INTO THE LABYRINTH

This is a written response to Steve Joy‘s solo exhibition ‘American Sublime’ at Garden of the Zodiac Gallery, Omaha, NE USA. 

The exhibition began on 3rd October 2024 and closed 1st December 2024. 

A m e r I c a n

S U B L I M E

'Garden of Forking Paths', 2024, Oil on canvas, 72 x 60 inches

I

Carlo Scarpa’s ‘Olivetti Showroom’ in Venice provided welcome shelter for artist Steve Joy as the chilly afternoon rain began to fall. Reflecting the mechanical components of a typewriter, the building’s architectural voids of empty space cocooned Steve’s latest idea – the concept of a new painting. 

Angles, atriums, passageways and mezzanines all replete with Scarpa’s signature detailing aided the conception of Steve’s silver hued ‘An Afternoon in Venice, (Olivetti)’. The rhythmic form of the painting’s cubist, sculptural in-out pattern is reminiscent of urban infrastructure. The grooves of the work echo the voids of Scarpa’s design, like the notches of a key, complementary to a lock of the unknown and the unfamiliar. 

Shining. Like the weak sunlight trapped within Saint Mark’s Square, raindrops glittering beneath the watchful gaze of Venice’s winged lion. 

An Afternoon In Venice (Olivetti) 2024, mixed media on wood panels, 64 x 24 inches

Meanwhile, the essence of the wild hills and towering castellos further south in Umbria are captured rather serenely in the painting ‘Architecture of Silence (Umbria)’. Radiant stripes and a regal section of magenta become harmonic stanzas to the silvery sections and earth-hued bronzes characterising this stately piece. 

We may think of Medieval Icons, simply displayed in the soft hush of Perugia Museum. Aged and cracked. The Medici realm transposed to the time and place of another. The settings of Judea, Gethsemane and Galilee transferred to the manicured pastures of Medieval Italy. In a similar fashion, Steve’s painting transports the emboldened palettes of saints’ robes to a time and place both current and new, past and familiar to retell miraculous stories of Byzantine origin. 

'Architecture of Silence (Umbria)' 2023-4, Mixed media on wood panels, 71 x 68 inches

The horizontal bands of two-toned marble forming the flying buttresses and architectural supports of the Duoma di Siena find their own contemporary inversion in the stripes of the sunken section in Steve’s ‘Architecture of Silence (Umbria)’. Magnificent medieval architecture is reimagined in oil and gold leaf. This painting is a fitting if somewhat nostalgic response to Steve’s time living in Italy during the late 1980s, admiring the ambitious abstract painters of America from afar. 

Duomo di Siena in Tuscany, Italy: medieval cathedral built in Gothic Roman style with precious marble

Located in a quiet, still corner at the back of Garden of the Zodiac Gallery a delicate piece fashioned from three shallow boxes – once lens cases of an unknown optician – floats on the wall as though a pale, soft cloud. Wisps of aqua intersperse the veils of porcelain white and brushed lettering of ‘St Francis of Assisi’, the title of the work. As fresh as a marble altar piece gleaming in a cavernous Basilica, this painting recalls the snowy white feathers of a dove, once preached to by Saint Francis himself. 

Italian influences find a new sense of being in Omaha, a city which lies on the same latitude as Rome. 

II

Installation view of 'Seasons (Harvest)' 2024, Mixed media with beeswax on wood panels, 19 x 9 inches

‘American Sublime’ may refer to the work of the Hudson Valley School. Painters such as Jasper Francis Copsey (1823 – 1900) and Stanford Robinson Gifford (1823 – 80) created large scale, panoramic landscape paintings to capture the seemingly boundless opportunities of ‘The New World’.

Stanford Robinson Gifford, 'October in the Catskills', 1880, Oil on canvas, 92.2 x 74.1 cm, 36.75 x 29.25 inches

Stretching back to the British tradition of Romantic landscape painting as established by Constable and Turner amongst others, the ‘American Sublime’ not only rendered the grandeur of the native American landscape but suggested a sense of continuity. Principles of European visual culture from the ‘Old World’ could be linked to the frontiers of the ‘New’. 

A once ‘unknown’ continent could be depicted so as to feel familiar by employing techniques of classical landscape painting. The use of exquisite luminosity and elegant graduations in light and tone recalled the Arcadian paintings of Claude Lorrain (1600 – 1682). Explorers and god-fearing settlers of this immense new continent could be depicted in paintings of the ‘American Sublime’ as though the heroic Grecian gods of a century before.

