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Lot Essay
"In contrast to the assertion of one reality, my work investigates how different realities interact and abrade. And the understanding is that the abrasions start with the medium itself." -- Mark Tansey
The meticulously-executed, dreamlike tableaux of artist Mark Tansey continually enchant and mystify viewers by nature of their staggering beauty and captivating imagery. In Repairing the Wheel, an early painting of 1996, Tansey depicts a lush landscape where rushing streams of water cascade over rocky outcroppings amidst a dense background of lush foliage, while two enigmatic figures set about repairing a giant wooden wheel. The rich variations in hue that Tansey teases out from his signature monochromatic palette are staggering, from the brilliant, frothy white of the water’s cascade to the inky black of the rock’s deep shadowy recesses, and the softly varying greys of the twilit sky. Upon further inspection, the rough-hewn surface of the rock formation slowly emerges, revealing itself to be lines of text that Tansey ripped from esoteric philosophy books, which he then folds, crumples and distorts using a photocopier. Other areas are similarly smeared and warped, as in the upper right corner which dissolves into a minuscule array of tiny black and white pixels. Tansey’s paintings are usually interwoven with erudite concepts that illustrate his extensive knowledge of philosophy, art history and literature, and in Repairing the Wheel Tansey knowingly weaves together such disparate themes as chaos theory, da Vinci’s drawings of the wheel, the sublime nature of landscape painting, and the fundamental nature of image-making itself.
Tansey’s paintings possess an unrivaled technical virtuosity that results from the time-consuming process of their creation. Over the years, he has amassed a vast personal archive of photographs, art books, magazines, newspaper clippings and other ephemera that he draws upon when creating a new work. He creates a preliminary collage by compiling several different sources, which he then photocopies, often stretching, rotating and cropping the images to produce strange new combinations. This preliminary collage assists the artist in preparation for his painting, which he typically executes on a vast scale, deliberately limiting his palette to a single, luminous hue. Tansey’s paintings display a precision that alternately recalls scientific illustration, archival photographs or an architect’s blueprint, which he achieves by applying gesso to canvas then a layer of pigment, working to create his paintings by removing the layer of color by washing, brushing, and scraping paint away to reveal the glowing white gesso beneath. The surface of Tansey’s paintings are like no other—their smooth uniformity lends his figures a lingering, ghostlike quality, as if suspended in amber.
In Repairing the Wheel, Tansey illustrates many of his most important recurring motifs, often conflating one significant form with another. The painting showcases a torrent of rushing water that streams from the hidden recesses of the boulders and cliffs of Tansey’s rocky landscape, a potent theme that recurs throughout his oeuvre. Meanwhile, two figures—a man and woman—set about the herculean task of repairing an enormous wooden wheel. While they work at their strange, unknowable labor, the course of the water surges on with a continuous, awe-inducing power, making the enormity and difficulty of their ordeal seem downright Sisyphean. Dressed in vintage clothing, the figures evoke a bygone era which praised the earnestness of hard work. The specificity of their old-fashioned clothing is in keeping with Taney’s technique; the female character, in particular, is eerily similar to Tansey’s most important recurring female protagonists, as seen in The Bricoleur’s Daughter and Four Forbidden Senses. Similarly, Tansey’s fascination with stones, rocks and geological formations continues to inspire his work—especially his most recent series—as well as the depiction of water, whether in streams, cascading waterfalls, pooling eddies or frothy oceans.
In Repairing the Wheel, Tansey’s use of distorted lines of text to depict the craggy surface of his rock formations is yet another recurring motif that fascinated the artist at the time. Tansey’s use of text first appeared in his paintings in 1990, and in the following years he repeated the motif in many of his most significant paintings. As in Repairing the Wheel, Tansey references the symbolic breakdown of language made popular by Jacques Derrida and the Deconstructivist movement, which Tansey would have known from his graduate studies at Hunter College in New York in the 1970s. In his typically clever and quick-witted way, Tansey references the breakdown of language posited by Derrida and the Deconstructionists by quite literally breaking down of the words themselves—he copies Derrida’s text, passes it through the copy machine, smears, folds, crumples and distorts, then applies this deliberately obscured code via silkscreen to the striated surface of his rock formations. Tansey’s technique deliberately obscures the legibility of the text, so that the letters float free from the words they inhabit, functioning as purely formal ciphers, having been liberated from the strict orthodoxy of Derrida's text.
