The Painter As Doubting Thomas

By John Yau


In some of the paintings, the swirls and cascades continue beyond the mesh's edge, like a gesture trying to pull free of its physical body. All of them cast a real shadow on the wooden support, underscoring the physical nature of the paint. The shadows also open the painting up to the world, and the light of the place in which it exists. Finally, the combination of the support, steel grid, and acrylic paint tilts The Cadiz Caprices towards the realm of bas-relief and architectural adornment without letting them settle comfortably or conveniently into that category. They are unclassifiable hybrids that resist all historical categories.

Tillyer's swirls often turn back on themselves, like a knot. The tension between gravity's inescapable tug and the desire to pull free of its dominion speaks volumes about our daily life, and the realization that there may be nothing else but gravity's inevitable triumph. And yet, there is also something matter-of-fact, performative, and celebratory about these paintings. Each gesture was made in one, irrevocable shot. There is no going, either in these paintings or in time.



Viva
The Cadiz Caprices

Tillyer's staging of his gesture, as well as the swirling form it often takes, links it to flamenco and bullfighting. The former originated in Spain from the mingling of Arabic, Andalusian, Islamic, Sephardic and Gypsy cultures, while the earliest known representations of a man facing a bull are found in two caves in Spain. In both flamenco and bullfighting, the performer must execute a series of movements that demand intricate hand and footwork. And, as in Tillyer's gesture, the twist or turn is a central, recurring action in flamenco and bullfighting. At the same time, his swirl evokes a scarf, the edge of a flaring dress as the dancer turns, stamping her feet, as well as the cape and short red cape (or muleta) that hides the sword used in the last part of a bullfight. When the artist adds a layer of polka dots to the swirl, he is making a connection to flamenco, and the dancer's dress, among other things. In Viva, for example, a large black swirl occupies the central vertical area of the mesh, flanked on the left by three smaller turquoise swirls and on the right by two red ones, with the lower one containing black polka dots. Abandon and order have become inseparable. The vertical rows remind me of the specimens collected by a lepidopterist, as well as the music's staccato rhythms. Tillyer's ability to suggest a wide range of associations enable the viewer to conjecture further on the connections between disparate cultural activities (painting, flamenco, bullfighting), as well as the relationship between the enduring and the ephemeral, substance and vulnerability. All the while, we are cognizant of the artist's deeply felt delight in the sensual and momentary, and his quiet mastery of his materials.

The Cadiz Caprices are the greatest abstract paintings about Spain by a non-Spaniard since Robert Motherwell began working on his "Elegies for The Spanish Republic" around 70 years ago. But unlike Motherwell, who was an innovative modernist, Tillyer, who is an inventive postmodernist, took this opportunity to meditate upon painting, and what is irreducible about it. While he worked within a very defined, rather rigid format, and a circumscribed vocabulary, he was able to develop remarkably distinct paintings. In Parador, a tilted rectangle extends out of (or into) the mesh (grid), which is broken and open. Painting has a way of becoming sealed, closed off and dead, and the broken grid serves as Tillyer's comment, as well as a rejection of orthodoxy.

In Spain, it might be useful to know, a parador is a luxury hotel usually found in a castle, palace, or convent, a place where present and past meet to form something quite different from the original. "Painting," as T.J. Clark points out, "is a craft tradition." The burden for every contemporary artist is how to replenish that craft, and make it fresh (in every sense of the word). A supreme colorist, who is able to evoke form and atmosphere, the solid and the transparent, Tillyer turns this recent series of paintings into a celebration of its deepest mechanisms, which is what a Flamenco dancer does every time he or she performs.