Gregory Gillespie

Now in his early fifties, Gregory Gillespie has followed the advice Delacroix gave himself in his Journals: "Choose stubborn material and conquer it by patience." Gillespie lived in Italy from 1962 to 1970, during which time he developed his major pursuits: landscapes, often squirming with strange vegetative details; still lifes, where organic textures become nightmarishly clarified in studio light; portraits, which have challenged his technical skills at representing temperament; and "shrine" paintings, modeled on the votive images of dead people sometimes seen on walls in Italian towns and often used to mark grave sites. He has also done numerous street scenes and figure groups, most of them derived from

Balthus. Whatever the material, most of his work has clustered around the technical task imposed by the shrine paintings, where he has addressed a crucial formal question of our time; Frank Stella has plotted his career by the same question, and younger artists like Julian Schnabel and David Salle noisily contend with it. The shrine paintings were occasions for Gillespie to punch into or distend a pictorial scheme and create new opportunities for deploying dynamic space. He seemed especially interested in creating a space that could bear the full awareness of surface flatness and also allow for illusionist depth, without turning the pictorial event into paradist trompe l'oeil. Once he returned to the States, Gillespie continued these investigations in his studio paintings by turning his actual working space into a shrine site.

Because he has been so obviously influenced by old masters, the temptation of parody, of infusing technical or thematic facts from the past into a new pictorial event, is a constant shadow presence in Gillespie's work. He went to Italy to study Masaccio, and the shrine paintings were at first not simply an American way of appropriating foreign subjects but also formal tributes to the architectural housings of Masaccio's figures in the Brancacci Chapel and in Santa Maria Novella. But the Italian who meant the most to him was the fifteenth-century Venetian Carlo Crivelli. Gillespie admits to the technical breakthrough he owes to his study of Crivelli. Frustrated by his inability to render the form of things accurately by blending paint in the usual way—"If I put a squash or rubber ball in front of me," he said in an interview in the early 1980s, "I couldn't make it look round with the usual blending"—he took over Crivelli's method of crosshatching. This corrected and sharpened the clarity of objects; it made the coloring thicker, busier, yet still fluid and resilient. By crosshatching he could, like Crivelli, condense the volume of objects and give them an unsettling vitreous solidity. Although there are few conventional religious icons in his paintings, especially when compared with the tabernacle rattlings of younger neo-expressionist contemporaries like Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer, there's a consistent devotional tone borne by the formal values Gillespie confers on brick, mortar, stone, color, and wash. This gives evidence, I think, of the other major influence on

his work. The Italian trace is mixed with, and secularized by, Dutch genre painting. One painting, the 1981 Untitled Landscape (After de Hooch), is testimony to that influence. In several of his figure groups we see the smudged physiognomies and sheeted lighting of Vermeer and de Hooch; his still lifes and interiors often borrow and revise the brickwork arches and tiled surfaces so commonplace in baroque painting. At the same time, though, Gillespie contests the restraints of influence by folding and buckling the picture surface into telescoped boxes, with no intention of dramatizing depth or discovery. And the walls and floors in his studio paintings, like his landscapes, become fever dreams of volume and massive color. To pursue his own visionary contrariness, he learned painterly disciplines of a conventional kind.

Gillespie is very much of his moment in the way he infuses debris into painting both as a pictorial subject and as material that complicates and disrupts the conventional surface. Ever since his years in Italy he has worked magazine and newspaper photographs into many of his pictures, taking them as a used, found armature on which to construct a scene. In several paintings of the 1970s he introduced all sorts of studio wrack: wooden models, old photographs, discarded studies for paintings, palette scrapings, still life items, and his children's toys—conforming to the atelier convention of including whatever happens to be on hand. But Gillespie arranges and distorts the material to suit his own purposes. Studio Wall (1976), which at 96 × 120 inches was the largest piece he had ever done, is constructed like a double shrine divided by a strip of wall with a light switch and notepad. The shrine on the left is a punched-in recess of four telescoped boxes; the fastidious (but in dramatic terms inconsequential) perspective and crisp edges of the nook are mocked by other objects painted into that devotional space: a houseplant, a leering mask, a crosshatched sketch tacked to the wall, a photo cropped like a classical bust. The right-hand shrine holds a doll, a toy airplane, more photos (one of them of a 1968 self-portrait), cinder blocks, and a teddy bear. Deployed as objects of painterly attention, the studio clutter has the look of holy objects. The devotional rigor of an inquiring imagination confers on these ordinary things an almost sacramental value. Maybe this is

what Gillespie had in mind when he said in the mid-1970s that his recent paintings were "moving toward religiousness in a positive sense."

