Anna Yuschuk

‘Structure is the giver of light’

Louis Kahn

There are a number of large—if ethereal narratives running through the recent paintings of Anna Yuschuk. They are stories about light.

One of these narratives concerns the way light moves from place to place—as it does, for example, in Yuschuk’s paintings that are generated from her claiming of the effulgent light that veils in from windows and doors [such as Terra Firma, Daydream and Blue Passage] and, similarly, from light that is reflected—say in a polished floor [as in Surface and Surface II]. Here, reflection is the work’s initial subject, and the paintings are subsequently built upon the artist’s treating such sources of light as the stuff of a deepening and proliferating discourse. Another of these light-narratives concerns the way light can be summoned or elicited from within pigment itself [as with paintings such as Purple Light, Yellow Light and Deep End (Caramel)]. Which is to say that this second light-narrative is about the creating of light ex-nihilo—as a primary and self-sufficient subject.

What this comes to is that, in the first narrative, Yuschuk’s paintings are about light. In the second narrative, they are, in themselves, light.

Because Yuschuk’s reflection paintings—let’s call them that for convenience, even if the designation is clearly not all-encompassing enough—are about the transfer of light, they are thus, at the same time, paintings about the positing of space. Elastic and absorptive by nature (at the conceptual level), these reflection paintings concede the existence of a stronger, more commanding light-source somewhere “outside” of the painting (flooding into the top of Terra Firma, for example, or sluicing into the picture-plane from the left side of Daydream), a light-source which, though it is, in essence, simply another subject or event in the painting (a fictive light-source), is nevertheless made to embody the actual site of the reflected light’s coming to rest.

The refection paintings, then, are paintings-within-paintings. They represent a conflation—first, of the artist’s depiction of the transitional radiance of a canvas’s “external” light and, second, of the billowing, outwash effects, on the canvas, of that “initial” lightfall. Yuschuk’s subsequent folding of both kinds of light—primary and secondary—into a single canvas then results in an initial destabilization in the viewer (who is looking both at “outside light” and the inner, depicted light on the canvas surface simultaneously)—which is ultimately resolved, I would argue, in an all-encompassing sense of the paintings’ additive wholeness.

Light, primary or secondary, real, virtual or depicted, is, of course, ultimately constituted as wholeness of experience anyhow. Light is light. As Goethe once put it, “Ever splitting the light! How often do they strive to divide that which, despite everything, would always remain single and whole.” (1) Nevertheless, the way Yuschuk uses light in her painting, radiance can be a doubled or paralleled or superimposable pair of matrices, sometimes working together, sometimes working separately or singly.

Let’s be more specific, and look in some detail at a couple of Yuschuk’s reflection paintings—works such as Blue Passage, Daydream and Terra Firma.

Here, there is a “visible” or spatially (even morphologically) understandable source of light. In Blue Passage, the light shafting vertically down through the painting’s right third seems to have originated—so persuasively or “realistically” rendered is the painting—as light from a window or open door located far “ahead” of us (or deeply “within”) the painting. This slot-like lozenge of light is the locus of an intense effulgence which, though fictive, is “real” enough to convince us that it is a wellspring of light sufficiently powerful to have lit (that is, irradiated and therefore “coloured”) the rest of the painting—which might otherwise (we feel) have remained dark. As it is, the painting’s soft system of graduated blues (darker blue at the top left, lighter blue through the middle left, a hierarchical structure of blues reversed at the right) seems to have been called into chromatic existence by this now charismatic and, in painterly terms, almost promiscuous light which has been allowed (by the artist) to stream “into” the painting from an “outside” source.

