When Likeness Breaks With Likeness November 1st, 2008
by Natasha Becker, Independent Curator and Critic
Like his previous series, Skin, Legs Icon are the kind of paintings that make Ian Robertson Duncan the enigmatic painter that he is; one can’t resist looking, touching, feeling, and pondering the rich surface... Read more
When Likeness Breaks With Likeness November 1st, 2008
by Natasha Becker, Independent Curator and Critic
Like his previous series, Skin, Legs Icon are the kind of paintings that make Ian Robertson Duncan the enigmatic painter that he is; one can’t resist looking, touching, feeling, and pondering the rich surfaces of the work, yet the work also dares us to look beneath its surface. Indeed, they extend to the realm of human relations and invite us to go beyond our own layered and complex surfaces.
Before canvas became popular in the 16th century, wood panel was the normal form of support for a painting. Panel painting is very old, so old in fact, that today we almost can’t make the cognitive leap from a concept of painting on canvas to a concept of painting on wood. Unless, that is to say one is familiar with Greek and Roman painting from the 1st to 3rd centuries! Yet panel painting has always been the normal support for the Icons of Byzantine and eastern Orthodox art in the 5th and 6th century. This period is most significant because it witnessed a transformation in art. Indeed, scholars have shown that the art produced during the Byzantine Empire was marked by the development of a new aesthetic; the most salient feature of this new aesthetic was its “abstract,” or anti-naturalistic character. If classical art was marked by the attempt to create representations that mimicked reality as closely as possible, Byzantine art appeared to abandon this attempt in favor of a more symbolic approach. The interesting part, however, was that Byzantine audiences did not necessarily view these works as ‘abstract’ or ‘unnatural’ but as entirely representational of the subject-matter (most often imperial or religious) even when the representation of that subject did not correspond to reality.
Duncan’s Icons engage what one understands as abstraction today in order to represent the subjects of his paintings. In other words, one has to go through the abstract to get to ‘the real’. So just what is the reality of for example, Legs Icon (Lung) or Legs Icon (Ce La) or Legs Icon (Weather)? Like a Chinese puzzle box we are left to fiddle with the pieces of the puzzle until they fall into place – or not. The mysteriousness of Duncan’s subjects is precisely that they are deeply encoded within the formal qualities of the work, their titles, and our responses to them. The luminous pigmented wood panels that make up Legs Icon vary in size, shape, color, texture and content. They can be hung on a wall, placed on a pedestal, a mantelpiece, a floor, and held in one’s hands. Legs Icon is not simply a clever play on words but a reference to the language –the Lexicon- of painting. As such, each painting can be conceived of as an inventory of lex-themes; discrete units that make up the icon, that place the object, and its subject, squarely at the center of our attention. Just like the icons of Byzantine, they demand a certain kind of work from the viewing subject: they are paintings and they are more than paintings.
By the 8th century AD Byzantine art sparked a fierce debate over the role of art in religious worship and resulted in the restriction of religious art, in what became known as a period of Byzantine iconoclasm. It would not take too much of a stretch of the imagination, on our part, to see Duncan’s return to painting, through the proscription of the canvas, and his relationship to the viewer, as similarly iconoclastic.
