Dennis Hollingsworth’s paintings raise playful questions about the paradoxical position of abstract painting today—caught in the impasse between the opposing camps of modernism and postmodernism. While Hollingsworth is highly skeptical about the outmoded conventions that inscribe painting, he also recognizes the impossibility of working without them. He uses this paradox as the impetus for his work, striving for a more contemporary synthesis—by turning the painterly process into a critical reflection upon itself, that constantly raises new questions about its own modus operandi.
Hollingsworth’s layered surfaces become a self-reflective space in which questions do not admit the closure of an answer—endings become beginnings, outer turns into inner and viewers are left to make of it what they can.
The sense of exuberant joy that underlies Hollingsworth’s paintings has an infectious quality. We see his cherishment of paint in marks that recreate themselves over and over again—becoming one with their medium. Paint is the lifeblood of these paintings and it is by pulling strength from movements of paint that Hollingsworth tests their limits—only to return to his initial starting point with a new determination to upset “the givens.”
Hollingsworth trained as an architect—giving him a broader concept of what it means to be an artist and freedom to use building implements like dry wall tools and palette knives to pull paint in nontraditional ways. Hollingsworth uses the architectural concept of a “series of edits” for “correcting mistakes”—to isolate beautiful aspects. He begins paintings by entering ” a certain territory without wanting to prematurely craft an end game” which will “foreclose beforehand what happens.”
Hollingsworth uses custom-made origami-like tools to spike pools of wet paint to crystallize and compound into spiny paint elements—like vibrating monads. These spinning shapes are drawn from nature but still keep the character of the paint—recalling his love of the way Antoni Gaudi drew from nature. These corpuscular monads also have an underwater sea life quality, which Hollingsworth explores in beautiful terrines, using armature with the plastic possibilities of impasto paint—that recall Jacques Cousteau’s underwater world.
The phenomenologist philosopher, Merleau-Ponty insists that “it is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into painting.”(1) The shifting digressions of Hollingsworth’s movements of paint—vividly illustrate Merleau-Ponty’s idea that the world is re-created in painting through the mediacy of the painter’s own body, “in a system of exchanges between seeing and the seen.”
The body has always generated the most powerful metaphors for painting, because as Merleau-Ponty argues, every painterly technique “is a technique of the body.”(2) Barbara Maria Stafford suggests that art must reclaim its relation to the body as a “locus” for experiencing the world. She argues that we need art today that is “anchored in something that isn’t simulated, degraded and cerebral”(3) Hollingsworth’s corporeal paintings are “anchored” in a visceral awareness of the embodied presence of a painterly mark.
Stafford argues that we need art that reminds us that we are “incarnated on earth, and we have spirit and flesh and that the two have become one.”(4) Hollingsworth’s luscious, polyrhythmic paintings are constantly searching for this fluid integration of mind, spirit and matter through an intellectual awareness of the way physical action can be embodied in paint.
References
(1) Merleau -Ponty, Maurice “Eye and Mind” Art and Its Significance. An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory Ed Stephen David Ross. State University of New York Press. 1994.
(2) Merleau -Ponty, Maurice Op.cit.
(3) Stafford, Barbara Maria “Interview” by Suzanne Ramyak, Sculpture. May/June1994
(4) Stafford, Barbara Maria Op.cit
Extract from an in-depth essay by Lita Barrie: Link
painters-table.com
