OCTOBER, 2006

HIGH AND OUTSIDE, Spur Projects, Portola Valley, CA.
Originally published on www.stretcher.org, October, 2006
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By Thomas Cunniff

Oakland artist David Ivan Clark is currently offering a suite of new paintings as part of a group show with Ann Hogle, Ashlee Ferlito, and Melissa Day. Clark has been known in shows over several years in San Francisco as a painter of landscape based meditations that evoke the industrial manipulation of nature. His works raise the question of whether there can exist a pure vision of the natural apart from the stamp of human intention, while paradoxically depicting a vastness of land and sky that flatly seem impossible to constrain. He had often studded his surfaces, which are made of stainless steel sheet metal, with a border of nails or rivets suggesting the mandate of productivity amidst the vastness depicted. In this show, his focus has subtly shifted from border to screen, with the visual emphasis on painterly grandeur and its artifice.

Clark's working method begins with a carefully built up ground coat on a steel surface, over which he applies multiple layers of pigment which are in turn sanded or otherwise abraded, so that a series of ridges appear from surface anomalies of the ground along with layers of paint in varying degrees of revelation. Both color and surface contrive to give the effect of landscape, often as if seen through a screen or grid emerging from the ground to become the structure of the image. Sometimes the grid is as faint as a light drizzle and at others, it becomes the dominant pictorial element. Because of its propensity for surprise and happy accidents, it's a process that produces an abundance of pleasure in this artist's hands, and here he has pushed its effects to impressive new dimensions.

Landscape 51 06 is a rectangular triptych measuring 132 inches by 64 inches, a commanding work whose vertical striations emphasize the panels' stolid presence with all the visual formality of a Japanese screen. It is a painting that sits on the border of depiction, an oblique homage of traditional landscape painting and its illusions, though reduced in Clark's reckoning to such minimal trappings as to push the genre toward abstraction. Its effect combines a fiery, brilliant light with the calculated repetition of its forms.

It may be that Clark's paintings more dispassionately celebrate nature the further they stray from philosophical underpinnings. There is Landscape 26 06, a lush and roiling vision with its hints of apocalypse where the sky emerges behind a curtain of almost theatrical atmospherics, towering and primordial. There are landscapes and effects of light that defy any sense of place, (some of them would more accurately be called dreamscapes) where an elegiac tone is struck that has its antecedent in Romanticism, but whose flip side is impermanence. In Clark's most overtly landscape-oriented work is the urge to break the bonds of representation and make manifest the consciousness of seeing itself, but in painting, of course, there is no seeing without the nostalgia of the pictorial, what Harold Bloom has called the "anxiety of influence."

This nostalgia finds its visual equivalent in the screen which serves as a kind of filtering device between viewer and image and causes one to remain aware of how pictorialism is haunted by historical precedent. There is a strong visionary component in Clark's pictures as well; in some there is an emptiness and finality that looks like the end of time, in others you have the sense of things seen, but clouded by memory, images of another world that might resemble this one.

Then there is Landscape 41 06, where an obscure bluish cloud or sky is surrounded by chiaroscuro void, hovering over a shrouded body of water; the water receives its light from that sky, whatever light it can retain before the blackness of night descends on all. It is a sublime painting whose surface is perfectly smooth and bears little trace of whatever toil it may have taken to arrive at it, a vision of no time and no space, whose beauty astonishes us and then is gone in an instant.

Thomas Cunniff is a Bay Area writer.

DAVID IVAN CLARK: NO PLACE at Hang Art Annex 567 Sutter St., San Francisco. Oct 7 - 31
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By Thomas Cunniff

David Ivan Clark grew up in the western Canadian province of Saskatchewan near towns with names like Medicine Hat, Buffalo, and Moose Jaw that bespeak an era when a sense of place was far less affected by human centrism in favor of the numinous, the animist, and the magical. To those familiar with his work, which straddles a border between landscape and abstraction, wilderness and industrial decay, the title of his currrent one man show at Hang Gallery, No Place, will come as little surprise. Clark has spoken about the sense of longing in these paintings, for the prairie of his youth from the long perspective of memory and, one might presume, for the need of being fully present in the illusion of painting itself, the null part or nowhere that the artist strives to manifest in the midst of the distracting bewilderment of the world. His work has a distinctly North American sensibility in its minimalist approach on the one hand that would seem to be all about the pleasure of lush surfaces and the atmospheric chiaroscuro of his brushwork; on the other it is a hybrid of constructs that seek to challenge the neo romantic ideal of landscape since the industrial revolution.

Employing the medium of oil on metal, Clark often presents a seemingly straightforward depiction suffused with a luminosity reminiscent of Arthur Pinkham Ryder, as in Landscape 25/04, in which the sky is the dominant element as if seen at dawn or dusk, in stark contrast to a dark foreground. Like Ryder, he depicts a visual idealization of place which has as its sensual components a saturated depth of field born out of a seamless handling of paint and a hidden source of light that contrive an aura of mystery and expansiveness. In Landscape 21/04 the sheer scale of the green sky dominates a shadowed, Saharan terrain; the effect is both of existential solitude and an enveloping warmth. There are many paintings in the show that appear as startling visions one had woken to from the seat of a train or jet and beheld with accumulating delight for as long as it took for them to fade from sight.

Clark sometimes frames his compositions with a border of nailheads as if they were not only landscapes but the riveted and lacquered fuselages of the engines that originally intruded on them and ironically set the stage for the notion of landscape as mythic artifact in the first place. Fastened as they are in a workmanlike manner to wooden panels, these paintings remind us that there barely exists that sense of natural boundlessness that the first explorers of the New World recorded with such awe. But they are also a nod to the processes of painting in which the artist probes the potential for beauty in his materials, while engaging the viewer in a kind of conundrum of one dimensionality as opposed to great distance and space, never wholly settling on the illusion of depiction.

More than ever before, Clark in this show blurs these distinctions as if the traditional elements of landscape were not merely framed by, but were being viewed through a literal scrim of mechanization which had left a corrosive imprint on the image, the result of abrading his surfaces to reveal varying layers of pigment and imperfection to intriguing effect. Landscape 31/04 appears at first glance to be a plain under a darkly brooding sky. On closer inspection there are vertical brown lines which might be read as either distant veils of rain or the striations of rust emerging from the underlying metal. In Landscape 34/04 one is confronted by rust runes imprinted on what clearly passes as sky in the minds eye, creating the strange illusion of a sign that has been left exposed to the very elements it depicts. The conceit is carried a step further in Landscape 37/04, a riveted triptych where depiction is given almost wholly over to what might be interpreted as a conflagrating rain of fire.

A painter of singular intent, David Ivan Clark's complex meditations have sounded the changes of that no place that is the province of a restless and fruitful imagining. We are grateful to have taken the journey with him.

Thomas Cunniff is a writer who lives in San Francisco.