Going to Ground at the University of Tulsa School of Art
November 1, 2016
The exhibition “Going to Ground” includes over 40 paintings from over the past 30 years. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring this essay by Jennifer Samet
Figure in Place: Paintings by Susanna Coffey
by Jennifer Samet
The recent work of Susanna Coffey synthesizes multiple dichotomies, including figure and ground; abstraction and representation; life and death; beauty and violence; male and female; skin and interiority; masking and individuality.
Three paintings in the exhibition are representations of Coffey’s late father. The earliest work in the show is “My Father is Sometimes a Mystery” (1980). This phrase is scrawled as text at the bottom of the painting. Her father’s face is shown in a form resembling a waning moon. The right half is in shadow, melting into dark painting ground. “Edwin R. Coffey” (2003) is a frontal portrait of her father, his head and shoulders set against a camouflage-patterned ground. The painting “Late Snow”(2012-15), although seemingly abstract, was inspired by a memory-vision of her father in a field.
Other paintings are more oblique, yet poignant references to her father. “Dad’s Camo Poncho” (1999) is a self-portrait, also with camouflage-patterned ground. More generally, Coffey’s explorations of landscape are rooted in childhood experience. Her father was involved in developing and building roads, so Coffey moved frequently with her family, and wandered through countryside that would have otherwise been inaccessible.
Coffey’s paintings become investigations of the inherent problem of portraiture: the capturing of likeness, versus showing “lifelikeness” – the spirit or feeling of a person. Coffey has continued to grapple with this question. She has taken it to the extreme of representing person and place in an entirely tactile and visual way — through the matter of paint itself, rather than image or text. They are metaphysical portraits.
Coffey probes the questions of difference between a person’s external and internal life, what remains hidden from sight, our connections to larger societal identity, what we become after death, our spiritual presence versus our material one.
In the last few years, Coffey has engaged with two media: acrylic spray painting using stencils, and slower-paced oil paintings. Her newest paintings bridge the media. This is one aspect of the idea of “Going to Ground” (the title of the current exhibition), where portraits are allowed to dissolve into ground and matter – visual manifestations of “dust to dust, ashes to ashes.”
In “Ringers” (2016), Coffey merges the two modes of painting within one portrait. A self-portrait in a backwards baseball cap is vertically mirrored by a vertebrae-like formation, rising from the more naturalistic head. It becomes the mask-twin to the self-portrait. Coffey used an enlarged ink-jet print of one of her spray-painted, stencil pieces to work from, to create the ground around the portrait, and the mask-twin.
“Late Snow” is densely worked, with a centrally and symmetrically placed blue-white form, textured like snow-covered earth. At the lower corners and sides we see touches of green and red peeking out from below. The painting has a “spine” – a subtle vertical line of whiter-white. It might represent a part of the landscape – the top of a small hill, or a path running through a field. However, the white line can also be read as a nasal skeleton, so that the painting reveals a ghostlike, obscured head and face.
These spinal, vertical forms can be found in several of Coffey’s paintings – the stencil works and also the more naturalistic portraits. They suggest common markers between human and non-human beings – skeletons, gene structures, and replicating strands of DNA. They suggest connections that run deeper than our daily lives.
Coffey recognizes that the visual flood we experience in our image-saturated culture puts us constantly in the position of existing in two places at once. Imaging figure and place is an opportunity to be in a place we are not. Here, that alternate place is metaphysical. It transcends the image we project of ourselves in the world, the surfaces we willingly share, and what we know of another.