December, 2009

Bathing in the Divine Afterglow of Postmodernism:
The Paintings of Sarah Cromarty

Everything in Sarah Cromarty’s works speaks about the paradoxes of a language divided against itself. In the current landscape of theory her paintings bring to mind a term coined by Zygmunt Bauman, the Liquid Modern condition. It’s not that I am proposing that Cromarty’s works are trying to reclaim something of modernism or inadvertently replicating the logic of global commerce, it’s that they comment on these phenomena by providing a strategy of intervention that disrupts both modern and postmodern models of sampling with a new integral relation between disparate elements and past forms. Her meticulous collage-like strategy of riffing off found imagery with the addition of painterly embellishments stands at a curious divide between self-conscious irony and whole-hearted sincerity without courting a faux criticality that would simply highlight the bifurcations between images, textures and motifs. Instead, her work issues from elements intimately tied to the collective unconscious of contemporary western culture(s) and the vernacular of Americana in particular. The fermentation of her pictures relies on beginning with reproductions of imagery as disparate as idyllic vacation scenery, irksome isolated cabins, mysterious caverns brimming with spelunkers and ominously deserted beaches. Then, through a process of selective editing, reconstruction and painterly improvisation these spaces are transformed into pictures of a waking dream-life that has more in common with writings of Thomas Pynchon than Marcel Proust. Both the means and the methodology employed in this process result in pictures that are unbound from their source material in unexpected and surprising ways, creating neither an afterlife for painting nor an undead painting but something definitively other, an alter-modern pictorial practice of sorts.
In her overture the feeling of the uncanny is elicited through encounters with wild life, the open desert and troubled Turneresque sunsets which always seem to carry the feeling of coming before or after a disturbance that remains concealed or just out view. This strange mix of themes, equal parts melancholia, romanticism and carnival, makes it impossible to attribute a proper name to such pictures. There are deviant processes at work across Cromarty’s dynamic surfaces; subtractions, edits, scraps and porous additions of every kind — all of which fall well beyond the historical techniques of academic painting, and even outside the purview of a readily identifiable idiom such as Expressionism, Symbolism, Fauvism, or Post-impressionism — even though something of each of these schools might appear in her pictures at any given time. If this wasn’t already quite a feat in and of itself, Cromarty’s unique vocabulary of working methods manages to pull together a vast array of different approaches to painting that challenges how we think of reappropriated material to the degree that she has dropped the cold self-reflexivity of postmodernism for the warm embrace of subtly manipulated materiality mixed with the ambience provided by proto-manufactured pictorialism, i.e., kitsch imagery. And yet the most striking quality of Cromarty’s works is that they always surpass their source material by eliciting something of the divine and exotic, delving into the irreality of a glorious night sky, a mythical encounter, a shaman-like symbol or an enchanted waterfall set off against the spectacular colors of a secluded rain forest. More than any other element it is this haunting quality that imbues Cromarty’s pictures with something especially distinctive, a singular quality that sets her work apart from much contemporary painting.
But what are we to make of such allusions? Are they simply an attempt to indulge in escapism; an obvious play of images designed to tug at our heartstrings and our hidden sympathies; or a lost rhetoric of bourgeois fancy? A second look at her selective interventions reminds us that Cromarty navigates these spaces with a deft hand and that what appears easy has only been made to look so at the expense of many learned years of painting practice. Cromarty’s pictures ask some tough questions of their viewers — what are your fantasies? Your places of rest and joy? And do such spaces even still exist in our commodified world of prepackaged leisure experiences? Most importantly however, Cromarty’s pictures beg the question as to whether contemporary culture now sits at the end of postmodernism or at the beginning of something else. Undoubtedly, the images she traffics in provide no easy answer, and answers are not what Cromarty is seeking anyway, these are all journey pictures, process pictures, or problematized pictures of one sort or another. And while the rich painterly qualities of modernism and the rhetoric of postmodern sampling both remain active in the construction of Cromarty’s image world, it is their unforeseen fusion that provides a model for something new, like the doubled sign of perfected mimicry matched with a theatrical sensibility that leaves all the seams turned outward. Here, there is no good name for what such works make one think and feel, rather, they reveal that the fate of painting in the twenty-first century is much more open than previous generations of artists would likely admit. Painters like Cromarty create works that are challenging enough to remind us that we have moved well beyond the need for such reductive modernist mantras as ‘medium specificity’ and the hip ethic of chic citationalism that defined the postmodern era. Painting that avoids such polemics is bound to produce a new audience, ultimately opening up a broader horizon of possibilities for image-makers everywhere, and surely Sarah Cromarty’s work is already well on the way to making a significant contribution toward such an endeavor. The strength of her pictures consists in her ability to reconstruct a retro-futuristic fable from the ruins of western culture that collides the complex iconography of the past with the conflicted status of the present in a way that these simple words struggle to convey, but even in their wake I feel all the better for having given it a fair attempt.

Grant Vetter

Grant Vetter is the author of The Neobaroque Era: Economics, History, Aesthetics, Politics, Science from Atropos Press. He lives and works as an artist and freelance critic in southern California.