gravity, leaking. — Natalia Zuluaga
The blue sky above us is the optical layer of the atmosphere, the great lens of the terrestrial globe, its brilliant retina.
From ultra-marine, beyond the sea, to the ultra sky, the horizon divides opacity from transparency. It is just one small step from earth-matter to space-light—a leap or a take-off able to free us for a moment from gravity.
—Paul Virilio
I remember boredom. Not just the kind of boredom of selective unlistening at school, but the kind that would find me when the Miami sun was too hot to step outside and apartment living made the fantasies of neighborhood children playing on dead-end streets a weird relic of Wonder Years television. In this boredom, I’d lay on my back in bed, my head dangling over the edge, the rim of the mattress nestled under the nape of my neck. Staring up, I found another world, an upside down labyrinth of sorts, and there I’d imagine stepping over the door frames, reaching up to door handles, and sitting on the sills of low windows. Letting my eyes lose focus, I’d create waves, shapes, and figures that emerged from, and melted back into, the popcorn ceiling. I’d think about every architectural feature—the closet door, the lamps, ceiling fans, and air conditioning vents—and consider what they’d be used for on the other side; they were details turned obstacles, riddles in the process of repurposing. This upside-down world turned right-side up wasn’t an escape constructed of my imagination; quite the contrary, it was an exercise in engaging with the flipside, a place that wasn’t available in our everyday upright commute through the world. Before the advent of interfaces that function as all-seeing cameras, able to pinch and rotate structures and spaces at will, there was the pleasure unlocked by laying down, looking up, and unhinging gravity’s grip on the eyes in order to wander.
In Lynne Golob Gelfman’s thru paintings, a similar operation and engagement is at play. At first glance, the characteristics of these works, which she has created on and off since the 1970s, are simple to describe: a raw canvas, muslin, or cotton sheet, covered from edge to edge with a grid of small painted triangles. She paints these triangles in a range of colors that bleed in varying degrees of saturation at their edges, revealing colors within and outside of their limits. Pale yellows give way to pulsing pink edges, electric blues turn dull at their centers, and tropical greens seem to fade into the minty hues of Art Deco stucco. The surfaces of the canvases vary from the unprimed plainness of works such as thru 3.5 (2014), to canvases awash with color, such as thru 5.5 (2016). In many works, the surface is also marked by the appearance of the lines of the cross bars supporting the canvas, a detail that lends strict order and limits to the otherwise loose preoccupation with geometry. The question of how these marks are made haunts our apprehension of the surface quality of the paintings: they are as present when the application of paint seems minimal as when it is clearly saturated. They evidence a kind of trickery in Gelfman’s hand and process. The bleeding triangles and the faint traces of the support structures hint at an ambiguity of illusion that Gelfman entertains while she plays with density and saturation in ways that make the triangles move in wavelike motions. This pursuit of ambiguity seeks to obscure the origins of her mark-making, but we should not mistake it for ambivalence on her part. On the contrary, what looks like a stain, or a mark caused by pooling paint or drenched brushes, in fact results from controlled pressure coming from the back of the canvas. With the care and premeditation usually reserved for the face of a painting, Gelfman manipulates the material characteristics of acrylic paint on the reverse by mixing it with varying amounts of dish soap—Dawn and, previously, Joy (before it became rarer to find in her local grocery), a detail and a play on words that strikes me as comical when compared to the seriousness of the paintings. This makes the canvas give in to the moisture of the paint, inverting our notions of front and back, seen and unseen in the process. This process also explains the traces of the crossbars in the paintings: they result not from pressure on the “front” of the canvas, or from the bleeding of an abundance of paint pooling in the space between wood and canvas, but, in fact, from the artist pressing down the wooden supports from behind until their marks appears on the other side of the surface.
The addition of dish soap, the properties of which ease the surface tension of the paint so that it flows more easily, is a calculated act of re-engineering. It allows paint to escape the confines of the canvas on its way to the other side. In these works, the canvas is not a substrate but a threshold, where opacity is a stop on the way through. In thru 5.5, for example, dense indigo triangles push through hot pink pools, which are surrounded by faint halos of peach-colored paint. In this way, Gelfman leverages the varying transparencies and viscosities of the paint, and manipulates it so that it travels the cracks of the canvas’ weave all the way to the back side. Gelfman has often cited the influence of textile patterns found in pre-Columbian artifacts on her work. I would argue that this influence extends beyond the aesthetic characteristics of those patterns, and that the processes of weaving and sewing clearly mark her work. Paint, in Gelfman’s thru series, acts like a needle that crosses a plane in order to bind and render the image. The paint rides along neither the horizontal nor vertical axes of the canvas plane, but instead acts as a vector, navigating as it seeps along the z-axis (the thru axis) toward a revealing face. The metaphor is a powerful one. If nothing else, Gelfman’s process reveals the possibility of different paths; it brings to the forefront the need to search for other grounds, for ideas that may emerge from the underside. This is especially true when we consider the span of time thru has occupied in Gelfman’s career, and the notable shifts in politics, economics, and culture during that period. As a result, the paintings go on to form much more than a series; they represent the proof of an extended exercise, a meditation on problem-solving and an instruction manual on how to seep thru the world.
