Artist Robert Mah

At Marion Meyer Contemporary Art

October 13 – November 11, 2007

354 N. Coast Highway • Laguna Beach • CA • 92651 • USA • 949.497.5442
marionmeyergallery.com

The Accidental Process: Robert Mah’s New Paintings

By Tyler Stallings

Robert Mah is a painter for whom a controlled spontaneity is paramount. He works in a tradition of painting that extends back to the early twentieth century, encompassing a timeline of artists beginning with Wassily Kandisky to Piet Mondrian to Jackson Pollock. Like them, Mah shares a pursuit of painterly passion through abstraction. More specifically, reminiscent of the action painters of the New York School from the 1950s and 60s, he approaches the canvas as an arena in which to perform. The paintings, then, are less about their “objectness” and more about being a record of the process itself.

Incorporating the accidental mark is a chief characteristic of the action painters, or abstract expressionists, and of Mah’s work. It is the stray drip or splatter on the canvas that can suddenly send an artist down an unexpected path. It is this journey that fulfils Mah in the studio, and it is the layers of this journey as seen in the deposits of the paint, by which a viewer can take passage too.

Mah first started painting seriously when he joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering as an Assistant Professor in Microbiology in 1963. While there, he enrolled in several art classes. This was a period of time at the tail end of abstract expressionism’s reign in art circles around the country, while Pop Art was just beginning to raise its head. Perhaps, for Mah, it was AbEx’s defining spontaneity, the sense of tapping into the subconscious, and even the seeming artlessness, that suggested a kind of accessibility, and a contrast to the rigors of the scientific method.

Without a doubt, it would have been exciting to be aware, while it was still unfolding, of the first truly original school of painting in the United States. Abstract expressionism established the vigorous creativity of a post-World War II America, and one that was not inhibited by Europe’s dominance and its aesthetics in the art world before the war.
A change in career appointment from UNC to University of California, Los Angeles, brought his artistic production to a halt in 1970. A daily two-hour commute from Huntington Beach to UCLA and a young family left little time for creative output in this direction since his attention was focused on research, teaching, and administration. His retirement from UCLA in 1995 gave him the opportunity to return to his artistic journey. He has picked up from the point of his first inspiration in 1963, again assuming an artistic practice that is committed to emotional honesty and a trust in intuition as guide for the hand and brush.

Two threads of abstraction loop throughout Mah’s recent body of paintings: one is architectonic, and the other is lyrical.

Orbs and rectilinear forms intermingle in Lunar Movements (2006), while rows and columns of forms interlock in Linear Chromatography (2007). Both titles reference scientific terms. The former examines the phases of the moon and its gravitational effects on Earth; while the latter references a laboratory technique involving the separation of the components in a mixture. On one hand, Mah shows us how he finds poetry in these scientific references, as if trying to make unfamiliar to himself that which was very familiar to him for so long in his occupation. Knowing that Mah was a scientist, these architectonic abstractions feel personal. It is as though Mah attempts to challenge the taxing of his mind by the rational, mathematical, and logic of science. In a sense, he has moved from a scientific laboratory of controlled conditions to his studio, an artistic laboratory with an unrestricted setting.

In these works, Mah challenges the illusion of depth and perspective that so many abstract painters have grappled with since the early twentieth century. This is most evident in Linear Chromatography. The puzzle of rectangles remains on the surface but at its center is a wash of paint with a slight horizontal line. Suddenly, the center rectangle suggests a window opening out onto a rainy landscape that stretches into the distance. Though there is the suggestion of recognizable imagery outside the confines of the painting, Mah’s hopes that it is just one level on which to engage his work.

Mah’s second approach is through gesture and lyricism. In works such as Above the Treeline (2006) and Sky Mountain (2007), his paint handling is loose. It appears as though he is simply spilling paint onto the canvas. In fact, his methodology involves the use of brushes and more unorthodox tools like a spatula and a ladle. He uses the ladle to more or less control his spills and to dilute the paint with water to give different effects of density and tonality.

The titles and images in these works reference aerial perspectives. The viewpoint is from that of a bird or an airplane. In Above the Treeline, gradations of black paint suggest a foreground, middleground and background for a landscape. A thick application of blackish paint suggest a thicket of treetops, apropos the title, while a thin, grey wash suggest mist enveloped mountains in the distance. The aerial perspective is traditional among Chinese landscape painters in the ink-and-wash tradition. A connection to this tradition is reinforced by Mah’s exclusive use of black paint and its handling like ink from a well.

In this tradition, there was never a demand for a dutiful observation of reality. Rather, in order to distinguish the main subject, the background might even be omitted altogether, simply leaving it vacant. But the apparent spontaneity or economy of line was due in part to knowledge of how reality worked, so to speak. In this manner, these Chinese painters could disregard such knowledge when they approached their silk or rice paper with ink and brush. Similarly, one feels that Mah is able to act outside the bounds of his scientific training that requires a different kind of strictness, and even outside the bounds of art history once he sits down at his easel.

Perhaps Mah’s consideration of artistic traditions from the East came from his tutelage by the celebrated ceramicist and sculptor, Toshiko Takaezu in Penland, North Carolina in the early 1970s. She exercises a spontaneous approach toward glazing by circumnavigating a vessel while applying a glaze without restraint through pouring and painting. This approach balances her more systematic process of a building her famous closed-topped vessels with stacked coils of clay. She embraces a technique that several ceramists had assumed on the west coast, most notably Peter Voulkos. They were inspired by the Japanese aesthetic in ceramics of accepting accidents in glazing and firing as important to the final outcome. This influence, when combined with the impact and stimulus of Abstract Expressionism in the U.S., produced a new approach towards ceramics, specifically towards the vessel and its functionality.

One of the connections between Mah’s two bodies of work is that both reference the landscape. On one hand, you have Mah’s architectonic works, suggestive of windows, tunnels, and overlapping buildings. And on the other hand, you have the gestural works that are suggestive of mountains and trees. They reimagine the classic theme of man versus nature when considered relative to one another.

Compositionally, even though the titles ground the work with references to an observable reality, neither people nor animals populate the scenes. Only the remnants of culture with the rectilinear forms or the secluded, wild landscape at the tops of mountains are apparent.

A reductive palette is perhaps the most daring aspect shared among all the works. Like the notable Abstract Expressionist, Franz Kline, only gradations of black paint are used in the majority of Mah’s recent work. It would appear that his goal is to restrict a certain number of choices, especially when viewed in contrast to his early work that involved layers of a multitude of colored paints. By taking color out of the equation, he can focus on the relationship between the forms, and the interplay of improvisation and discipline between spills and geometric forms.

In a more recent work, Harnessing Hydrodynamic Turbulence (2007), Mah brings his varied working methods into a singular composition. Here he lays down his signature spill. Then, clearly, inspired by its resemblance to a waterfall, he takes a route that does not place it within the context of a lofty mountainside, but instead places it squarely within the confines of the man-made world. He does so by painting an overlay of rectangles and polygons onto the spill. These forms suggest an hydroelectric dam that is referenced in the title. It is the one man-made structure that can mimic a soaring mountain wall that is accompanied by an occasional and controlled release of a graceful cascade of water. In this new work, it is clear that Robert Mah has, indeed, discovered his special vocabulary.

Tyler Stallings is the director of University of California, Riverside’s Sweeney Art Gallery. His writing and other curatorial work can be viewed at www.tylerstallings.com.