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| Arts Alive en el Warehouse District |
| Joan Duran en New Orleans |
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 Liquid Islands
I like the operations involved.
I take pleasure in observing the changing forms ... as they occur (colorations, thickenings, contractions, crystallizations, polarizations, etc). There is something a little perverse about this observation.
Roland Barthes
Joan Duran has moved from the impassioned, calligraphic gestuality of his youthful work, to an almost detached observation of the operations that coalesce into the inhuman beauty of his latest experiments. Leaving behind the directness of painting, they enact an extreme version of Barthes’ description of cookery. They hint at ceramics, a similar fusion of art and science around the transformation of matter, with its unpredictable mutations that withold surface characteristics to the last; they recall the fascination of seaside engineering, channeling the ocean between precarious dykes into miniature lakes and moats.
A belief in something like ‘objective chance’ (Breton) has always animated JD even in his most hands-on periods, and through these paintings he tests it in new ways. Despite appearances, this is not informalist work so much as the product of a game, a sort of plastic solitaire, whose rules are a method that falls into three parts: chemistry (mixing each time a different, nameless, and we hope not too explosive brew of dyes, bleaches, glues, alcohols, and pigments); physics (placing tubes and other objects beneath a canvas on the floor to create the topography that allied with random creases and folds, will determine the lie of the liquid) and pouring the first over the second (generally a one-stop action). After that the image ‘dries’, or rather ferments under its own steam for weeks or months; it drains and settles and sweats, weeps, bubbles and blisters, darkens and lightens. The final work thus possesses an independence of a different order to the modernist concept of autonomy, being largely created from within by natural processes, rather than by an inspired hand. It is solipsistic, referring only to the other works in the series. Yet it is also a dependent form, shaped by history and environment almost like a photograph, obedient to conditions now lost, preserving the trace of vanished reliefs.
Such a form—of which colour is an intrinsic property—and the manner of its production, offer a number of complex qualifications to current art practices. Its uncompromising abstraction sets it apart, both from the increasingly sterile mix-and-match of pre-packaged cultural signs that describes so much neo-conceptual art, and from a neo-figurative painting with the same discursive goals. And yet it refuses the immaterial nature of a lot of the resistance to this market-mirroring shuffle of signs, such as computer art or interventions in social space. Although fashionably enough it is, at one level, the ‘document’ of what is unmistakably a ‘process’, rather than an action or an expression like traditional painting, it also delivers as an art object in the old sense, showering sensual rewards upon the most uninformed spectator (even if I suspect that JD is always fighting his own facility for gorgeousness).
Narrative or ‘time-based’ genres are hot at present, since the cheap availability of video technology encouraged a literary turn in art. In this context, the synchronic time in which Duran’s images develop winks at geological deep time, dwarfing human sequences. Conversely, the quick-fire concision of his own input is a myth-busting recognition of the pressures on professional creators (who have become functionally indistinguishable from any other worker in the global turbo-economy) to produce at Stakhanovite rates; in fact, the implicit leisure of narrative work often masks a heightened speed of turnover. In today’s businesslike context, there is no more use for the paint-smirched, unworldy genius who once redeemed the salons of bankers and moguls with bohemian glamour. A central—if regrettably invisible—part of the process behind these paintings is therefore JD’s performance at the studio, smoothly in character as the white-collar exec: ‘Now, when I work I dress as if for going out; the challenge is never to mess up my pristine tennis shoes.’ The same point makes itself when we realize there’s no smell of turpentine in the air. Duran’s materials are tough, artificial, industrial. Even the canvas is synthetic.
Post-post-modern, post-craft, post-semiotics, post-theory, post-narrative. And yet Duran’s ellipses assert the inherent claim of abstract form to a political and social, as well as aesthetic and emotional, resonance. Rehabilitating the ‘author’ at a just level between subjective control and objective chance, they enable responses that are neither academically predetermined nor arbitrary.
Sensations and analogies develop across Duran’s serial experiments. (Most of what follows is suggested by the six paintings pushed into a group by the one-off sanguinary splendour of akaí tek-rek number one, with its slightly different connotations.) They tend to be tripartite—like the method, like a rhetorical figure, like JD’s brisk aspiration to make ‘pim-pam-pum’ paintings. An effortful pulling-apart and an obscure gathering in relaxedness; transparency and dense opacity as extensions of one another; a slipping of scales between primeval vertebrate structures and satellite topographies. The outer edges are particularly compelling to watch as they curl their probing fingers, or dissolve fuzzily, or turn hard backs. We have to really look at these phenomena on their own terms, to understand their language through the way they take possession of their space: creeping, tensing, puddling, here dark sundered islands, there fathomless cenotes or the transparency of mineral shallows, suddenly a conflagration of magma. I find myself drifting into metaphors of the coming-into-being of land and water—confusingly, since what might be land masses are actually liquids between invisible, ironed-out banks, and everything in this universe is in the process of finding its nature.
If fluid identities and geographies come to mind, it’s not just because painting has always been associated, in different senses, with a national project, and that Duran has been deeply involved with the creation of a country, Belize, from the beginning when it was a bare white canvas. It’s that here could be a visual poetics of the Caribbean itself, all coasts and volcanoes and lagoons, with an essential indefinition that is the effect of numberless immigrant cultures, like a seething mix of ingredients tearing apart and mingling and seeking places of escape or rest. The pain and privilege of that part of the world, according to writers from CLR James to Edouard Glissant, is that the subject too is immersed in a perpetual process of becoming. There is a beautiful passage on this by the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott:
...then the noun the ‘Antilles’ ripples like brightening water, and the sounds of leaves, palm fronds and birds are the sounds of a fresh dialect, the native tongue. The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one’s biography joins in that sound ... and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
Duran’s titles are the sounds of creatures of this unfinished world: nit nochi ploi, akaí tek-rek, cawá... They seem a mixture of the known and the invented, but they are fragments and morphemes of disparate tongues from Catalan to Japanese. The artist is himself multilingual, somewhat stateless, a wanderer who has created his own, always provisional, belonging to a corner of the earth. And this brings us further out again, to the global level of imaging that pervades these paintings. It’s not too fanciful to suggest that they figure with unconscious accuracy the restless flows of the contemporary world system, whether of capital, data, products or migrants; what the anthropologist Roger Bartra has called today’s ‘liquid cultures’, lacking a a territorial basis, welling up through the dry, exhausted enclosures of the modernity to which TS Eliot bids farewell in The Waste Land. Like slow lavas, neither liquid nor solid, land nor sea, but finding their own pathways, Joan Duran’s latest images have all the disturbing beauty and uncertainty of the present dissolution of everything we thought we knew. The forms of the future have not yet hardened into anything we can deal with. And the artist, perversely, observes.
Lorna Scott Fox
London, August 2005
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