Archive: Issue No. 75, November 2003

Francine Scialom Greenblatt's 'To My Beloved' is dedicated to the memory of her deceased husband, and her leitmotif, the rose, emphasises the works elegiac freight and commemorative function. Nothing could embody the artist's sense of love's tragic fragility more eloquently than the rose, which states both Carpe Diem and Memento Mori. Greenblatt endows the bloom with such soft, yielding pliancy, it becomes an analogue for female flesh, and enmeshes the concept of Eros with that of Thanatos. Her lush sensuality remains intact, but the unctuous, buttery impasto and singing colour contrast past felicity with present vacancy, and blend lyricism with passionate lament.

As Greenblatt's high seriousness escapes many viewers, who view her work as pornography, it is essential to contextualise this controversial artist. Greenblatt forms part of the neo-Expressionist return to figuration, and her painting presents affinities with that of Cucchi, Chia and Clemente in Italy, Immendorf and Fetting in Germany, Garouste in France and Morley in Britain. All these painters deploy a free gestural style of splashy impasto to evoke a world of subjective fantasy.

As self-conscious postmodernists they forge art from the cultural bric-a-brac of the centuries, and cobble the great archetypes of history, religion, mythology and art together with references to their own experience. Allusion, quotation, parody and irony distance the artist from his/ her creation, which remains fragmented, fragmentary and open-ended. Since such painting is relativist - as concerned with style and representation as it is with reality - the artist draws no conclusions. Pigment, brushwork and mark making become primary and the task of fabricating some necessarily tentative and provisional interpretation devolves upon the viewer.

Greenblatt's deliberate avoidance of chronological and geographic specificity lends Egypt, Greece and Rome - a dreamy scene of kissing lovers - a timeless universality. Two antique vignettes are superimposed upon the image - a randy satyr from a Greek vase, and a scene of lovemaking from an Egyptian bas-relief. These classical references emphasise the kissing couple's generic character and suggest both they and the painting are less distillations of the artist's unique temperament than conduits through which archetypal energies pour. The work challenges notions of originality and lays no claim to finality. The flat linearity of the classical citations clashes so violently with the massively sculptural lovers that the painting fragments and proclaims its status as yet another faulty stab at perennial erotic themes.

Libido is Greenblatt's chosen terrain: she paints a thrash of naked bodies, gaping mouths, probing fingers and engorged members brushing over apertures, lips, buttocks and breasts. A decisive subjectivism distances this material from reality. Figures and limbs are superimposed upon each other in disregard of coherent space and scale. The figures drift through a limbo that collapses around them, and we construe them as figments of the imagination.

The critic, Otto Hahn, describes Greenblatt's work as "plunging the spectator into an inner universe where everything is expressed by means of mental flashes." She evokes the surging mass of projections that race through minds inflamed by desire, and her paintings are all fading after-image and momentary flicker.

Mankind's erotic vitality is reflected in his/ her cerebral vitality, and Greenblatt presents the former through the latter. The libido manifests in effervescent mental foment, in a rush of fantasies, and she conveys this hectic volatility through melting, diffuse imagery. Bodies and limbs are captured as they materialise from a flurry of brushwork or as they dissolve into it. Contour is avoided; edges blurred, and paint applied in eddying swirls to create a fluid blur that approximates to a stream-of-consciousness.

The work Sensory exemplifies this flux and febrility. Setting is eliminated: overlapping bodies monopolise the picture space and generate jostle, crowding and claustrophobia. Only a thin wavy ribbon of aquamarine separates the figures, and streaky tonal brushwork makes this shove out against the anatomies, heaving them to the forefront of the picture plane.

Action slows down to an adagio. The figures seem oblivious of each other, and their erotic endeavour seems cerebral or fetishistic. A man buries his head in a bouquet and inhales; an ecstasy-filled face with closed eyes and gaping mouth tilts heavenward; a profile freezes in soulful supplication. The heads move ritualistically around a naked female torso as totemic as an idol or fertility figure. Headless and hence, depersonalised, it becomes the embodiment of the urge to couple or mate.

The figures ache with yearning yet wear expressions of thrilled surrender and delirious abandon. Although overwhelmed by feelings so potent that they swoon into expiratory poses, they remain cruelly alone, and what they experience is solitary fantasy not rapturous orgasm. The erotic occurrence is situated in the realm of the imagined, the remembered or the anticipated not the actual, and it resonates absence, loss and longing and reflects a stifling inner world of obsession in which chasms separate the pangs of desire from the ecstasy of release.

Such dense psychological nuance would constitute a pointless complication in pornography, which aims solely to arouse, and the painting's simmering emotional intensity invites metaphysical readings. The artist seems to make the sexual urge a metaphor for aspiration to union with higher forces - God, the cosmos, creativity or ethical perfection. The confusion with pornography arises because Greenblatt equates eroticism with spirituality, and compels us to witness sexual intimacies to which we are not normally privy. Such explicitness forces us into the role of voyeurs, and makes engagement with the paintings so fraught we loose sight of their symbolic dimension.

Keyhole compositions, drastic cropping and giant cinematic close-up techniques lend the images an overwhelming sexual immediacy and exacerbate the viewer's unease. In Finger, the colossal heads are cut off at scalp and chin so that mere sections of the face fill the canvas. Scale is drastically amplified, and the physiognomy magnified ten-fold so that the viewer is forced into indecent proximity with the kissing couple's mouths and tongues. To gain such a view in reality, we would have to stand just inches away, and this unnatural closeness implies that the viewer is a potential participant in the sexual transaction.

In Sensori this monumental gigantism is applied to a masturbating nude who assumes a disturbing carnal flagrancy. Greenblatt consistently places her figures at the forefront of the picture plane as invasively close to the viewer as possible. In Sensori and many other compositions, vigorous modelling endows the naked anatomies with such aggressive plasticity, they puncture the picture plane, erupt into our space and collapse our sense of physical and psychological distance.

In Screen, a scene of cunnilingus, the passive and supine woman's body is cropped so her trunk and head must be imagined as lying on the gallery floor. The spatial construction stands the viewer precisely where the head of the woman would occur. As we occupy the same space as she, we momentarily become her, and any illusion that we are detached from the lovemaking is shattered. We are forced into fleshly contact with Greenblatt's voluptuaries, and this implies mutuality and shared appetite. Such parallels are less demeaning than they seem, for Greenblatt invests eroticism with mystic repercussions, and views it as a primitive aspiration to transcendence. Through flesh we move toward the light.

October 13 - November 1