In Daydream, the apparent architectonics of Yuschuk’s painting are perhaps even more familiar to us than the light-arrangement in Blue Passage, and it is reasonable to assume, therefore, that the artist can afford to be elegantly spare here with the cause-and-effect relationship, in the painting, between “external” light and “inner” radiance. Structurally, the painting is simplicity itself. What is apparently a window—a representation of a window—down the left side of the picture, admits of a delicate fall of light into the body of the painting. There is a creamy-beige “sill” or “floor” running across the painting at the bottom. That is what the painting has to show us—as incident. Obviously, this locating and identifying of the nature of the work’s effulgence is only a starting-point, however, for any adequate reading of the painting’s meaning. In the broadest terms, Daydream behaves as if an environmental light-work by, say, James Turrell (the light from the “window”) had somehow or other been positioned immediately next to a Rothko (the rest of the canvas). Because the painting is as anecdotally evocative and memorial as it is (who has not been drawn to the comfort of a light-filled corner, with its double appeal as a site both of bodily security and vista?), Daydream stands as the very emblemizing of the way luminosity can seem to build a physical place to be and then animate that fictive space with the imaginative expansiveness of recollected experience.

Terra Firma, in comparison to the relative openness of Blue Passage and Daydream, is chromatically and, therefore, spatially complex—a rich layering of colouristically defined planes of (descending from the top of the painting) cream, milk chocolate brown, darker browns, bone whites and purple-greys. The disposition of these varying densities of colour seems to be variegated result of Yuschuk’s having begun with a horizontal crack of light located at the top of the painting. Much of the richness of this engaging painting derives from the ambiguities posited by this crack of light in its role as a “source” of illumination: the painting—which, after all, is perfectly flat—nevertheless requires that we contend, first, with its flat surface purely as a coloured field and that, second, we acknowledge, at the same time, the visceral pull the work exerts upon us as we try to locate ourselves amidst its shimmering, shifting, morphologically seductive, space-making planes.

This twinned set of perceptual fallout in a painting like Terra Firma locates lends it meditative agency. As Arthur Zajong notes in his remarkable *Catching the Light: The Intertwined History of Light and Mind*, in his discussion of light and meditation, “Among the nine other kasinas or devices (which include water, air, heat, blue, yellow, red, white, and space) is also the kasina of light. Of it, Buddhaghosa writes: ‘he who grasps the Light-device grasps the sign in light entering through a wall-crevice, keyhole or window-space.’ That is, every manifestation of light is potentially the occasion for the true grasping of light, be it the dappled disks of light beneath the shade of a tree, or the moonbeam that furtively makes its way through a chink in the wall. Each instance offers an occasion for enlightenment, for seeing light.” (2)

Which discussion brings us to Yuschuk’s second body of light-narrative paintings—those which, unlike the reflection paintings, appear to be about, as was mentioned earlier, the creation of light ex nihilo, from “within” the canvas itself (her Large Blue seems very much a transitional work that stands between the reflection-paintings and what we may as well call, for want of a better name, the pure-light paintings.

These pure-light works—paintings such as Yellow Light, Purple Light and Deep End (Caramel)—are, for the most part, square paintings. Unlike the rectangular reflection-paintings—where rectangularity tends to evoke architectonic dimensionality (most of these paintings seem to be systems of planes-in-rooms), a square format feels dimensionless, a perfected geometrical figure that, in its essential scalelessness, feels unbound, transcendental, whole.

The square, therefore, is the almost inevitable choice of format for the hosting, as it were, of radically etherealized ideas such as the production of pure colour experience.

Yuschuk’s pure-light paintings might be thought of, among other things, as “low threshold” paintings. Unlike the reflection-paintings generally—which you can (at least imaginatively) enter—the pure-light paintings establish a profound reversal of that perceptual vectoring: they enter you.

To look intently at one of Yuschuk’s pure-light paintings is an engrossing experience, an experience that is as visceral and bodily as it is metaphysical and disembodied. The works are slowly but insistently performative, their performance lying in the quiet but persistent way they change before your eyes—if you give them the generous amounts of time they require. The blue-violet Purple Light, for example, will more and more insistently offer a floating horizontal rectangle of blue light hovering in its upper half—which you cannot recall having noticed when you first began gazing upon the painting. Similarly, the exquisite Yellow Light begins resolutely enough as a study in creamy-whites, only releasing, over time a beautifully strange bluish “cloud” that hovers at the bottom of the painting—like mist over water.

