BY JOSEPH KOERNER
SALANDER-O’REILLY
GALLERIES CATALOGUE
1999
Ann Peretz tells a story about her several canvasses entitled Horse Leach Pond. The pond is by her summer place in Truro, on Cape Cod. It’s where she swims rain or shine since after painting, swimming is what she most likes to do. And as she swims, she looks over at this little wood jutting out into the water between herself and the far shore. This is the view, and this, the feeling, that makes her happy, and that is, for her, happiness. So she paints the pond that is happiness to feel and to see. And because Horse Leach Pond is always different, because it changes with the weather, time, and season, she paints it often, always differently, until, by now, she thinks she really knows that pond. Which is necessary, since the trouble with this view is this: it’s impossible to paint while you’re seeing it, since you’ve got to be in the pond, swimming, with your eyes just above the water’s surface.
A disarming creation myth: painting depicts something that cannot be depicted because you would literally sink if you tried. It disarms, because that something is so evidently more than the pond, more even than the view combined with the sensation of water, that something is nothing less than the happy experience, the condensation of the entirety of happiness and experience in that pond. It’s a myth, like the tale J.M.W. Turner spread about himself: how he lashed himself to the mast of a storm-tossed ship in order definitely to know what a tempest at sea really is. For with her story Peretz, with that sense of understatement that matches perfectly the temper of her art, gives painting its plot. Painting starts immersed in experience, but must take place elsewhere, in the studio. There the experience is remembered, painted, and repainted until the painting, each painting, is its own experience. Peretz calls this procedure “winnowing.”
At the very close of a recent interview, as if it were the last thing to keep in mind, Peretz noted smiling, “I never paint cheerfulness. I don’t like cheerful.” What then of the happiness at Horse Leach Pond, and of the satisfaction that her canvases thus entitled elicit? Like the Romantics, Peretz as discovered the tragedy of landscape. She has found in her stark subjects, as well as in her gently austere painterly manner, the sad inside of experience how happiness flares up as yearning. But she has also found a secret passage back again, painting pictures that, in ever more powerful ways, immerse us in their element, so that we ourselves must either see or sink.
Peretz’s new paintings build on her achievements, of 1996-97. She resists the duns of Truro, again breaking up the great horizon on vertical stretches of canvas. Her newest Dunes, consisting of four equal-sized panels, distills her characteristic approach. At the base, undulating surfaces of sand rise up toward the right, climaxing in a veritable mountain of duns that covers the horizon. These scuffed surfaces, loosely painted, offer tactile, at-hand entrance into the scene, as if somehow touching the dunes, painting them, and beholding their portrait were all one continuous fold. But Peretz also ruptures those surfaces through the polyptych format of the whole. The variable intervals between panels work partly to pull the eye from depth to surface, and from the vast seascape view to its material constitution as oil paint on stretched canvases. Partly, though, the intervals magnify depth by rhythmically measuring it against surface, and by pacing our eye through four discrete but infinite distances. For the tangible dunes only foreground the picture’s intangible essence: the horizon, painted as the meeting of two great, grey, turbulent planes oriented off-center to the right, around the merest indication of a rising sun. The vertical cuts between the canvases are thus repeated, and immeasurably exceeded, by the ocean between dunes and sky.
This decisive silhouetting of the at-hand against the infinitely removed within a watery medium recalls the Horse Leach Pond canvases (cat. Nos. 2, 4 and 6). Peretz has painted several new versions of that signature subject. In one, she has introduced colors that she otherwise studiously avoids: bright, hectic blues, and greens that are quite simply green. The familiar motif, painted in hues expectable in a landscape, becomes, by virtue of its unusually conventional treatment, deliberately citational and estranged, as if Peretz were saying, “Yes, sometimes the pond is blue and green,” and further, “Sometimes the pond looks like someone else’s picture.” Another version of Horse Leach Pond makes up for this, infecting its greens with helter-skelter pinks, and dissolving the whole right side of the picture into a fresh-colored wash.
