Paul Winstanley

My Heart's in the Highlands

Ben Street

Looking at a painting of a mountain isn't much like looking at a real mountain. This is something we can probably all agree on. What the nature of that difference is, and why it might be worth paying attention to, is one of the subjects of Paul Winstanley's new body of paintings. While we might all agree on that distinction, though - might see it as self explanatory, even an obvious thing to say- that gap, between being there and not, between closeness and distance, between seeing something and saying something, is the place where Winstanley's art makes its home. It's the place too, where landscape painting, in the pre-Impressionist Western tradition at least, generally sits. That towering peak in an Albert Bierstadt painting, for instance, can only have been made in the relative warmth and quiet of the artist's studio, far in space and time from the place in the picture. It's easy enough then, to see the landscape painting as the best embodiment of painting as pure fiction. Yet despite that, doesn't something take place as we look, something unexpected? That's to say, isn't the effect of the painting, it's emotional undertow, acting on you anyway? Acting, even, on the artist, whilst painstakingly brushing-in a surging waterfall or a dangling branch he first saw somewhere else, many weeks ago?

If distance - both literally depicted and metaphorically enacted - inheres to landscape painting per se, Winstanley's mountain peaks are removed further still. Each painting originates from a printed photograph of an existing historical painting, which has then been subject to procedures of attrition and deterioration using a wax resist surface applied on top. Winstanley's paintings take as their subject the degraded images that result from that process. The source material then, has been subject to a practice by which the uncontrollable marks of the wax resist, which end up resembling the moves of a gestural abstract painter, have been allowed to contaminate the clarity of the original work. These are landscapes as seen through a gauze of scrapes; they are blotched with the damage incurred by their reproduction. Visual discrepancies interrupt and delay the closure of the image. Reproducing these painterly glitches with a sure and meticulous hand, Winstanley's corrupted landscapes bear the traces of their mediation like scars on a face. Or seem to: the finished paintings in fact go some way towards restoring, in the minuteness of the brushes touch, the precision of the originals. They're portraits, in a way. And so a kind of feedback loop emerges, whereby what might be read as a sardonic riposte to the highfalutin conceptual intensions of traditional landscape painting becomes instead a form of appeal to it: a way of asking what might be salvaged or returned to us from those paintings, even at our own technological, or ecological, or philosophical, remove.

What are Winstanley's sources? None are names, Bierstadt aside, likely to trouble the curricula of most art history programmes, or the roster of blockbuster museum shows. Adalbert Waagen, Joseph Jansen and Joseph Anton Koch- two Germans and an Austrian, not particularly well known even in their home countries- painted Alpine landscapes from the turn to the end of the nineteenth century. Their's was a practice seemingly untouched either by the threat of photography or by that of plein-air painting. Spatial effects get recycled from artist to artist, like a repertoire of available forms. Time and again, they show pale crags clumping over dark evergreens, while water trips and tumbles over the rocks beneath. These artful arrangements announce them as such, as art, and in doing so stake their place within a deeper history of paintings of places. That's to suggest that they're looking over their shoulder in historical terms, trying on Claude and Poussin for size. Another word for this is picturesque: picture-like. Art itself, not just landscape, is the real subject. That's another way their unexpected retrieval in Winstanley's paintings seems, gradually, as you look, more and more apt.

What these older paintings - let's be clear, by artists from their own distinct cultural contexts - otherwise share is their curious relationship to the complex act of looking. This has been, in some sense, Winstanley's great project as a painter. His works have always taken the architecture and rhetoric of viewing as their subject. In earlier paintings by the artist, emptied spaces (art school studios, modernist corridors, waiting rooms) became reframed as sites loaded with enquiry, each one a means of worrying at the nature of painting's address to any given viewer. Even his landscapes seen from speeding cars are as concerned with the nature of viewing as they are by the subject they seem to depict. Placement, perspective and colour - the tools by which illusionistic Western painting sets up its virtual realities - become, for Winstanley, the means to think through how painting and the world come together, or don't. The distancing was always there, but in these new works, it's charged with a different kind of intensity. By calling back to a little-visited corner of the history of painting, Winstanley's landscapes rephrase their questions in a sceptical, but no less searching, idiom: What are we seeing when we can't see ourselves?

What's returned to us then, is a way of thinking. Landscape paintings of the kind Winstanley's works respond to were built to anticipate a reading of the sublime. Within them, human figures, dwarfed by the immensities of nature, connote an experience of fear-tinged wonder that is the essence of the sublime encounter. Their contradictions breed possibility. They depict an incident of overwhelming intensity that they can't themselves, as objects, generate; their scale (roughly in the 30 X 48ins range) is much too small for that. You had to be there they shrug. (It's Mark Rothko, among others, who in the following century would try and generate actual sublime experiences in his viewers, through huge scale and effects of light and space; he's here too, haunting the room). And so the distancing effect Winstanley introduces, through attending to the discolouration and distortion of the altered images, is also embedded in his sources. The sublime encounter is, after all, something of which a painting or poem can only show you the residue. When Winstanley allows his paintings to return to the fictions of looking, by placing them in imagined museum and gallery spaces looked at by a shifting constituency of indistinct viewers, it's a meditation of what's left of the sublime, too. The Romantic convention of the rückenfigur - a human figure seen from behind, gazing into the depth of a landscape - is a proxy for the viewer, a kind of avatar, that gets reanimated in these images. What these paintings offer to them and to us is the possibility of an experience that might not yet be forclosed, something to which the act of painting might, even now, so late in the day, grant us access.