Beyond time: Brice Marden’s last paintings

Contributed by Kim Uchiyama / The dreamtime, as understood in Aboriginal culture, is a fully integrated reality lived daily, a total experience that holds past, present, and future in balance. From this perspective, the late Brice Marden’s last paintings feel both old and new, evoking an ancient mindset while embodying a new sentience and haptic presence born of the vulnerability and fragile urgings that arose as he grappled with his aging body and the ravages of cancer. The show’s title, Let the painting make you, is apt. It is fundamental to Marden’s work that painting spoke through him from the inside out: although he always adhered to his own set of rules, he never imposed an intellectualized concept on his creations. 

These paintings can be seen to evoke shamanistic references to the natural world and its undercurrent of chthonic realms and unfixed time, found in paleolithic cave painting. In the seminal The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art, David Lewis-Williams proposes a theory of transcendence as it relates to the performative aspect of cave painting. Rather than focusing on its ritual depictions as conjuring good fortune for the hunt, as many anthropologists do, Lewis-Williams argues that rock art may have functioned like a kind of membrane between the exigencies of daily life and metaphysical vision. He suggests that people made cave paintings to summon and understand elusive concepts of time and space, construing the endeavor as a spiritual one. In cave paintings there is an immediacy of expression – a sense of the body relinquishing control in response to the confinement of the cave as it searches for a new language that reaches beyond immediate physical circumstances.

It is impossible to know if Marden was trying to capture this kind of experience for himself, but the paintings themselves hint that it is plausible. One of the rooms in the exhibition contains only drawings (except for a single painting), and they do seem to indicate an investigation of the mark and its intimations of language. 

Some years ago, I visited Pech Merle cave in southern France. One wall is covered with negative handprints, possibly made by spitting and blowing earth pigments over one hand pressed to the rock surface. I felt the presence of the makers of these prints, and the experience was uncanny. They may have been intended as signatures, much like contemporary graffiti. But they also could have constituted a kind of sign language elaborated over time, with one layer of prints overlaid by a later one. The layering could indicate that the various makers of the handprints saw themselves as parts of communal wholes and, beyond that, elements of a universal continuum.

Marden’s painting below contains the remnants of charcoal ciphers, washed over by a green-gold paint layer in which a meandering red line, leaning and shifting left, forms shapes. The right-to-left rolling movement reminded me of the surging lions of Grotte Chauvet (now unfortunately closed to the public but pictured below Marden’s painting). Note also the mirroring reverse movement, characteristic to Marden’s painting: detectable near the center of the notional pride of lions are the head and chest of a wayward animal as it turns back to meet a second one.

The cave in Sicily’s Monte Pellegrino, near Palermo, shown below, contains an unusual depiction of the human figure in prehistoric art. Grotta dell’Addaura, as it is known, shows bodies performing dance-like movements. The human figure is more fully developed in terms of bodily references than it tends to be in most cave paintings, in which they are typically two-dimensional and stick-like.

Marden’s lines feel like journeys undertaken deliberately and then reconsidered, slowly feeling out their parameters and then recursively turning back on themselves to revise prior movements. Nothing is lost in this accretion – all becomes part of the act of making. Conveying this experience, and that of being “made” by the act of painting, is Marden’s essential achievement, and it is a substantial one. In his late paintings, we see his courage in the face of fallibility and mortality in committed pictorial evolutions that still seem to question their own history. Yet their distinct linkage to primordial paintings affords them firmer ground by embracing shared humanity that spans generations.

“Brice Marden: Let the painting make you,” Gagosian, 980 Madison Avenue, New York, NY. Through December 22, 2023.

About the author: Kim Uchiyama is an abstract painter whose work is included in numerous public and private collections in the United States and Europe, including the Delaware Museum of Art, San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts (Texas), Beaumont Art Museum of Southeast Texas, University of Tennessee at Knoxville,  Architectenatelier Wijns (Wolvertem, Belgium), Spazio Contemporaneo Agora (Palermo, Italy), and PRO.D.A.S. Ingegneri Associati (Palermo, Italy). She is a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow, a two-time MacDowell fellow, and a member of American Abstract Artists.

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