Like Monet’s hay stacks, Peretz’s pictures of Horse Leach Pond are simultaneously autonomous experiments in color and portraits of differentiated conditions. But Peretz’s ponds are also moods. Moods evidence that experience is always also experience of oneself. They erupt less in moments when object and subject stand unified, than when a disparity between the two is felt, as when a cheerful scene brings sad thoughts to mind. Mood, the motif that underlies the multiple canvases of the pond, thus is a sort of experience of experience, its plot is of an impossible, oceanic grasping from here to there. A painting of rain on Horse Leach Pond renders this immediate. Peretz streaks her landscape with colors of that landscape not because, as she swam in it, rain on the pond looked exactly that way. Rather, this rain of paint reveals the motif perennially behind the motif, the view—here simply trees that might be green but never quite are—that’s always and never the same.
Peretz’s rendition of rain signals a departure in her recent work. Since 1996 her canvases have become more densely painted. Working often on a dark, prepared ground, she spreads colors in overlapping layers with a palette knife, creating thickly crafted surfaces. Two paintings of a marsh in Cape Cod exemplify this new, almost sculptured facture. The clumps of reeds look like they were carved out of vicious paint. Peretz builds up the reeds as if forward from the picture plane, which is allowed then to recede in the image of surrounding water. And that water is veritably swirled onto the canvas in the sheer exuberance of painterly gesture.
A group of small oil sketches documents Peretz’s endeavor to expand her technical arsenal. These intriguing pieces, which read like laboratory trials for her monumental pictures, utilize a mountain view to experiment with multiple paint surfaces: unprimed canvas, translucent underpaintings, matt passages of paint roughly applied, and shiny planes, where the palette knife has smoothed its path. It is this mixed tactility, part sculpted, part gestural, and emancipated from all decorative design, that, together with the structures developed in the polyptychs, has made possible some of Peretz’s strongest works to date: the large, square-format Tamariu Quarry (cat. Nos. 1 and 7), and the monumental portrait, also in square format, of trees on the coast of Spain.
When asked why she decided to paint on such a grand scale, Peretz lets her arm draw huge circles in the air. “I wanted to do that!” What was it, though, that enabled her to paint compelling pictures within this desire to immerse her whole body in the act o f painting, indeed to swim with her brush on the canvas? What had she learned beforehand, such that, on encountering such a dangerously large expanse, she was able to tackle it with blissful certainty? Certainly her triptychs taught her how to extend her images laterally through space, though without increasing canvas size. The intervals between panels formalized the individual compositions, making them each read as metonymies of something larger; and they endowed the whole with a rigorous internal structure. Peretz’s new large canvases eschew this enabling device, although the way she cuts her subjects off at the edges makes each huge painting read as if it were part of an even larger whole, so that even these canvases seem too small for her imagination. More crucially, though, Peretz has replaced the external formalism of the triptych with the internal logic of the perfect square. Like the triptych, the square canvas abstracts the image inscribed on it. It draws the images toward their isomorphic edges, so that, flattened, they stand forth as the mere painted surfaces they are.
The square fulfills the high modernist imperative that painting represents painting. In Peretz’s hand, however, squareness adds a powerful charge to the subject matter itself. Because the trees are not captured in a vertical format, because the quarry does not command the oblong view one might expect, trees and quarry become active, unpredictable forces continually making and remaking the format that contains them. Might not the quarry, as a massive vertical, require an upright rectangle even if the fringe of landscape at its top wanders laterally through the picture, like Peretz’s foreground dunes? Indeed the quarry consists of multiple planes of color, some square, some oblong, some tall and narrow. Thus, the question of a proper frame has already been asked internally as the question of the quarry’s shape.
