By Joseph Masheck.

The prepared canvas is a field set apart and awaiting some kind of articulation which will leave it something other – something else, metaphorically more – than so many grammes of linseed oil and earthly elements deposited on so many square meters of Irish linen (here, at that, exported then imported).

If one can invoke the great name of Cézanne without implying magical validation: the diagonally ‘figured’ panels, different in colour, of Ciarán Lennon’s three large ‘Scotoma’ paintings recall his foundational semiotic.  Cézanne made a visible point of operating on that most elementary level where any second stroke which abuts or interrupts a first, constitutes a fusion, like a weave or weld, yet also, as inevitably, one in a sequence of fractures.  As for the carry-over of such micro-structural awareness in cubism, I notice that the critic Apollinaire had to counter a foolish doctor’s claim that the then new cubist painting, in which, supposedly, ‘everything is distorted (déforme) in the same measure and order,’ was nothing but a literal representation of pathologic ‘scintillating scotoma’ (Chroniques d’art, 15 May 1914).   Latterday ‘formalist’ critique underestimated this molecular level of activity on which gross material is genetically transformed into linguistic ‘material’ – just what is writ large in the huge patient swipes of Lennon’s new paintings, with the intimate relation of bristle to brushstroke extrapolated to muralistic scale.

Given its basically metaphorical character, painting could never be encompassed by the literalism of ‘Minimal Art.’  American minimalists pursued an anti-rhetorical absolute of inertness and formal self-evidence in severely uninflected artworks.  While there were ‘non-relational’ counterparts in painting of insistent object status, likewise purged, foremost practitioners of abstract painting tended rather to excel in crypto-traditional practices: design (Stella), colour( Marden), even lyric touch (Ryman; not that those who hate painting ever notice).  In a new generation, I remember discussions with Seán Scully, who aspired to an articulated complexity: quite physical stripes, one and two layers thick, seemingly black or grey but emitting deep subliminal hues, led to paired panels with contradictory stripes, manifest colour and brushwork; relief and retraction of relief.  Lennon, for whom inflection is basic (as when scratches keep before one’s consciousness a transparent pane of glass), has turned from physical structure – literal folding of materially painted canvas to purely painted differentiations that still hum with hue in their basso tonalities.

In happens that the artist long admired the work of an old friend of mine in New York, Sharon Gold, whose paintings had provoked me to write, with illustrations, which Lennon in turn saw.  Despite commonalities, how-ever, tellingly technical differences, of all things, prove untransmittable by mechanical, let alone electronic, means.  Which suggests that perhaps painting can, after all, hold out against assimilation to the bluntly literalistic terms of a hyperpragmatic world.

Lennon was preparing for further development when he stopped making folded paintings and began to plaster over boxy, object-like supports with a patchwork of pigment.  Notably with the ‘Scotoma’ works, he has in a more essentially metaphorical sense engendered images in which megastrokes of subtly calibrated colour, painted wet-int-wet seem to fold palpably over and under in grand diagonal sweeps.  This shift to purely optical ‘folds’ accomplishes an active transcendence, and a rigorous one, of brute materiality.

There is today such antipathy towards anything describable transcendental that many cool artists would be bothered to learn that Lennon’s three large paintings were painted with the Annunciation in mind.  The wretchedly ‘utopian’ geniuses of early modernism were evidently less impoverished.  In ‘Point and Line to Plane’ (1926) Kandinsky summons the Annunciation itself to explain how in painting the ‘untouched… material plane which is called upon to receive the content of the work of art’ is ‘a living being’ which ‘joyfully’ … receives the right elements in the right order’ (trans. H. Dearstyne).  The sober stillness, like a deep polyphonic drone, of Lennon’s new ‘pure’ abstractions is more spiritually attained than any mundane order merely imposed by fiat of formal; or even antiformal, design.

Dublin, 1993.