, and now, with his predominantly crimson palette, something very visceral can be found in his work - flesh, muscle, fat, bone. In many of the works, and especially the tall paintings, there is a particular impression of fissures - deep slashes, cracks or wounds - and that the surface is rupturing. (There are echoes of Barnett Newman - like Pollock one of the great American abstract expressionist painters - but Scott's works are the messy jagged, raw versions of Newman's precise zip paintings, where pristine fields of colour are scored by single vertical lines, but the surface is never breached.)
The artist has been measurably impacted by his experience of Cairo, especially in his awareness of the physical and immediate nature of life - and death. There is a certain explicitness in the sight of meat hanging in the open shop-fronts (in comparison to its hermetically sealed packaging in Western-style supermarkets), or the carnal rituals of the feast. Scott has also experienced one of the seminal life experiences whilst in Cairo - the birth of his children: an everyday miracle, the physical materialization of flesh from nothing. Commonplace dramas and scenarios - birth, butchery - resonate in Scott's vivid panels. These flat surfaces remind us of the physical nature of the world and especially of the body - this extraordinary machine that we inhabit so unthinkingly, which we use and move in so insolently.
And here lies one of the inherent paradoxes in Scott's work: there is a pervading association with action - explicit and implicit, in its creation and in its composition, yet this work captures and freezes action. The paint responds to Scott's gesture, but the painting is an inert remnant of that moment of movement; the surface suggests motion and rhythm yet remains static. And this contradiction Scott probes to an extreme in his series of small sculptures which record the permutations of a drop of liquid as it splashes on a surface. This split-second and most mundane transformation Scott has painstakingly dissected and recreated by molding, carving (then polishing and painting) cheap modeling plastic, to create these precious-looking objects, like stars or coronets, again red, but here desirably shiny.
By conceiving, exploring, playing with, and ultimately accepting the inherent dichotomies which co-exist in existence, Scott reminds us to appreciate the stuff from which we and our world are made, which so often we take for granted or even find repellant, and reveals the profound value and beauty in the physical matter which we inhabit and in which we are contained.
Lucy Till is an independent curator currently living and working in Cairo
Facilis Descensus Averno? Adrian Saunders
At first sight these canvasses challenge. The deep ruts of imperial purple, the glowing shades of phoenician crimson and the rippled textures of porphyry create an image of sensual and inviting luxury that draws the viewer into a close dialogue with the painter. These are no mere explorations of colour, but rather a series of carefully thought-out pieces that describe a concept that is at once profound and redolent of the poetic and mystic truth that surrounds us, if only we had eyes to see. For Bailey is a painter of ideas and of a more spiritual cast of mind, that leads him toward a web of connections both of motif and idea that may at first seem unexpected, but which after reflection appear increasingly eloquent and of lucid clarity.
There is possibly a key here that allows us to glimpse the workings of Bailey's ordered, but still fruitful universe. He is a perceptive painter, in a period when painting may seem passé. But for Bailey, painting is a means of setting-up resonances that allow him to articulate an essentially intellectual and utterly coherent vision of the varied visual stimuli that crowd in upon us from every side. He is a man on a journey, downwards and upwards, and it is of both inner and exterior enquiry.
So, "facilis descensus Averno ." When Virgil's Aeneas asked the way to the Underworld, he was given the somewhat chilling reply, "The way down is easy." The full stop bespeaks a certain finality. But like the Roman hero, Bailey does find a way out and with the generosity of the seeker asks us to share it. Resonance and association allow a contemplation of beauty in the unexpected, which leaves a feeling of peaceful optimism and a sense of the journey accomplished. These canvasses ask the viewer to contemplate what many may choose to avoid. Are we right to detect the ripple of muscle, or the gross structure of tendon and sinew? A whiff of the shambles? Perhaps more. Perhaps we are made to look even deeper and asked to contemplate. Are we brought as low as can be in order to start the inevitable and astonishingly fecund journey back to the light? Is it then, when in the stillness that we start to look deeper into these pieces, that they start to take on a life of their own?
Expressed with eloquent, almost baroque brushstrokes, and drips of paint falling in dramatic, sometimes calligraphic swirls, the rich pompeian reds seem somehow less bloody; stalactites possibly, rippling across the wall of a ruby cavern, or the draped brocades and silks so beloved of Titian, Caravaggio or Rubens. A hieratic grandeur and a sense of exuberant theatricality are manifest. The whole begins to resonate to that subtle music of simile and luxurious metaphor, found in light and delicious, tactile colour. There are pieces that draw the eye downwards, those that bring the eye to rest on a corner or a well-found detail, those that overwhelm. Bailey is always eloquent and his rhetoric demands attention. But it is deeper. He writes his text with confidence and in doing so, leads us to look into the beauty of the familiar. He is never sordid. Shocking maybe, but always measured and tightly controlled. He sees a fascinating and fertile complexity in simplicity and then suggests that we open that inner eye that leads...where?
Adrian Saunders teaches Art History at the American University in Cairo