CLAIRE CHÊNE: True North, paintings

FIG Gallery, November 15 to December 9, 1995

Claire Chêne, Ocean, 1995
oil on canvas and wood panels
48" x 88" overall (3 panels)

Claire Chêne, New Forrest, 1995 acrylic on canvas 60" x 60"

Claire Chêne, Continental Divide, 1995 acrylic and brick dust on canvas 48" x 60"

		Les terribles fremissements de la terre
		et les vomissements des cratères
		sont le langage qui nos dévoile
		les mystè des inaccessibles profondeurs.

		--Claude Albore-Livadie

Claire Chêne's large "elemental" paintings in her solo exhibition at FIG Gallery mark a departure in her abstract-symbolist aesthetic. They take the elements (earth, fire, water) as their subject, intensifying what would be the ordinary components of landscape painting and exploring them as forces of nature beyond human control. They present the viewer with walls of roiling fire, torrents of turbulent, engulfing water, and mountains of shifting earth that recall the eighteenth-century definition of the sublime as the representation of overwhelming natural forces that at first evoke terror, but when "tamed" within the frame of art give rise to a terrifying beauty. They also recall Immanuel Kant's definition of the sublime as involving forces too large for the imagination to encompass, thus generating a sense of awe at what lies beyond human comprehension. Psychologically, the confrontation with sublime nature becomes an encounter with the idea of our own death, or simply with the anxiety produced by the earth-bound uncertainties of human life.

Oceanis a three-panel, turbulent Tsunami-like wave, sufficiently abstracted that viewers may not recognize what it is until it is "on top of them," so to speak. The upper reaches of its transparently painted wave are offset by the quieter passages that comprise its undertow. Yet frozen in time, the wave can also seem like a bluish glacial ice-cave that is ultimately as beautiful as it is threatening.

Landscape presents us with the reddish-brown blocky planes of a rugged mountain whose vertical escarpments plunge into the middle foreground like a fluid landslide of muddy earth that provokes the thought of our falling or sliding to our deaths into a grave of earth that awaits us. Continental Divide is a more abstract painting of earth-toned planes seamed with black, its fluid brown paint mixed with brick dust to give us the feel of seeing the earth shifting directly infront of our faces.

Wild Fire is a four-panel painting of a wind-whipped wall of fire. It's foreground exhibits a few twisted and charred black branches left by a fire that is consuming everything in its path, while the heat and terror of the image is accentuated by patches of sky blue visible through the fire's smoke in the upper reaches of the painting. Yet the fire is so intense and again beautiful that it carries psychologically metaphoric connotations of purification in addition to ideas of destruction.

Forest is a lush green patchwork of verdant forest in the midst of which a waterfall gushes with incredible hydraulic force, indicated by the unusually wide parabolic curve of its falls. But the force in this particular painting is less the destructive force of the water than the sense of an enormous amount of life-force capable of producing such a surfeit of green. And as the title of another painting, New Forest, might suggest, the life-force of Chêne's forests may represent a process of psychological renewal and transformation that may be prefigured in the idea of death that the more violent instances of the sublime raise.

Also included in the show are smaller acrylics on paper that pick up the landscape imagery of Chêne's larger paintings. In two, My Boat Coming In and My Boat Going Out, an empty, sail-less rowboat in a cove becomes a dreamy figure of passage from one psychological state to another. The incoming boat floats in the washy small breakers of a relatively calm sea, entering a cove defined by the sketchy brown outlines of rock, ready for a soft landing on the beach, as if somehow guided by an unspecifiable force, while the outgoing boat heads into a rougher and darker sea (perhaps the onset of inclement weather) toward the outline of black rocks in what may be a metaphor for the kind of anxiety we feel whenever we embark on a new and uncertain phase of life. A Family Portrait, a large four-panel narrative painting more characteristic of Chêne's symbolic abstraction, represents members of the artist's family in imagery (a hot sun, a fragment of Mexican architecture, a moon hanging over a show-caped peak, barely visible ghosts of human figures, and boat shapes that suggest the idea of passage) that weaves from panel to panel.

CLAIRE CHENE: Arezzo Paintings: Years of Exile

FIG Gallery, October 12 to November 5, 1994

Claire Chêne's second exhibition at FIG Gallery in October will combine her "Arezzo" paintings, based on 15th-century Italian Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca's frescos for the choir of the church of San Fancesco, Arezzo, with thematically related abstract work.

From Piero's whole cycle, which spans an enormous narrative (centering around the wood of the cross) from the death of Adam to the return of the "true cross" to Jerusalem, Chêne has selected two of the more "miraculous" scenes, the Finding and Proofing of the Cross and the Dream of Constantine, and she has painted them in a looser, nonrealist modern style with significant alterations. In the scene of the proofing of the cross, for example, she has omitted the very event that is supposed to "prove" the cross "true"--the resurrection of a dead young man from his casket in a funeral procession--thus forcing the viewer to make his or her own judgement about the cross. Similarly, in the Dream of Constantine, she has moved the angel who points down at Constantine asleep in his tent from the left to the right of the composition, where it no longer fits the authoritative compositional X of Piero's original that makes the angelic vision seem somehow "preordained." In an even larger version of the Dream of Constantine, Chêne dispenses with the angel entirely. Thus, while paying homage to Piero della Francesca's painting, Chêne subtly subverts the force of dogmatic faith. Constantine's vision may be in the mind of the dreamer, the transformative dream taking place in imagination as metaphor rather than as literal event.

Alongside the Arezzo paintings, Chêne has placed abstract work that explores the tension between our modern experience of social chaos and fragmentation and our desire for a more stable realm of community. In one work, for example, what looks like the windshield of a car (a symbol of social mobility) sends abstract splinters of glass flying while the painting's upper background abstractly suggests the kind of architecture of the small Renaissance city on a hill that is in the background of Chêne's rendering of Piero della Francesca's Finding and Proofing of the Cross.

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