blind spots
some notes on pascal danz’s recent paintings
Locuslex Magazine #3, October 2009
Looking and seeing. In many of Pascal Danz’s recent paintings we find ourselves looking at people who are engaged in an act of observation, of looking or watching. We observe the act of observation. And in every instance, the incident to which the observer’s attention is directed is absent. In Danz’s ongoing series of paintings derived from the documentation of US atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950s and 60s, everything has been dissolved in light but the watchers. We see only silhouettes and shadows, surrounded by iridescent aureoles of light. Somehow these figures seem simultaneously impossibly fragile and monumentally heroic.
In 1972 (paparazzi) a gang of photographers are thronged in a tree like monkeys, lit by harsh lights. We see them straining to catch a glimpse of their quarry, but we don’t see what it is they are looking at. Yet in such works these gaps in the narrative of imagery are activated by memory. The void is filled with echoes. The nuclear flash and subsequent mushroom cloud is one of the defining images of the twentieth century. The terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics in 1972 produced a set of images that are firmly embedded in international consciousness. Danz knowingly exploits this pre-knowledge, our unconscious personal data bank of pre-existent images. We are, in a sense, primed for his paintings. He uses our readiness, our image-familiarity, to create an active engagement on the part of the audience. As such we are drawn in to the absences within his work.
Painters are, of course, unusually preoccupied with sight, and seeing, and the meaning of this all-encompassing activity. It is a trope that has run through Pascal Danz’s work. But in the last five years it has perhaps become Danz’s dominant theme. It is there in his images of rock concerts, where again, we observe the spectators – or sometimes the performers, looking out into a sea of humanity, which stares back - and in his series of negative cityscapes, the remainings, which make explicit the active process of visual engagement. And it is undoubtedly the primary subject of these powerful new works.
A flash of light. Heat. A dissolving world. Light and colour. A degraded image. Silence. Painted void. The radiance of a thousand flash bulbs. A point of entry.
A blind spot, also known as a scotoma, is an obscuration of the visual field. In medical literature the physiological blind spot, or punctum caecum, is the place in the field of vision that corresponds to the lack of light-detecting photoreceptor cells on the retina where the optic nerve passes through it. Since there are no cells to detect light the corresponding part of the field of vision is not perceived. Curiously, rather than perceive a blank, the brain fills it in with surrounding detail and with information from the other eye. As a result, the blind spot is there but is not normally perceived.
As always, there are other possible meanings. A ‘blind spot’ can also be an emotional or psychological phenomena, the object of which we are unable or unwilling to engage with. Something missed. A subject about which one is ignorant or prejudiced. A failure.
The radiance of a thousand suns. We step backwards, awed by the power unleashed above the landscape. Light and heat as material, tangible. Camera flash. Glare. Still figures. The world become indistinct. Embedded in memory. The accretion of images across a lifetime, like a coral reef.
Painting and time. Alongside an exploration of the mechanism and meaning of sight and seeing, Danz’s new work presents an investigation of time in painting. Again, perhaps paradoxically, painters are preoccupied with temporality. One of the supposed superior qualities of film over paint is the way in which it can capture and represent real time. Yet painting, in part because of the way it is made - the physical actions of the artist are preserved as traces on the surface of the canvas - and in part beacuse of the way in which we look at it – in slow time – introduces and embraces and even produces time in mysterious and compelling ways. In Danz’s work we see two main strategies to explore this. Firstly, he creates sequences of images, like the frames of a film, which present an unfolding event. Secondly, he introduces a blank space, a blind spot, a mysterious lacunae or emptiness in the heart of the image, which somehow opens it out, like a cinema screen.
Cezanne’s palette. Beckett’s blindness. Rothko’s emptiness. Possible failure. Uncanny beauty. Defective representation. Doubt (a state somewhere between belief and disbelief, involving uncertainty or distrust or lack of sureness of an alleged fact, an action, a motive, or a decision). Doubt brings into question some notion of a perceived ‘reality’. Slow life. We must ask ourselves, again and again and again, what are we looking at?
