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KATHLEEN SHIELDS |
Lucy Maki's quirky configurations of shifting spaces, peculiar appendages and eccentric, geometric shapes correspond to an inward, intuitive reality. She has said she wants to make objectively real, without describing, a partial "image" she sees in her mind-perhaps a shape connected with a sensation, perhaps "a part of my past that seemed so far removed that I no longer felt it had been real."2 Like the tip of an iceberg implying the rest of its huge unseen mass beneath the surface, this subliminal image is a metonym for something lurking at the periphery of conscious memory. It belongs to the intimate meanderings of reverie, to the embellishments of imagination-vast, interior realms that find equivalence in the formal excesses of Maki's paintings. |
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Since for Maki there are "no boundaries to this image in my mind," it must be an endeavor simply to admit its immensity. Indeed, her work is always additive, its construction a process of accretion. She begins with a rectangular canvas but always extends it with shaped surfaces and odd little attachments of wire, ropes, nails or wood. Painted patterns and shapes collect into tightly packed arrangements ass if by absent-minded doodling. Even the paint surface tends to be dense and layered, reworked again and again in various colors and textures. Tensions between large and small elements, ranging from wide fields to minute details,' give the work a complex, internal dynamism that is somehow better felt through diffuse awareness than tracked by focused attention. The creation of a work often seems to have been a matter of excruciating application, both of materials and of self. With it you feel in the presence of some essential impulse which suffuses every brushstroke and shape with the sheer effort of expression. An almost hysterical compulsion about its frantic edges, obsessively rendered surfaces, menacing points and sharp angles suggests an uneasy emergence. Yet at the same time, the common substances of canvas, paint, aluminum and wood can seem to have been magically transformed, alchemized into an object of both material opulence and otherworldly origin. Thus while Maki's art may appear lacking in confidence or a certain expected grace, it is not without its own uncanny resolution and beauty. And its restless aspiration to boundlessness, whether that of reverie, memory or the imagination, is couched in a reality you can see and feel-- in the materiality of collage, in the fussy little attachments and in the plasticity of paint. Even the title may embody a feature of the work's capacity to dwell simultaneously in dual. |
 Lucy Maki, Magician, 24" x 16", 1985. |
 Lucy Maki, The Sun Rises Also, 90" x 55" oil and mixed media on canvas, 1986. |
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The quixotic Crusader could be a fantastic portrait of the knight errant whose flailing, spinning windmill motion is fixed in a blue wire spiral at the center of the canvas. Or perhaps its frame of runic inscriptions records some medieval incantation of the moon and stars. Shifting surfaces, cut away in acute angles or added in relief, form a neo-Cubist kaleidoscope of time and space. Wedges of heavily textured and patterned cobalt, silver and gold even recall the sorcerer Merlin who once looked into times past and future. The black-shrouded Magician, with its periphery of jagged edges, a row of nails jutting from its side and a red, twisted-wire tail, conjures an ominous transition into a world beyond. Diviner evokes a Ouija board with a boat-shaped planchette that traces prophetic patterns and messages across a field of symbols and letters. Larger works, such as The Sun Rises Also, disperse into emptiness as they slowly suck you into a central void. Phaedo's watery blue pool churns and flows against a flat, gridded frieze, all roped at top and bottom by stiff, arrow-ended slings. At midpoint a pale yellow lens shape seems to emerge from a thick primordial soup, passing from its viscous fluid into a more structured domain. The Byzantine, gold-skimmed surface of Oasis condenses into the inaccessible depth of a sparkling, bottomless sea just as it dilates into a shimmering, celestial expanse. Vertically spanning the shifting space, a crude jewel-like pendant and two slender columns burst into brushy foliage barely contained by the corniced upper edges of the canvas. Near its center a black square both holds the plane and recedes into an immeasurable distance. Still other works transpose states of being through compositional symmetry. In Spectre a prominent, near vertical creates a negative or near-mirror image of the scalloped line on the left in the series of curved shapes on the right. This symmetry also gives a work more physical presence, so that works such as Oasis and Phaedo may recall the sensation of standing before another person or in front of a mirror. These not only implicate your presence in theirs, but have a mirror's quality of seeming to contain a deeply receding, illusionary space while reflecting back outward through the surface to your physical space. As if containing both the space of memory and the space of the present collapsed into one, their compositions occur in both imaginary and actual space, obscuring the distinctions we often make between the two. An intriguing, even witty, correspondence further joins the painted and sculptural elements of some works: the two- and three- dimensional ropes and arrows in Phaedo and the blue disk and cutout spurs in Oasis draw you into their curious interactions, dissolving contradictions between virtual and actual presence. |
 Lucy Maki, Phaedo, 82" x 70", oil and mixed media on canvas, 1986. |
Maki's once-frequent use of an eye-shaped or lenticular form to signify passage from one part of a painting to another, as in Phaedo, gained special resonance for her when she discovered the same shape, called a mandorla, in J.E. Cirlot's A Dictionary of Symbols. Historically the mandorla has symbolized the union of two worlds-upper and lower, heaven and earth. A symbol that "embraces the opposing poles of all dualism," it is "the zone of intersection and interpenetration (the world of appearances)." |
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In a sense, the mandorla is a metaphor for the fundamental impulse behind Maki's art which seeks to embrace a language both of symbolism and of self-evident form. As such her work holds many stylistic references to previous representations, from ancient architectural ornamentation to medieval inscriptions to 20thcentury design. The richness of these cultural allusions makes them impossible to inventory. Each is immanently complex and intimately connected to the context of many others. Philosophically as well as visually, Maki's art is highly reminiscent of early Modernist abstraction Cubism, Constructivism, Suprematism, Surrealism-and in some ways of Abstract Expressionism and more recent abstract painting. But Maki's art both consciously and unconsciously reworks the modernist vocabulary and its history of abstraction, rediscovering or remembering the essential impulse that prompted its invention. Her process is that of recollection. And her art is both a personal and cultural gesture toward the restoration of the past in the present. It is a renewed "desire to deepen the foundations of the real," as Breton wrote of Surrealism "to bring about an ever clearer at the same time ever more passionate consciousness of the world perceived by the senses." 3 Writing
about Lucy Maki's paintings has been like trying to recount an
early morning dream. Everything is so lucid and precise, so palpably
real, but no rational narrative binds the images and textures
that jostle and displace one another. All is disjointed yet intricately
spun together more by a current of feeling than by any fixed
structure, a vortex of events of which you are both an observer
and an intimate part. Sensations are crystal clear. All makes
perfect sense. It is only when you are fully awake and try to
remember the dream in now-conscious images and language that
you find it easily escapes to the recesses of a subconscious
world. So it is with a Maki painting. Like Bachelard's "pious forest," it "accumulates its infinity within its own boundaries." The work's integrity and significance therefore do not translate into a common discourse that would fix its directionless movement. Descriptive nouns and adjectives finally are inadequate for articulating an experience that, like a daydream, seems to occur outside or prior to and the manipulations of rational thought and language. At times it feels inappropriate to discuss Maki's art in terms of things we already know. Yet it is surely a substantial aspect of the work's peculiarity and power that it may enable us to see and know those things more deeply and intimately. So it is not surprising that Maki would also invoke Gertrude Stein and her "Tender Buttons," which for Stein represented an effort to rediscover nouns, to get at "a way of naming things that would not invent names, but mean names without naming them." Maki's abstract images similarly realize with uncanny precision the essence of a sensation, a feeling or a thing, and charge our vision with the passion that makes them real. NOTES:
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