Eliza Griffiths

The sparks are always flying in Eliza Griffiths’s paintings, and the works exhibited at the McClure were nothing less than incendiary. If we catch fire as we enter their orbit, it is because the radiance in her work verges on the solar and karmic. Hers are sidereal portraits in the best sense of that word: they are vibratory and show aura. The social constellations in her work are always tinged or, better yet, singed—by astral flames.

Griffiths’s preoccupation with human experience and behaviour in the social world goes right back to the beginnings of her art. Early on, she wanted to put paint to the emotional truth of young peoples’ psychic experiences in puberty and beyond. She identified fugue states of identity and desire and rendered them. In fact, her work has always been rife with telling psychological as well as sociological narrative tropes parsed within the horizon of human intersubjectivity.

Whether it is power relations, female adolescent experience and the development of socio-psycho-sexual identity, or women’s negotiations with the pressures and complexities of the contemporary urban environment, Griffiths is attentive to the condition of being in the social world, and her emphasis here is on various species of action. A feminist of no marginal persuasion, she uses a recurring cast of characters to explore her ongoing interest in sexuality, intimacy and the limits of desire.

You can eavesdrop on her thinking as she paints, and she tussles with it in exhaustive fashion—erasing, layering and over-layering, adding, subtracting, tweaking, in order that the hot points in her subjects will grow hotter still. Arguably, her continuing interrogation of the multiple dimensions of intimacy, interrelationship and agency would not be possible without a struggle with paint itself, and her endlessly reworked grounds become somatic incubators.

Her paintings may be “hot” subject-wise, but they are always cool, calculated and considered in their execution. This helps explain the power of her work. Griffiths works both tight and loose with her pigment and its application. Her drawing skills are exemplary by any standard. She is not afraid to loosen the brush stroking to suggest abstract density, while not losing sight of figurative clarity. Invariably, she achieves both. A painting has to be both experimental and assured; she mixes things up, and this furthers her storytelling powers while deepening the spell cast by her painting licks.

Furthermore, she has an uncanny ability to make flesh not just luminous but erotically numinous. It would be no exaggeration to suggest that many of these paintings evoke Eros as both Muse and palpable emanation. As she herself has averred, her own erotic gaze, mediated by oil paint, is an attempt to destabilize and subvert a passive viewing experience. The paintings are redolent of both sexual and psychic heat.

Griffiths is usually her own best subject and puts herself out there, morphing from female to male to female at will in order to test both the authenticity of her subject matter and the occulted but very human truths her work accesses. In lovely, and lovingly applied, alternately representational and abstract painting passages, she daubs the glyphs of desire as her subjects negotiate the deep waters of the contemporary social world. Griffiths understands what Goethe knew well: when desire exceeds all reasonable limits, all hell breaks loose. But it is important, I think, to emphasize that Griffiths does in no way illustrate sexuality in her work. That would be pornographic, profane and purely cornpone.

In 1523 Titian painted Bacchus and Ariadne, one of a series of mythological works for the ducal study in the castle of Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara. In Griffiths’s paintings, the identities and roles of the major players in that painting are notably reversed. Dionysus comes to the side of Ariadne—or rather Ariadne comes to the side of Dionysus—and they morph into one another like provocatively hypercarnalized Siamese twins. The males in Griffiths’s paintings, feminized now and transgendered surrogates for the artist perhaps (since her work is all about self-portraiture), arrive poised on the threshold of ecstasy like hungry martyrs in willing sacrifice, and with real abandon. Here, male and female, straight and gay, morph in simultaneity. She provides proof that, as the literary critic Malcolm Bowie once said, feminine sexuality migrates between the sexes.

R M Vaughan had her dead to rights when he once called her the Larry Clark of figurative painters. Some of the finest drawings in the exhibition were of sex-parties-in-the-offing—with no punches pulled. Griffiths is fearless. In this exhibition she also included very recent paintings, which were more schematic than usual, shadowy renderings made more shadowy still by virtue of subject matter, which served to accentuate her exemplary rendering skills.

Interrogating both self and other, and constantly upping the ante beyond any comforting margin of safety for herself or her viewers, Griffiths’s work demonstrates not only an understanding of Eros and relationships in terms of the phenomenology of the social world but also a beguiling retinue of exquisite painting licks. She is a savant who has her way with oil paint. But her paintings also possess mordant wit, daring and, not least, a bracing measure of moral courage. ❚

“Action Paintings” was exhibited at Galerie McClure in Montreal from November 6 to November 28, 2009.

James D Campbell is a writer and curator in Montreal who contributes regularly to Border Crossings.