If Gillespie's technique in the shrine paintings perforates the flatness of the pictorial surface, in his landscapes it amasses weeviled textures. In the 1974 Visionary Landscape, for instance, mineral and organic matter is built up so thickly that the picture plane melts into the encrustations and engorgements of the scene. The vegetative forms seethe so densely that Gillespie's realist gesture here is one of bringing back alive not the appearance of reality, not a persuasive or affecting likeness, but rather the feeling for a vital force that infuses all matter. Looking at this and other of his landscapes is like looking into a shattered pomegranate, or at a mad elaboration of an anatomical illustration by Vesalius. His visionary natural forms are cellular, viscous, cankerous. He paints nature's appearances as if they were viscera, a concealed hyperarticulated mass. Vines, shoots, flowers, weeds, soil, and rock all seem to bloom and rot in the paint itself. (A realist's favorite worst dream must be that the paint becomes the thing it represents.) The homunculi and vegetable excrescences that spill from the labial hives in Visionary Landscape remind us inevitably of Hieronymus Bosch.

Gillespie's forms, though, do not have the episodic deployment of figure groups that we find in Bosch and Bruegel; moreover, in these artists we always feel the restraining hand of the draftsman governing the turbulence. Gillespie renders the eruptions in nature's ordinary appearances as a fused detailing of the resolution and decay of matter. He catches natural process at the stage when ripeness rots. The images can be overpowering because they seem beyond the artist's control—or beyond his will to control. The tendriled and bulbous forms of the 1973 Night Garden seem to possess a consciousness borrowed from the human and are yet utterly strange to us. Gillespie is, as we might expect, aware not only of these effects but also of their pedigree: "Lots of people say Bosch or Bruegel when they speak of my work. I've liked them from time to time. . . . I don't know who these kinds of paintings [like Night Garden ] really relate to. Maybe that Victorian Irish painter, Richard Dadd. He was actually insane and he painted little

creatures. . . . He's interesting, this Dadd—he painted the anthropomorphic qualities of nature—goblins, leprechauns." Dadd was a literary, illustrational painter, and most of his work is quite conventional. What attracts Gillespie, I think, is Dadd's queasy ability to make images in which we see the world of fairy—little people, animated vegetation, sprites—menacing normal waking perceptions and reason with a vaguely horrifying mischievousness, horrifying because it may at any moment invade and derange consciousness.

Gillespie's drawing becomes all the more rigorous when his subject threatens to burst the norms of composure and right design. His Landscape with Perspective (1975), for instance, has an elegant, almost somber, formal structure that is studiously observed because of the turbulent matter stirring within it. The title suggests an academic exercise, but the picture has a subversive sexual force. The "perspective" is in fact a vulval funneling from a pale misty sky filling the upper hemisphere of the picture (which is smallish, even by Gillespie's standards, roughly 16 × 12 inches) down to conical terrestrial forms that tumble and spill down the picture plane. Nearly buried in the scene are signs of culture, a farmhouse, a small church, a row of houses, provisional structures embedded in the heavily combed surface. Gillespie is trying not only to present culture's orders as they occupy pieces of the earth's surface but also to make visible the plasmic throb inside the actual physical ground of existence. Although technically the peer of any of the Superrealists of his generation who emerged in the 1970s, he is not interested in the vaporizing dilations of photorealist portraiture. ("Realism," Delacroix wrote, "is the grand expedient that innovators use to revive the interest of an indifferent public, at periods when schools that are listless and inclined to mannerism do nothing but repeat the round of the same inventions. Suddenly a return to nature is proclaimed by a man who claims to be inspired.") He aspires not to porous exactitude but to mass and volume, and to a kind of molecular movement. In a painting like the 1975 Self-Portrait (Torso), he wants us to see the tiny blood vessels under the skin not so we can experience the skin's transparency and frailty but so we can feel the movement and mass of blood channelings. Of his portraits

in particular he has said that he wants "a suggestion of veils, that things are happening underneath." That ambition applies equally to the landscapes. (Over the years he has also done several "curb-scapes" or "gutterscapes," crawl-space views of houses and landscapes in which he offers literally an underneath view of things.) It accounts for the atomization process visible in the color in many of his works: the pigment seems consubstantial with the subject matter. Gillespie is willing to forgo the tedious perfections of Super-realism to achieve what he calls a sense of colossal mass. However small the format—most of his things are modest in size and executed on wood—his pieces look heavy, not because he loads the surface with pigment but because the image itself expresses the feeling of the density and heft of matter.