The pure-light paintings are enormously complicated works—which mask their complications with an initial guilelessness. Here, you may imagine, is a monochromatic painting about, say, yellow, or blue or gold. The truth of the matter is infinitely more sheer, more attenuated. The paintings merely begin in yellow or blue or gold. But after that, by means of some inspired, private, labour-intensive magic of Anna Yuschuk’s, they travel far, far away from their initial chromatic moorings—to a “true grasping of light.” There is rapture here. And an exquisite, if inchoate meaningfulness.

Gary Michael Dault, Toronto, February 19, 2008

1. In Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), p. 292. 2. Ibid., p. 340.

Clement Greenberg, the avatar of American abstraction in the ‘50s, wrote in 1961 “the tendency is to assume that the representational (in art) as such is superior to the non-representational.” These days the opposite is true. Paintings revealing no information are accepted far less critically than those with recognizable and hence questionable elements.

Still, what Anna Yuschuk’s doing by going abstract is crazy, brave or a bit of both. Her show “Silence” at Ingram Gallery reveals the “major shift”, as she says, away from representational work – such as the sliver of the doorway visible in Corner Space II (2006) – to purely non-representational work such as White Stripe (2006).

One understands her struggle. Brought up in Ukraine with the old Soviet a-tractor-looks-like-a-tractor style of art making, the Toronto painter has been cautious about her ventures into the area of abstraction, that “an unknown adventure in an unknown space”, as it was called by the abstractionist, Mark Rothko.

She need not be. Her ability to conjure up the illusion of light is even more evident in work where colour offers the only shape visible.

This exhibition has marked a major shift of my attention from an object in space to the space itself. In the presence of an object, space usually plays the secondary role of a background. Our mind lingers on objects trying to find their meaning in relation to the environment. In these new works I was interested in the subtle and elusive quality of an empty space.

What happens when we walk into a room devoid of things? Our senses become heightened, we pay attention to the sounds and the silence, we notice the quality of light. We notice the way we feel being in the room. The space in the room becomes more important because it allows us to look inside of ourselves.

There are two sets of imagery in the show – abstract compositions and near-abstract interior spaces. In the ‘corner spaces’, I focus on the boundaries of the space – walls, floor, ceiling, etc. The boundaries are not the space, rather they separate our private space from the rest of the world. Within we are creating our inner space - shelter - where we feel safe and protected. In their quiet stillness of these works you become the main subject of the piece, bringing your presence and interpretation to the work, which is then reflected back to you.

In abstract compositions space becomes ‘no-thing’. It takes on a different quality of expression – there is no-thing to understand, one can only feel it. These paintings are not for an impatient viewer. They require one to take time to contemplate and observe the surfacing of subtle variations of tone and colour. Superimposed layers of bright and muted colors convey a sense of emergence, a possibility, a potentiality.

‘Space and silence are two aspects of the same thing, the same no-thing. They are an externalization of inner space and inner silence, which is stillness: the infinitely creative womb of all existence.’

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

At a time when technology has the ability to blur the boundaries between truth and fiction, the question of what we are really looking at becomes increasingly profound. What is real anymore? Photographs, once considered infallible evidence, are no longer trusted as the wonders of PhotoShop become commonplace manipulations of the everyday.The uncertainties of our visual world are the subject of Anna Yuschuk's work as she explores how our suspicions of reality affect our sense of personal identity.

Literally blurring the line between painting and photography, Yuschuk's canvases are richly layered backdrops surrounding a central image that appears as a blurred black and white photograph. Referencing the live model and the effects of digital manipulation, Yuschuk translates both using the medium of oil, combining ambiguity with the seduction of the painted surface. Calling into question our very methods of communication, the use of paint challenges what we initially think to be a manipulated photographic image. In this sense, her work acts as a new form of photo-realism; painting that looks not like a perfect glossy snapshot, but like the altered, and ambiguous photographic images we are becoming accustomed to.

