Virginia Verran: AUTONOMY, Art Space Gallery, London by Sue Hubbard
Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards, at the still point, there the dance is,
T. S. Eliot The Four Quartets
I have been thinking about what makes a good painter and it is surely that they have a unique voice, that their particular style of mark-making belongs exclusively to them, that like a signature practiced over a lifetime, it reflects their singularity so the works could not have been produced by anyone else. Such an artist is Virginia Verran. Her paintings are bold force fields that hover between movement and stillness, between abstraction and figuration, between memory and a sensual reality. To stand in front of one of them is to be drawn into a transitional state, to experience something inchoate. Movement is sensed; that moment of dissolution when one thing becomes another like the fleeting blur left on an old-fashioned camera plate.
Her palette is old-masterly, full of luminous reds and blacks. Her favourite painting is Rembrandt’s Margaretha de Geer, that tender study of old age painted in a symphony of blacks with a slight mottling of red on the subject’s elderly face. Such echoes can be sensed in the swirling vortex of Black Painting (one million miles) 2007. A pale ectoplasmic stain sits in the centre of the picture plane. It seems to be dissolving, held down by or shedding rows of morse-liked dots and dashes, red, grey and white against the billowing darkness. It’s as if it’s trapped, yet at the same time, twisting and turning in an attempt to escape. As we spend more time with the work, we might begin to discern other more figurative elements. The pale smudge begins to imply a figure, the dotted lines to form the outlines of roof tops. But as soon as the mind and the eye start to settle, solid ‘meaning’ slips away. All we are left with is a powerful experience, as if having witnessed a tornado that has now past, leaving an aftermath of stillness. The dots and dashes, here, may be a form of non-verbal communication or coding, even the pulse of thought patterns or the blip-blip of a heart monitor. The more we look, the more is suggested.
Black Painting (one million miles) 2007, oil & mixed media on canvas, 229 x 198 cm
Erasure is an essential part of Virginia Verran’s practice. In Black-Blue (interior) 2023, a ghostly shape reminiscent of a Rorschach ink-blot appears after the rubbing back of the paint surface with turps (it soaks in quickly). The result is a mysterious image, part X-ray, part Turin Shroud. The light from this central space seems to pulsate, then dim. At first it just reads simply as a pale blob – an absence – but if you stay with it the mind insists on an ambiguous figure. Its feet appear pointed, as if dancing. The knees are turned out but, looking again as I write this, I can see Christ suggested on his Cross. His fragile arms thrust out, the head bent and ringed with a garland of black and white dashes that might be a crown of thorns. Although her paintings never insist on a single interpretation, you realise that Virginia Verran must have looked at a good deal of great religious art. Like Rorschach’s famous blots this shape can be understood as a psychometric examination of pareidolia, that is the perceiving of patterns as meaningful objects, shapes or scenery, which is dependent on the psychological sensibility of the viewer.
Blue Black, (interior) 2023, oil on canvas 183 x 168 cms
The greater the amount of time allotted to these works, the greater the reward and feedback. Appearing, at first, inherently abstract and theoretical, longer contemplation reveals them to be highly personal. Many were painted in lockdown and others in response to the death of her mother. The outline of a profile is suggested in Alizarin-Indian Yellow (tracer-interior) 2023. A veiled presence frequently lies inside many of these paintings, giving them their emotional charge. Here, figurative readability is scrambled by the cascade of red and white dots flowing down the picture surface. It’s as though Verran is always trying to catch us off guard, to confound what we think of as ‘the meaning’. There’s a resistance to too much intellectual and theoretical interpretation. Yet these works never insist on autobiographical confession, though it is embedded deep within their layers. They have to be felt to be understood.
Alizarin-Indian Yellow (tracer- interior) 2023, oil on canvas 90 x 80 cm
Many of the most appealing works are tondos, it’s a form that is particularly suited to her intense vision. In RP RV RM (stars) 2021, the viewpoint changes so that we might be looking up towards the Renaissance ceiling of some great vaulted cathedral. In 2010 Virginia Verran won the Jerwood Drawing prize emphasising how integral drawing is to her practice. Her works on paper might at first instance seem more diagrammatic, more graphic, yet whilst it’s possible to identify, say, a hand, its fingers covered in rings, a row of trees, or what might be a red and white striped light house, meaning is, again, not direct. More rewarding is to understand these works as psychological maps, the cartography of memories, dreams and reflections.
What Virginia Verran understands is that a painting is not a simple depiction of the world but rather a translation of unnameable spiritual and observational experiences into the medium of the paint. It’s through this ongoing voyage and through the process of making a painting that she – and ultimately her viewers – discover new worlds, new ways of seeing.
Virginia Verran at Art Space, London https://www.artspacegallery.co.uk/frameSetASG.htm until April 26th 2024