Gillespie prepared for the paintings of the 1970s by some of his experiments with collage in the street scenes and shrine paintings of the 1960s, when he frequently worked magazine pictures into the pictorial scheme. His 1968 Soccer Star shows a photograph of a famous Italian athlete collaged into a street scene, but his seated figure is eviscerated, split from neck to groin. It's a shocking but rather impassive image, as clinical photographs sometimes are; it is also one of Gillespie's very few schematic and academic pictures. Its juxtaposition of the body's familiar exterior form with its hidden interior is judicious and contrived, though it obviously prepared the way for Gillespie's more subtle interrogations of the relation between the seen and the unseen. And out of earlier works like Exterior Wall with Landscape (1967) and the 1969 Naples Shrine and Viva Frances, where square crannies showcased all sorts of cultural debris, religious imagery, wormy human figures, and distant landscapes, came the mysterious landscapes, portraits, and still lifes of the 1970s and 1980s. Landscape of the Realm (1973) takes the visual format of the shrine and melts it into a stream of dark terrestrial recesses in which Gillespie sets his familiar homunculi, bladders, and intestinal coils. If a picture like Soccer Star offered too much of the mere shock of disclosure, Landscape of the Realm is executed by a mature artist who has found and is pursuing his theme. Gillespie admits that many of his paintings are about change. The organic matter he so often takes as a subject is painted as a

changeful, intermediary substance. The massive color resolution of his technique, though, allows these larval stages to look like adult identities, final and completed. The most representative Gillespie image is at once larva and imago. (He would be the ideal American illustrator of Ovid's Metamorphoses .) His methods sometimes participate in the process they express. He likes to use the dried paint from his palette in much the same way he has used photographs: "If the paint on the palette gets interesting, I'll pick it up and paste it down on a panel and start painting into the shapes—'Rorschaching' into it." The mixed, unwilled, haphazard formations become a larval presence infused into the painting to bring it to some higher, more richly molecular, resolution.

Gillespie's many self-portraits display the formal disciplines he learned from the study of Italian and Northern European art. They also play out another dimension of the transformations evident in the landscape paintings. From one to another, his image in the self-portraits is revised, redecorated, re-emergent as a different tone of self-regard. In a 1978 painting his hair is long, he has a beard and wears a T-shirt, and the frontal pose of the head has not only a Venetian depth and complexity of color but also an intensity of mind registered in the gaze that recalls the Venetians Gillespie admits to admiring most—Bellini, Carpaccio, and Crivelli. The brushwork shows the fastidious attention to detail practiced by Gillespie's friend William Beckman, but in this and other self-portraits Gillespie continues a tradition, not usually evident in figure painting in the 1970s and 1980s, whereby likeness, as John Berger has written, "defines character, and character in man is inseparable from mind." In a 1976 self-portrait, the artist is stripped to the waist; his physiognomy and coloring have a historical shadow life that recalls Masaccio's and Mantegna's treatment of the figure. The painter looks at us, or at the imaginary mirror that returns him to himself, with a wariness and suspicion that releases the mind's anger at its own nagging candor. In Self-Portrait in Studio (1976–77) he is clean shaven, with a cropped skullcap of hair, and he sits behind his palette and worktable as if behind a barricade, his materials cunningly positioned as protective, explanatory intermediaries between his imaged self and painting self.