As the debate needlessly rages over the death of painting and its importance versus photography, Yuschuk quietly subverts the argument by creating paintings that are about the decline of photography, re-establishing painting as a medium of 'truth'. Primarily depicting the female form, Yuschuk uses the body as her medium of investigative reality. Through painting, the female body becomes a vehicle for both the formal concerns of paint surface, as well as an exploration of self identity. "Flesh was the reason oil painting was invented" said De Kooning, but Yuschuk's women are about more than formal engagements with mere physical flesh.

Writing about the work of Kiki Smith, Jessica Bradley states that 'the question of identity, the subject of intensive semiotic and psychoanalytic investigations throughout the 1980's, is now, once again, complexly compounded with that of corporeality.' Yuschuk, much like Smith, is concerned with corporeal uncertainties - the ambivalence inherent in women's bodies that make us both vulnerable and threatening. Yuschuk, however, is more concerned with the subtleties of this ambivalence and identity, using the dominant media of paint and canvas to subvert what we know and expect of the traditional nude.

In Do I See What You See? for example, a woman is on her hands and knees, looking back at us between her arms. A vulnerable position, Yuschuk's handling of the body enables this work to transcend the sexual as it becomes linked, again, to how we communicate. Not only is the title both playful and inviting - thus destabilizing the vulnerability - but the uncertainty of the medium (is this a photographic image?) also echoes our uncertainty of the sexualized female body. The question asked becomes unanswerable as her position hovers between the transgressive and the subjective; we are unsure of what we see and what the subject is trying to say.

The title pieces of the exhibition Waiting Room take the uncertainty of the subject still further. A transitional body in a frustratingly unknown narrative, the figure is seen in four positions inviting multiple readings. Holding her breasts, on her knees, lying down - we are given few clues as to what this woman may be waiting for, while the tights she wears destabilizes the natural state of the nude, reminding us that there are stages of nakedness that are often more revealing, yet also strangely de-sexualized. Again, the work conflates the sexual and the taboo with the feminine masquerade that exists in all women. Introspective, the woman examines herself, oblivious to the viewer. What concerns her may be medical, may be linked directly to the body, the breasts she holds, but it is not for us to engage.

In their exploration of the boundaries created between women and their own bodies, the space of disconnection between public and private corporeality, these works can be read in parallel to images created by Vanessa Beecroft. In contrast, however, to Beecroft's composed and aloof choreography, where women pose in the regulated manner of a fashion layout, Yuschuk's women look us in the eye, challenge us, kneel and writhe on the floor. If Beecroft's eerily perfect models subvert agency, creating a sense of surrogate integration that is all women (and consequently none), then it is Yuschuk's women who speak of the agency of self, of the private, interior body not revealed to the outside, even when one is completely unclothed.

Following closely in the tradition of Gerhard Richter's Photo Paintings from the 1960's, Yuschuk's technique echoes his play between paint and photo, while reminding us that our relationship to photography has become increasingly complex. Rather than copying photographs, Yuschuk's painting is about the inaccessible nature of identity and the myth of photographic objectivity. Of Richter's work Roald Nasgaard writes:

The painting develops as an object with palpable material characteristics to be seen parallel to other objects in the world; a condensed analogue of reality that, by posing as a photograph, arouses expectations of certainty, and, by being a painting, refuses them again.

Gerhard Richter: Paintings, Thames and Hudson, 1988, p.49

For Yuschuk, as for Richter, there is more to say through the practice of painting, particularly of that which is unsaid and unknown. Refusing the certainties of photography, Yuschuk works within the inherent ambivalence of the painted surface, but without assuming that either this object, or the photograph itself, can speak of any form of condensed reality; rather that such uncertainty is inextricably linked to the ambivalence of her subjects, and of the subjects to themselves - a woman's relationship to her own body, and our relationship to viewing such bodies.