Tim White: White Works

by Nancy Princenthal

Basic Language: one of the first computer programming languages (basic in two ways, then, to the digerati), it could also be a name for reductive abstraction in art, the kind in which no recourse is made to information extrinsic to the work. Tim White has titled several of his recent paintings Basic Language, as part of an ongoing exploration of what such abstraction offers. The early promise of non-figurative painting - that it would establish a universal idiom of pure, transparent emotional expression - has long since been given up in favor of a multiplicity of local and personal dialects, some more eloquent than others. In White's hands, abstract painting provides a hard, bright surface, challenging and reflective, in which our increasingly noisy visual culture can see itself muted, a mirror image colorless and silent but mercilessly clear.
The first of the Basic Language paintings (1997) is a big (84x66") canvas consisting of strong, broad vertical stripes. Executed with graphite and oil pastels, to establish the basic structure, and then multiple layers of undiluted acrylic paint, applied mostly with palette knives, the stripes are heavily textured, dense but luminous, the shaded margins between white and black suggesting the sides of classical columns, or metal bars. They could also be roll bars on an old, black and white TV set (rotated 90 degrees); certainly they seem bigger than life (like anything publicly broadcast) and unstable (same). The connection isn't idle. White works in several radically disparate ways, one of which is with video. A recent project involved transforming short fragments of World War II documentary footage, via painstaking, frame-by-frame digital remastering, into video projections so immersively graceful and mesmerizing they seem to have been shot underwater. In Presence, the image is of a tracer bullet, in Runner, of a soldier sprinting, vainly, for his life.
These video projections and related (and also subsequent) digital color photographs are given deeply saturated, sensuous color: marine blue, blood red. The paintings, on the other hand, are resolutely black and white. This renunciation of one of the medium's conventional resources (and visual rewards) is intended, in part, to create a link with (traditional, black and white) photography, the thin laminates of acrylic over graphite creating a surface as close as White can get to photographic emulsion. But White's bleached grisailles - they tend to be more white than black -- also find references in the work of some of the most painterly of postwar artists: Jasper Johns, Robert Ryman. White doesn't pursue their work's conceptual premises, but seems drawn instead to its opacity, constructed around ordering systems so numbingly familiar (the boxed sets of white and gray letters and numbers in Johns) or, conversely, so densely self-involved (the infinitely cross-referenced research into varieties of handmade white surfaces, in Ryman) that they resist associative interpretation. For his part, White seems interested in creating painted surfaces slippery, shadowy and diffuse enough that vision skids across them, in an anxious, tantalizing chase after resolution, or stable illumination. Basic Language II (White Space) is a roughly square (72x76") composition structured by a Johnsian grid, each unit framing a shadowed round depression, all seemingly raked by a bright, pulsing light. It suggests a massive bank of just-extinguished lights, a hard white, electric glow lingering in each cell. Basic Language III (Empty Space) evokes a vanity mirror, with what could be a shiny metal frame lined with light bulbs surrounding a big, empty white square in the painting's center. It teases the viewer with a monumentally unavailing image of personal reflection, but offers, as compensation, abundant opportunity for considering what abstraction yields, and withholds.
White cites Malevich's recurring use of black squares in discussing his own engagement with the white square (also, of course, a Malevich trademark). But if, for White, one defining parameter is the kind of essential, timeless token of experience Malevich sought, another is the infinitely fluid world of commercial moving images. "Painting is a one-image, one-solution process, without the constant mutability of video," White says. It's fixed, and requires fixity in its viewers. In Empty Space II, his goal was to create a painting that was, almost literally, blinding white, so bright that sight would be arrested, then involuntarily averted: the illusionary square of light would be, in a sense, the precursor of momentary blackness, a reflexive sensory shutdown. That's not, he found, an achievable goal in painting. But his solution, in gridded swirls of light, does better, sustaining both the scintillating, unstable quality of bright lights (and moving imagery), and the solid, material presence of painted canvas. It's as if he's pried open the space between two frames of a battle newsreel to insert a long, threatened but intoxicating moment of complete visual satisfaction.