Peretz is fully aware of the historical density of this motif. She knows that Cezanne depicted quarries as natural analogues to the structure of his paintings. Ambitiously magnifying Cezanne’s motif, she finds a perfect vehicle “to do that” with her brush. For labor on a canvas propped up vertically before the body feels somehow like labor on a quarry. The quarry’s surface, that vertical cut through the landscape’s horizontal reach, becomes, when painted, an engulfing expanse. What is distinctive about Peretz’s Tamariu Quarry, though, is not the structural intelligence it demonstrates, or its sureness of touch and coloristic range. Rather, in it Peretz has opened her composition to the sheer contingency of the visible world The heap of gravel in the foreground, and the three wooden poles staked out before it, distract Peretz from the structures that typically interest her, causing her to attend to structures that obtain in the world nonetheless. It is in passages like these that one feels Peretz’s subject exceeding any “winnowed” experience of it. This new, uncanny excess is most apparent in her masterpiece of 1998, Tamariu Woods 1 (cat. No. 8).
The impact of this work derives from the palpable presence of those massive, bare trunks combined with their dizzying extension into space. In the long paint strokes with which she models these trunks, and in their trajectory up and out into the abyss, Peretz repeats mimetically the exhilaration and the risk of painting on such a large scale. It is worth asking why we think the trees grow outward as well as upward. For one thing, because we observe their spreading bows as if from below, yet feel as if we observe their trunks from across, we tend to surmise that these trunks rise up and away from us at a diagonal. Peretz supports this surmise by picturing the trees, in their seaward leaning, partly from the side, so that their diagonal becomes registered in profile. Moreover, the whole surrounding landscape hints at an outward lean. Because the foreground trees tower above those in the idle-ground, we deduce that we stand atop a steep slope, and that the trees lean because they are rooted to the slope Of course, one could imagine that Peretz simply lifted her eyes to some leaning trees and painted what stood above her, rather than obliquely before her, like someone photographing a skyscraper from the sidewalk. But this structural possibility is counteracted by the horizon—that inheritance of Peretz’s triptychs—which announces that the scene is viewed looking straight forward. And yet, although we feel confident of our mental picture of the observer and the observed (i.e., beholder gazing dead ahead, trees growing on a slanted slope) the whole arrangement complicates a purely optical understanding of the landscape. For because of the picture’s scale and the way the trees within it are painted, the eye does not simply scan the trees up and down but seems to inch forward along their oblique extensions.
Peretz’s perspective is a consistently embodied one. What she aims at showing (of these trees, as of the dunes and pond at Truro) is how things look from inside a body. This body is simultaneously localized and mobile. It mirrors its own mobility in visible objects that, when scanned, make one aware of the physical activity involved in viewing. Following the tree trunks up to their branches, one senses the movements of one’s own eyes repeating those of the painter. Peretz manages to make us feel not simply that we behold trees on the coast of Spain, but that we stand there in our bodies, as well. She heightens this doubling by making her effigies almost life-sized. This invites us not merely to scan the trees with our eyes, but to reach out and touch them.
And it is here that the drama of the picture unfolds. For having surmised that the trees rise from a precipitous slope, the viewer knows what touching the trees would risk. To reach forward toward such a leaning trunk would mean to fall forward from one’s upright posture, until one lies supported only by the tree. Peretz indicates this vertiginous gesture by cutting the trees off at their base, so that we cannot see the ground from which they rise. The picture thus invites us to lean forward into an abyss. And experience tells us that the return will be difficult. We could not, for example, right ourselves by swinging a leg toward the ground, since under the tree the terrain slopes away. Our options are only these: remain where we are, climb further up, or slither backward to the unseen ground on the upward side of the tree.
Even if the viewer does not imagine this retreat, the picture teaches “humility,” in the root sense of the baseness of earth (humus). It draws us out and up to the ocean and sky, even as it recollects the dust that we are and will become. Peretz thus succeeds in picturing both the immersion in the world that she termed “happiness” and the necessary withdrawal that forbids her any cheer.
Joseph Koerner is the Victor S. Thomas professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University.