Art review
His rejection of certainty is an urgent reminder that the imagination should not be neglected in the pursuit of art.
British-born Trevor Winkfield has followed a unique path that is yet to be fully recognized for its unlikeliness, depth and breadth. After attending art school in Leeds and obtaining his master’s degree from the Royal College of Art in 1967, he moved to New York in 1969, where he continued to publish a poetry magazine, Juillard (1968-1972), making a name for himself among a group of writers and artists known as the New York School. He worked for Arthur Cohen, who sold books and ephemera on 20th-century modern art movements such as Dada and Surrealism, and annotated Cohen’s encyclopedic catalogs. These were informative, concise and witty. He was a polymath whose knowledge of minor artists and writers, such as Gerald Murphy and Ronald Firbank, was unparalleled.
In 1976 Winkfield took up painting again, creating book covers and collaborating with poets such as John Ashbery, Charles North, Ron Padgett and Harry Matthews. He had his debut exhibition in New York in 1977 and published his translation of Raymond Roussel’s How I wrote some of my books. Roussel, widely considered the most eccentric writer of the 20th century, wrote according to linguistic rules based on homophones: words that sound the same but have different meanings. As you might expect, in the years since, critics have tried to connect Winkfield’s collage-like paintings of artificial worlds with Roussel’s wildly improbable novels, but they never discovered the key, which I don’t think was ever there. As literary as Winkfield is, he is also a visual person. This complete duality makes him inimitable.
Winkfield paints on a table; the eight work in The mermaid’s revenge – Paintings 1991-2001 at the Tibor de Nagy gallery stem from a decade in which Winkfield had access to an apartment where he could work on what for him were large-scale surfaces. They are made in acrylic on linen and measure between 35 1/2 x 19 1/2 inches (~90.1 x 49.5 cm) and 45 x 72 inches (~1.1 x 1.8 m). The format of none of the works is the same. Each is packed with details meticulously executed in flat, saturated playroom colors, punctuated by volumetric detail in a simple, illustrative style. One reason for this disruption is that Winkfield does not want us to read the paintings as airless and flat. He has conjured up an artificial world – at once brightly coloured, slightly sinister and cheerfully incomprehensible – mostly inhabited by a fine-featured young man engaged in some mysterious activity.
The painting’s titles underline the solitary nature of the tasks being performed: ‘The Navigator’ (2000), ‘The Student’ (1999), ‘The Astrologer’ (1991) and ‘Self-Portrait’ (2001), with its palette and carefully depicted blobs of paint. Each figure could be a surrogate for Winkfield, an artist and writer who has written smart and original pieces on Georges Braque, Jasper Johns, John Graham and Florine Stettheimer, collected in Georges Braque and Others: The Selected Art Writings of Trevor Winkfield, 1990-2009 (2014).
In “The Student,” a young man, wearing a helmet topped with a fish and what could be a slot for an eyepiece, holds a long-handled jar under a light bulb that releases tokens marked by a snowflake pattern. The tokens reappear in the sky above the pink and light blue mountain visible through the open window. The student’s body and clothes are made up of separate parts, with his oversized hands and bare feet painted in different colors, including celadon and orange. The flatness of the shapes suggests that we are looking at an intricate shadow puppet engaged in an activity whose meaning we will never unravel.
The hermetic nature of Winkfield’s paintings may be off-putting to some, but not to me. I think his dedication to creating a completely artificial world is a necessary and important counterpoint to the art world’s belief in literal meaning and transparent, socially conscious subject matter. His rejection of certainty and the comfort it supposedly provides is an urgent reminder that the imagination should not be neglected in the pursuit of art, and the freedom it can give you. In the unlikely synthesis of bright colors, incomprehensible behavior and compelling scenarios, we are invited to enter a carefully constructed world unlike any other.
Left: Trevor Winkfield, “The Navigator” (2000), acrylic on linen; right: Trevor Winkfield, “Self-portrait” (2001), acrylic on linen
Trevor Winkfield: The Revenge of the Mermaid – Paintings 1991 – 2001 continues through July 31 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery (11 Rivington Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan). The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