A profound, metaphorical painting, Repairing the Wheel also evokes the heroic beauty of panoramic landscape paintings, the history of art-making and—perhaps most tellingly—the scientific systems that guide the uncontrollable nature of the universe. In fact, in the late 1980s, Tansey became interested in the newly-emerging theories espoused by Edward Lorenz and Benoit Mandelbrot, and the 1987 book published by James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, the first popular book about chaos theory and the butterfly effect. Since Tansey often conceals hidden imagery within his paintings, often only revealed when the painting is rotated 180 degrees or viewed from an oblique angle, it is tempting to discover the starry night sky in the upper left corner of the painting when flipped upside-down; the water miraculously morphs into clouds, and the figures seem suspended in a strange spacecraft not unlike Stanley Kubrick’s fantastical rotating space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Rotating the painting back to its proper orientation, one can perhaps identify a scull-like apparition in the rushing waters of the lower right quadrant, much like vanitas that is concealed in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors of 1533, and only revealed when the painting is viewed from an oblique angle.
Perhaps the most significant motif in Tansey’s Repairing the Wheel is the wheel itself—the rather strange rustic contraption whose wooden planks need repair—and this provides the focal point around which the narrative of the painting is built. The wheel, of course, is a potent allegorical symbol that dates back countless millennia; one need think only of the mandala, the zodiac, the labyrinth, and the infinite wheeling of the stars across the night sky. The particular wheel that Tansey depicts in Repairing the Wheel is similar to those featured in a 1987 exhibit on Leonardo da Vinci. The critic Mark C. Taylor acknowledges that Tansey would have seen the meticulous drawings that da Vinci made of wooden wheels. The epically-scaled painting Leonardo’s Wheel also includes similar da Vinci-an wheels. By depicting the wheel, Tansey invokes its myriad associations, from the smart economy of a watermill to the joy of a Ferris wheel or the empirical utility of a turnstile, while referencing the greatest art-makers of Western art history. Its depiction might also reference the very act of art-making itself, a convenient analogy for the painter’s continual task to “reinvent the wheel” with every fresh canvas.
The meticulously-executed, dreamlike tableaux of artist Mark Tansey continually enchant and mystify viewers by nature of their staggering beauty and captivating imagery. In Repairing the Wheel, an early painting of 1996, Tansey depicts a lush landscape where rushing streams of water cascade over rocky outcroppings amidst a dense background of lush foliage, while two enigmatic figures set about repairing a giant wooden wheel. The rich variations in hue that Tansey teases out from his signature monochromatic palette are staggering, from the brilliant, frothy white of the water’s cascade to the inky black of the rock’s deep shadowy recesses, and the softly varying greys of the twilit sky. Upon further inspection, the rough-hewn surface of the rock formation slowly emerges, revealing itself to be lines of text that Tansey ripped from esoteric philosophy books, which he then folds, crumples and distorts using a photocopier. Other areas are similarly smeared and warped, as in the upper right corner which dissolves into a minuscule array of tiny black and white pixels. Tansey’s paintings are usually interwoven with erudite concepts that illustrate his extensive knowledge of philosophy, art history and literature, and in Repairing the Wheel Tansey knowingly weaves together such disparate themes as chaos theory, da Vinci’s drawings of the wheel, the sublime nature of landscape painting, and the fundamental nature of image-making itself.
Tansey’s paintings possess an unrivaled technical virtuosity that results from the time-consuming process of their creation. Over the years, he has amassed a vast personal archive of photographs, art books, magazines, newspaper clippings and other ephemera that he draws upon when creating a new work. He creates a preliminary collage by compiling several different sources, which he then photocopies, often stretching, rotating and cropping the images to produce strange new combinations. This preliminary collage assists the artist in preparation for his painting, which he typically executes on a vast scale, deliberately limiting his palette to a single, luminous hue. Tansey’s paintings display a precision that alternately recalls scientific illustration, archival photographs or an architect’s blueprint, which he achieves by applying gesso to canvas then a layer of pigment, working to create his paintings by removing the layer of color by washing, brushing, and scraping paint away to reveal the glowing white gesso beneath. The surface of Tansey’s paintings are like no other—their smooth uniformity lends his figures a lingering, ghostlike quality, as if suspended in amber.
