Weaving & Dust

Those who are familiar with Amy Banker's work might remember her opera painting dedicated to the music of Verdi, Donizetti or Mozart, and to such larger-than-life figures as Othello or Lucia di Lammermoor. Crossing to yet another domain of artistic expression, and perception, the present exhibition takes us from the Othello of Verdi to that of Shakespeare, from music to literature, without losing either flair or verve. Drawing on plays and lyrical poetry, Banker's new paintings reflect on the thousand-year-long discussion about word and image.

Her work illuminates how poetry and painting, by opening up fields for shifting significations, share the capacity for representation and abstraction. Bringing together the visual and the verba, Banker's canvases are not about the constitution of meaning, but about the construction of webs of reminiscenscences-they only imply, and never directly signify, the literary allusions of their titles. Sequences, mostly in the form of loosely built thematic groups, have always featured in Banker's art, yet her most recent paintings introduce a new aspect of seriality: each and every work on view arises on a 30-by-40 inch canvas.

Demonstrating that dimensions always function as structural principles and, at the same time, methodical devices, Banker acts within her self-imposed rules and restrictions.

Yet as the breadth of her planes is secured, an open-ended question arises; do these works form a series, or, despite the sameness of their size, do they remain individual and separate entities? In the new work, as opposed to the heavily marked surfaces of earlier paintings,one finds an unexpected tranquility of gesture. Still inscribed by traces of their making, as well as by the erasure of marks, these canvases also propose a model the process of painting as a double of writing, combining painting and poetry as spatio-temporal media. As Banker put it, 'I have been rereading the plays and the sonnets.

It takes a lot of time.' And indeed, the slow and sustained work of Banker, the reader, finds a parallel in these methodically built canvases. Through their layered surfaces, the painting embody time as do poetry and words: as if in a palimpsest, through superimposed structures of marks, they figure and materialize the temporal dimension of painting. 'I am still writing notes and planning, but the paintings take over.

Sometimes I do the drawings first; other times I lay down the background and the color in layers and blocks first,and then draw. It is a process of paintings, weaving, like a needlepoint tapestry, but with paint.' Despite their luminous and shimmering colors ... expanded and spread out by large, open gestures into fields ... the canvases do not simply act as optical vibrations.

Due to their woven strata, Banker's paintings solicit viewers to see and contemplate them up close. Inviting us to experience their tactility, Banker reminds us that, in painting, chroma never exists without solidity,that color is always substance.

Looking at these paintings, one might consider 'the extraoardinary patience of things' as Robinson Jeffers put it when writing about the Carmel landscape. Evoking experiences of nature, another underlying reference in Banker's work, we can think of those images of 'pristine beauty' that live 'in the very grain of the granite,' but also on the surfaces of paintings, and in the textual tapestry of poems. And then, we might also ask with Hamlet: 'what is this quintenessence of dust?' For Shakespeare, it was poetry; for Banker, it is painting.

Agnes Berecz 2007