In its essay, “X Notes on Practice: Stubborn Structures and Insistent Seepage in a Networked World,” Raqs Media Collective draws lessons from the figures of the migrant, the squatter, the pirate, the hacker, and the workers occupying the factory in order to think about ways to claim a sense of agency, to change systems, and to create grounding within the otherwise shifty, networked reality of our contemporary moment. In doing so, Raqs illustrates the incipient revolutionary potential of the act of seepage. By extension the description below also serves as a valuable lens through which to think about thru:
By seepage we mean the action of many currents of fluid material leaching onto a stable structure, entering and spreading through it by way of pores, until it becomes a part of the structure, both in terms of its surface, and at the same time as it continues to act on its core, to gradually disaggregate its solidity. To crumble it over time with moisture.
In a wider sense, seepage can be conceived as those acts that ooze through the pores of the outer surfaces of structures into available pores within the structure, and result in a weakening of the structure itself. Initially the process is invisible, and then it slowly starts causing mold and settles into a disfiguration—and this produces an anxiety about the strength and durability of the structure.
By itself seepage is not an alternative form; it even needs the structure to become what it is—but it creates new conditions in which structures become fragile and are rendered difficult to sustain. It enables the play of an alternative imagination, and so we begin seeing faces and patterns on the wall that change as the seepage ebbs and flows.
I bring this up not to force an explicit political reading of thru, but instead to underscore the power in the political act it implies. These paintings are not about the issues of migration, of borders, thresholds, and subjects, but they do serve as prisms through which those realities could be read, understood, and navigated.
Gelfman’s calculated understanding of the way in which paint and canvas enmesh in a material dance is noteworthy in that it speaks about the trappings of the surface of the canvas, as much as of escape from them. This escape does not happen just on the level of the seepage discussed above. The artist also embeds it in the formulaic approach undertaken to create the grid, as well as to break it. Early in the development of the thru paintings, she attempted to engage with the ideas of the systemic painters, such as Sol Lewitt, developing a rigid formula that would determine the number of triangles and the way color would unfold throughout. This, however, did not last, and Gelfman found herself “cheating” and allowing for self-imposed chance to enter the process. Today, this deviation still plays an important role in her work. Recently, Gelfman casually mentioned that she still starts every thru painting with a plan regarding the grid, the triangles, and—comically, considering the colorful characteristics of most of the paintings—the intention to paint them in varying shades of gray. The plan, however, almost always ends in a series of alternate decisions resulting in new endpoints. In this way, Gelfman embodies the archetypal figure of the trickster: exhibiting a great degree of understanding of her chosen material and the canon, and using it to disobey rules and conventions. It brings to mind the relationship Benedict Singleton constructs between the ideas of the jailbreak and the task of design in “Maximum Jailbreak,” which illustrates the relationship between the trap and the escape in describing the world as a “field of nested traps.” A trap net taken out of the context of everyday use reveals a few details about its construction: it say things about the prey it intends to trap and about the path of escape, as much as about the hunter who designed it and the environmental knowledge she leverages to make it. In this analogy, trap and escape hinge on each other:
It is a knowledge of traps and how they function that enables one most easily to undo a trap that one is in: a talent for escape is predicated on the same intelligence that goes into entrapment. . . . To outfox is to think more broadly, to find the crack in the scheme, to stick a knife into it, and to lever it open for new use. Freighting the environment with a counter-plot is the best device for escaping the machinations in which one is embroiled: a conversion of constraints into new opportunities for free action.
I find Gelfman’s thru reflected clearly in Singleton’s observations as much as I found it in the upside-down of my own experience. In the question of what is front and what is back, and in Gelfman’s calculated response using paint, dish soap, canvas, and color, lies an irreverence for the way things are—a kind of dismissive shrug about the way things “should” be in the now, in favor of tiny decisions toward what “could” be. This is evident in the triangles and the colors that have shifted and buckled on their seeping trajectory through the canvas. Thanks in part to Gelfman’s masterful deviance, those shapes have changed their position in the world and have emerged on the other side as new endpoints—metaphorically paralleling the path of freedom as a process of continuous contingency. This is not freedom as platitude or as unattainable ideal, or even as restful end, but instead it is, as Singleton declares, a vision of freedom that is “quantitative, a series of practical achievements, proceeding by degree—we are free of this, and then of this, and then of this, new end points emerging rather than an a priori finish line at which, on breaking the ribbon, we can at last rest easy, luxuriating in a genuine liberty.”