In Repairing the Wheel, Tansey illustrates many of his most important recurring motifs, often conflating one significant form with another. The painting showcases a torrent of rushing water that streams from the hidden recesses of the boulders and cliffs of Tansey’s rocky landscape, a potent theme that recurs throughout his oeuvre. Meanwhile, two figures—a man and woman—set about the herculean task of repairing an enormous wooden wheel. While they work at their strange, unknowable labor, the course of the water surges on with a continuous, awe-inducing power, making the enormity and difficulty of their ordeal seem downright Sisyphean. Dressed in vintage clothing, the figures evoke a bygone era which praised the earnestness of hard work. The specificity of their old-fashioned clothing is in keeping with Taney’s technique; the female character, in particular, is eerily similar to Tansey’s most important recurring female protagonists, as seen in The Bricoleur’s Daughter and Four Forbidden Senses. Similarly, Tansey’s fascination with stones, rocks and geological formations continues to inspire his work—especially his most recent series—as well as the depiction of water, whether in streams, cascading waterfalls, pooling eddies or frothy oceans.
In Repairing the Wheel, Tansey’s use of distorted lines of text to depict the craggy surface of his rock formations is yet another recurring motif that fascinated the artist at the time. Tansey’s use of text first appeared in his paintings in 1990, and in the following years he repeated the motif in many of his most significant paintings. As in Repairing the Wheel, Tansey references the symbolic breakdown of language made popular by Jacques Derrida and the Deconstructivist movement, which Tansey would have known from his graduate studies at Hunter College in New York in the 1970s. In his typically clever and quick-witted way, Tansey references the breakdown of language posited by Derrida and the Deconstructionists by quite literally breaking down of the words themselves—he copies Derrida’s text, passes it through the copy machine, smears, folds, crumples and distorts, then applies this deliberately obscured code via silkscreen to the striated surface of his rock formations. Tansey’s technique deliberately obscures the legibility of the text, so that the letters float free from the words they inhabit, functioning as purely formal ciphers, having been liberated from the strict orthodoxy of Derrida's text.
A profound, metaphorical painting, Repairing the Wheel also evokes the heroic beauty of panoramic landscape paintings, the history of art-making and—perhaps most tellingly—the scientific systems that guide the uncontrollable nature of the universe. In fact, in the late 1980s, Tansey became interested in the newly-emerging theories espoused by Edward Lorenz and Benoit Mandelbrot, and the 1987 book published by James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, the first popular book about chaos theory and the butterfly effect. Since Tansey often conceals hidden imagery within his paintings, often only revealed when the painting is rotated 180 degrees or viewed from an oblique angle, it is tempting to discover the starry night sky in the upper left corner of the painting when flipped upside-down; the water miraculously morphs into clouds, and the figures seem suspended in a strange spacecraft not unlike Stanley Kubrick’s fantastical rotating space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Rotating the painting back to its proper orientation, one can perhaps identify a scull-like apparition in the rushing waters of the lower right quadrant, much like vanitas that is concealed in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors of 1533, and only revealed when the painting is viewed from an oblique angle.
Perhaps the most significant motif in Tansey’s Repairing the Wheel is the wheel itself—the rather strange rustic contraption whose wooden planks need repair—and this provides the focal point around which the narrative of the painting is built. The wheel, of course, is a potent allegorical symbol that dates back countless millennia; one need think only of the mandala, the zodiac, the labyrinth, and the infinite wheeling of the stars across the night sky. The particular wheel that Tansey depicts in Repairing the Wheel is similar to those featured in a 1987 exhibit on Leonardo da Vinci. The critic Mark C. Taylor acknowledges that Tansey would have seen the meticulous drawings that da Vinci made of wooden wheels. The epically-scaled painting Leonardo’s Wheel also includes similar da Vinci-an wheels. By depicting the wheel, Tansey invokes its myriad associations, from the smart economy of a watermill to the joy of a Ferris wheel or the empirical utility of a turnstile, while referencing the greatest art-makers of Western art history. Its depiction might also reference the very act of art-making itself, a convenient analogy for the painter’s continual task to “reinvent the wheel” with every fresh canvas.