Place
and Form by Conrad Baaker
Many
of the highways and expressways which cut across our country, along
with their bordering landscapes, were intentionally designed to provide
a variety of visual experiences, not merely for our pleasure as drivers,
but in order to keep us alert. The paintings of Stephen Duren possess
a similar function. They provide visual pleasure, yet this seems to
be but a strategy to keep us at attention.
Stephen
Duren has covered a lot of ground in his career as a painter of landscapes
and interiors. He connects into an art historical tradition of translating
natural and manmade spaces into shapes, lines, and colors - continuing
the honorable work of artists like Pierre Bonnard, Richard Diebenkorn,
and Wolf Kahn. Although this is a romantic practice, and perhaps anyone
making a painting today is romantic in some sense, Duren pushes and
pulls at this depiction of romance, avoiding the pratfalls of stereotype.
Looking
at the broad gesture of Duren's work, one sees the landscape image
clearly dominating the view, whether it be a view of nature unadulterated,
nature agriculturalized, or nature as seen and felt from within our
interior spaces. But these paintings do not necessarily depict nature
according to expectation. They are deliberate objects/images that
are ordered in a particular way for a reason. And like the variable
view from the highway, the constructed visual experience in these
paintings is quite enjoyable. Every image contains a variety of stimuli,
from repetitive line patterns and textures to fields of glowing colors
whose combinations would seem to contradict if it were not for the
decisiveness in which they were put in place. Duren ballets in pictorial
space, leaving the ground for an aerial view, and then careening into
solid flatness as if it were a gravitational law. These daring formal
constructions incite an active, difficult, and lively viewing.
"Form
has a meaning," writes Henri Focillon in The Life of Forms
in Art, "but it is a meaning entirely its own, a personal
and specific value that must not be confused with the attributes we
impose upon it." And this is a good rule in regards to Duren's
paintings, as it prohibits us from simplifying his work and turning
it into something akin to decoration or blind pleasure. This interior
meaning also prohibits us from indulging in the translation of visual
forms merely as a psychological exploration based on expression.
But
what meaning can possibly be derived from the shifting of spatial
planes, the pushing and pulling of color and shape, or the tilting
and collapsing of perspective? Perhaps it is through the activity
of formal analysis - the performance of looking at constructed space
- that we can begin to see the direction in which these paintings
lean.
In
the book Space and Place, the geographer Yi Fu Tuan writes,
"In experience, the meaning of space often merges with that of
place. 'Space' is more abstract than 'place.' What begins as undifferentiated
space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with
value"
Place is complicated. Place speaks of connections between time and
matter. It is the record of relationships between specific persons
and events. But place is not necessarily the natural depiction of
a landscape, and thankfully, Duren's paintings make us work harder
than that. Even the plein-air studies deny normative depiction.
The
formal push/pull of space in Duren's landscapes becomes a prototype
of "place" through our active involvement with the image.
As we see these paintings shift back and forth between formal elements
(color, line, and shape), and then shift again between representation
and abstraction, we encounter a complicated experience of looking
and perceiving that mimics the way we experience the world. In life
we find our place by determining distance and scale, interpreting
pattern and variation, and meditating on the beautiful. Duren's paintings,
like life, endow these abstract spaces with value. The experience
of these spaces becomes an embodiment of "place," calling
us to the attention of what we are doing and where we are.
