Melanie Authier

Freedom in abstraction has always meant transcending enervating constraints and archaic ideals. But achieving that freedom has also meant—and in this sense abstraction is very close to jazz improvisation—a deep and abiding understanding of structure. That Ottawa-based painter Melanie Authier, still in her early 30s, has achieved this freedom has been clear for some time now. Her work looks like nothing we have seen before in abstract painting and seems to adhere to a set of rules written by her; she is an artist who has seemingly escaped all the rules in both unruly and rapturous paintings.

They are vertiginous, volatile and, in terms of persona, no two are alike. I have to confess to not understanding exactly how she succeeds in making them, and I have been looking hard at abstract painting for over 30 years. As opposed to the hard-edged school of late modernist praxis, where the presence of ruler and tape is still omnipresent, her work celebrates the gestural presence of the hand, split-second timing and intuitive structural prowess. But to explain the precise nature of her facture is difficult. It seems almost supernatural in its way. You have to search out metaphors elsewhere to highlight its strengths.

Looking is like listening to the work of jazz giant John Coltrane. At first, you are swept away by the rush brought on by his sheer virtuosity, immersed in and overwhelmed by the formal complexity and further, in Authier’s case, the sheer onslaught of paint. As you look again and again, its deeper rhythmic and harmonic structural complexities are revealed. You are then repletely seduced. The real and heady pleasure in looking at her work lies in appreciating this painter’s spectacular fluency in interpreting harmonies and compositional structures in real time. Her employment of hard-edge/bevelled-edge feints and parries is akin to the guide-tone line in left-hand shell chords—a vital form of counterpoint in improvised music. Consider Lennie Tristano’s “C Minor Complex” from The New Tristano LP. In that cut and on most of the album, Tristano’s left hand plays inexorably coercive bass lines, while his right hand plays highly layered, sophisticated, and, moreover, technically breathtaking improvisations. The vortices and matrices in an Authier painting often demonstrate the visual equivalent of such walking basslines that stop us short and hold us captive. She is an ambidextrous genius at contrapuntal play.

I think there is something like handedness at work here. Authier succeeds in subverting the orthodoxies of how we perceive painting by engaging counterpoint and sundry perspectival contrarieties in the way that the late Quebec abstractionist Charles Gagnon once did. His paintings had a similar vivacity. Her paintings are inherently restless things, real chameleons, shapeshifters abstract and figurative at one and the same time. From quadrant to quadrant, they demonstrate an interhemispheric interaction that is entirely compelling and even hypnotic. She intuitively understands the complicated structures of harmony and holds her paintings together in a way that translates them into a proverbial snare for the eye.

If harmonic and melodic structure rule these paintings righteously and well it is probably because they are inbred in her painting mind from the get-go, as in Tristano’s multi-tasking hands and Gagnon’s hungry eye. The former are hidden in plain sight, I mean the harmonics, while the latter are invested in process itself.

Within the ambit of a brush stroke and its phrasing, Authier constructs elaborate templates for paintings that enjoy a paradoxical oneness because of her contrapuntal licks and not in spite of them. These melodic templates mean that the content of her paintings is entirely locked in, while she brings contradictory pictorial structural elements into the foreground—jostling pictorial oppositions, as in the exhibition’s title, binding them together in an unlikely and uplifting state of cohesion. This is as true of the smaller paintings in her show as the larger ones. The smaller paintings are like windows thrown open upon the wider vistas of the larger paintings; her mastery of scale allows that both large and small have similar impact.

In many of her recent paintings, the armature of painting becomes almost anthropomorphic. The whirling dervishes fashioned from ribbons, streamers and bows of deliriously extravagant pigment that informed her earlier work have given way to a fabulous bestiary built entirely upon paint and illusion. Over Eons, 2013, is a good example. The cascading morphologies here are bred-in-the-bone ambiguous and change from vantage point to vantage point in a Louisiana heartbeat. The painting as an entity seems somehow alive. These fields are process-oriented and Authier delivers the true meaning of tumult no-holds-barred. Indeed, the tumultuousness of content is beautifully mirrored in the process of making painting itself.

Authier’s beatific brush stroke soloing and improvisational melodic structures and consistent counterpoint stratagems arise spontaneously from both her forebrain and solar plexus or they wouldn’t have a ghost of a chance of reinvigorating abstraction the way they do. In a recent monograph on the artist for Concordia University’s FOFA Gallery, I called her “the Natural”—the Roy Hobbs of painting—and on the basis of the paintings exhibited now at Georgia Scherman I see the enduring truth of it.

Legendary jazzman Ornette Coleman once claimed that his music had no metric time per se, but only the inbuilt time of breathing itself. Authier possesses this latter temporality in spades and invests her remarkable abstracts with all manner of deft and crisp contrapuntal play. Indeed, she has honed her improvisational chops from work to work, series to series, creating seamless imaginary spaces that reveal to us splendid harbingers of the future of abstraction while pulling us relentlessly into the orbits of her paintings by the sheer force of their painterly gravitation. ❚

“Melanie Authier: Jostling Pictorial Oppositions” was exhibited at Georgia Scherman Projects, Toronto, from February 7 to March 16, 2013.

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