In the most complex of these pieces, Myself Painting a Self-Portrait (1980–81), Gillespie rips through the complacencies apparent in so much American figure painting since the 1950s in which the parody of old master images and styles has conveniently served as a gesture of extravagant self-heroizing exhaustion. His patient, methodical work over a fifteen-year period led Gillespie to what we see in this image, a transformation of the entire space of the painting into a shrine, a canvas lair. He shows himself enclosed and bound by the materials of his work. A woodsy green backdrop forms the wall behind him. To one side is a grid-covered wall—it looks like a comb of cells—on which drafting instruments hang. Before him, to our right, the easel is braced by another grid wall. On the table barricading him from us are pieces of fruit familiar from earlier still lifes, his palette, and two tiny manikins, shrunken versions of the forms that appeared in the 1980 Manikin Piece . The work space is just a pinched interval between those surfaces, a shrine pressurized by the planes that define the limits of the picture-making activity. The painter, the ostensible votive object, is bare chested, skinny, his torso wiry and torqued like a Cimabue corpus; his facial expression blends matter-of-fact concentration with a surly, self-absorbed impatience. It's the look of a person whose intelligence can never be satisfied by its own best products. The activity we catch him at is that of reimagining the appearance of the self, or rather of an emergent image of the self. And that portrait-in-progress on his easel is hilariously unsettling: a horsey face, with a toothy slice of a grin, looking into the middle distance between us and the painter, like a prankster mediator between what the painter might discover while painting and what we—checked and deflected by convention, historically determined expectations, moods, and fashions—think we see. That larval image, its goofy openness so unlike the severe look on the face of its maker, is in the scheme of the painting a completed, mature image, even though its flaccid textures lack the colossal mass of the fully painted objects, the completed natures of all the other objects in the picture.

Gillespie's ideal of colossal mass is palpable in a painting like Still Life with Eggplants (1983; Plate 10), where a leathery red pepper, an overripe banana, pears and squash and eggplants mys-

teriously bear forth, in their solemn stillness, the febrile densities and molecular movement of the earlier landscapes. Still life painting is a ritual of offering; in presenting his subjects, offering them to the viewer, the painter is offering also a formal interrogation by which technique and historical memory transfigure thing life into image life. Still life perhaps registers change more tremulously than any other kind of painting. A painter like Morandi, whose work Gillespie admires, can occupy an entire career investigating the spiritual qualities suggested by the forms of bottles, cans, and beakers; instrumental in such investigations is the veil of line and color that deflects or inhibits exact rendering. In Gillespie's still lifes generally, but particularly in Still Life with Eggplants, the objects are veiled by their own voluminous textures. The close-knit colors are weighted with a mineralized, night-garden light that exposes on the surfaces of the objects the physical energies of fruition and decay. In the orange-russet flesh of the squash sitting on its shelf, in the webworked purple sheen of the eggplants, we see released the changes that go on in the boggy undersides of the natural order. The actual making of the images sometimes partakes of the same changeful process. Gillespie has said that his paintings "go through a lot of turmoil and change." He said of a still life that he was working on in 1983: "It was going to end right under the edge of the table. That's where the painting ended in my mind, and I was just going to saw the wood at that point. Then, during the last month or so, I decided I wanted to make it bigger. It was a feeling that it's alive, you know, that the concept didn't prevent some spontaneous change from happening."

Gillespie possesses remarkable painterly skills, he exercises an unusual visionary imagination, and he works steadily (if very slowly) through his themes. His work seems all of a piece. I've passed over the trattoria interiors that he did in the late 1960s, which formally coincide with the shrine paintings, and the nudes and erotic paintings of the same period, a few of which were very controversial. (Two Women [1965], showing one woman in a robe, another nude in a frontal pose, was mutilated when it was exhibited. Seated Man and Girl [1965–67] shows a bare-chested man leaning toward a seminude woman standing in a doorway: the male

figure began as a photograph of de Chirico sitting at his easel, wearing a shirt that Gillespie then painted out. Two Women also began as a photograph.) As for the public presence of his work, Gillespie is at some disadvantage. The small panel format he prefers does not recommend itself at a time dominated by physically large and flamboyant canvases. He may also have momentarily slipped the armature of critical formulas. He is a painter of brilliantly executed physical detail, but he is not a superrealist or a trompe l'oeil artist; his visionary landscapes and still lifes have little in common with the visionary mood of the Neo-expressionists, and he's not interested in narrative painting; he recapitulates old master facts but is neither a parodist nor a historical sentimentalist; and his classical rigor enacts high romantic themes. His career shows a coherence and sustained intensity that certainly rival the careers of younger artists who, for social, ideological, or commercial reasons, have drawn the attention that might be spread about to include a marginal, independent artist like Gillespie.