Black paintings

Keith Coventry: Vanishing Certainties (ed.), exh cat., Haunch of Venison, London, 2009

In On the Spiritual in Art (1911) Kandinsky described black as ‘something extinguished, like a spent funeral pyre, something motionless like a corpse.’ It is the opposite of light, a negation. Keith Coventry’s ongoing series of ‘Black Paintings’ (2004-9) play with this idea. They render Raoul Dufy’s Riviera landscapes – classic early twentieth century images of the ‘good life’ of sun, sea and sand, privilege and luxury in the South of France - as congealed black monochromes. In doing so they corrupt two distinct art historical traditions, enacting a double reversal, a double negation. The vivacity of Dufy is perverted by the blackness of the paint; the purity of the monochrome is corrupted by the ghostly figurative imagery therein. 

Coventry’s transcriptions are faithful, up to a point. Dufy’s sun-drenched images emerge gradually from the thickly worked paint. The original subjects are still present but Dufy’s characteristic manner, his loose and seemingly easily-won washes of paint and lively brush marks, are gone. In their place are nocturnes constructed from thick slicks of dense black oil paint. Dufy’s landscapes, his studio and his nude models are drained of their bright light and colour and shrouded in darkness. Nice, Cannes and the Golfe Juan are made to seem ironic icons of despair and degradation. These paintings thereby become strange cousins of Coventry’s earlier series of black monochromes depicting makeshift crack pipes made from plastic water bottles, inspired by Giorgio Morandi’s serial still-lives of the 1930s and 40s. The suggestion is perhaps of a profound continuum between the inner city crack den and the world of luxe, calme et volupte.

This is perhaps not quite such the giant conceptual leap it at first seems. Beneath the Riviera’s veneer of moneyed sophistication and healthy fun runs a darker undercurrent, and it is this that Coventry taps into. The French Riviera first became a fashionable resort for the  upper classes in the late eighteenth century. At about the same time ‘climato-therapy’ - a change to a warm climate – became popular as a cure for a wide variety of diseases, including consumption. The French historian Paul Gonnet wrote that as a result, Nice was filled with ‘a colony of pale and listless English women and listless sons of nobility near death’. In the twentieth century the Riviera’s health-giving reputation endured: during the first World War and after Cannes and Hyeres were reportedly like a ‘gigantic hospital’. However, at the same time the region gradually also acquired a parallel reputation for decadence. This is the alternative tradition explored by, among others, F Scott Fitzgerald in Tender is the Night (1934) and JG Ballard in Cocaine Nights (1996).  Alongside the moneyed sophistication, the yachts and helicopters, tax havens, film festivals and supermodels, this is a zone of alcoholic breakdown, financial ruin, secrecy, prostitution, tabloid tales, drug violence and sex scandals. And here too are some of Europe’s worst urban sink estates.

Alongside Dufy, Coventry references the twentieth century tradition of monochrome painting explored by Malevich, Rodchenko, Stella, Reinhardt and others. Coventry has spoken of how Dufy was one of the very first modern artists he was aware of as a child (‘at the time I thought (he) was terrible, because I thought “I can draw better than that”). Dufy's cheerful oils and watercolours depict yachting scenes, sparkling views, chic parties and musical events. Yet the optimistic, illustrative and fashionably decorative nature of much of his work has meant that his output is now less critically valued than that of his contemporaries who treated a wider range of social concerns. Dufy’s work depicts an essentially fictional world and his eyes ‘were made to erase all things ugly….’ It is worth recalling that Reinhardt’s artistic theory proclaimed that ‘art must inhabit its own universe, completely removed from the everyday world.’ The traditions represented by both artists can therefore be understood as forms of retreat. 

In the ‘Black Paintings’ seemingly contradictory positions are brought together. They are a provocation, a detournement of two positions within Modernist painting: the Post-Impressionism of Dufy and the high abstraction of Reinhardt and others. Both positions represent a kind of idealism, and offer us variations of spiritual yearning and escape. However, since the early 1990s, all of Coventry’s work has suggested that there can be no escape. He explores and exposes a vicious circle, a call and response of social reality and idealism. In the ‘Black Paintings’, as in all of Coventry’s work, lofty ideals are undermined and traditions are destroyed. They are the dark mirror in which are reflected the (reversed) ideals of the Modernist cultural endeavour. No escape. They are also what Coventry, speaking of Francis Picabia, an artist he particularly admires, has called an ‘act of resistance.’