Jasper Francis Cropsey, 'Autumn - On The Hudson River', 1860, Oil on canvas, 152.4 x 274.3 cm, 60 x 108 Inches, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

America’s pristine views and immense wilderness also enabled painters to blend notions of time with landscape. Past and present could stretch both forwards and backwards in such works, connecting Europe of the ‘past’ to ‘The New World’ of the ‘future’. Expressing national and cultural identity, ‘American Sublime’ paintings ensured self-preservation and engaged strong emotions. Spirituality was seen as enshrined within the natural world, reaching out beyond the seemingly ceaseless horizons to the west. 

Installation view of 'American sublime'

Described by Immanuel Kant as a ‘sort of tranquility tinged with terror,’ the concept of the ‘American Sublime’ finds contemporary relevance in Steve’s large scale paintings ‘Tlön’, ‘Orbis Tertius’ and ’Garden of Forking Paths’.  

Whilst these paintings are titled after the short stories, the ‘Ficciones’, of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) in ‘Labyrinths’, their scale, sense of past merging with present and veil of otherworldliness are akin to the ‘American Sublime’. 

Jorge Luis Borges

III

'Orbis Tertius', 2024, Mixed media on canvas and wood panels, 89 x 84 inches

In ‘Orbis Tertius’, the largest painting in the exhibition, horizontal bands of gold rest along the top of the focal, grid-like structure on canvas. More stripes lead downwards along the the left side of the work, collaborating with those above as though the trunk and overhanging branch of an ancient tree, its bark smoothed and golden in the glimmer of sunset.

Leaning a-symmetrically – simultaneously part of the painting yet also framing ‘Orbis Tertius’ – these zips of gold echo compositional techniques utilised by 19th century ‘American Sublime’ painters.

Literally and figuratively framing the canvas, these stripes of gold border the painterly layers like a crest, or illuminated lettering surrounding a Book of Hours. Steve’s use of gold leaf and varnish is technically inspired by Byzantine Icon paintings.

Glowing, as if to denote sunrise or clouds parting during the hour of sun down, ‘Orbis Tertius’ merges the Eastern shores of the ancient Byzantine world with the historical and ideological frontier of the west. 

The central canvas section of the painting unfolds before our eyes, as though a creased map from Lewis’ and Clark’s expedition. Bars of soft blue and deep gold rise and fall. Offering no clear route, are these blocks of colour sign posts as to the way, or obstacles along a mysterious pathway? Mirrored and mazed, our eyes follow these ‘corridors of time’, these ladders and angular roads that fork and split.  

A labyrinth of paint. A labyrinth of Time. Sometimes pushed into the background, like the wispy forms of a medieval church mural surrounded by tromp l’oeil, these markings converse with one another. These sensitively painted layers – sometimes rubbed away and brushed over –  recall the speckled and fragmented remains of a medieval fresco buried beneath centuries of plaster. 

'American Sublime' installation view with 'Orbis Tertius'

‘Orbis Tertius’ shares its title with that of the ‘provisional title’ of an encyclopaedia. This encyclopaedia details the ‘splendid history’ of an illusionary world – the fabled planet of Tlön – as told in the short story ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ by Borges. 

Translated into English, this encyclopaedia was originally written in one of the invented languages of the planet Tlön. In Borges’ short story we as readers are informed by the narrator that the extraordinary undertaking of creating a fabled planet with its own rules, laws, literature and languages took a secret society of intellectuals many years to achieve.

Steve presents us with a possible visualisation of this peculiar encyclopaedia and all its contents in the form of a magnificent abstract painting. We wonder within this subliminal landscape, in the artist’s labyrinth. Like the narrator in ‘The Library of Babylon’ or the dreamer who is a fragment of a dream in ‘The Circular Ruins’ we are caught within the weaving, winding trails of Borges’ imaginings. 

Steve’s ‘Orbis Tertius’  is simultaneously an alphabet, a mathematical equation of endless variables and a depiction of an illusionary place, symbolising its history and philosophy. An imagined past of a distant dream merges with the nodes of the present moment. Although features such as a frame bare resemblance to an overhanging tree, the zig-zag contours a maze or the grid of a map, we instead find ourselves within a labyrinth of the sublime. 

Installation view of 'The Bees Acknowledge Sovereignty (Lalibela)', 2024, Mixed media on canvas, 60 x 48 inches

IV

'Tlön', 2024, Oil on canvas and wood panel, 73 x 73 inches

The calming palette of ‘Tlön’ draws any passer-by in to the gallery from the passageway outside. Minimal and mediative, there is a clear link to the soothing vision of Agnes Martin. Another grid-like form, akin to mysterious runes plotted upon a piece of fabric, inhabit this pink blushed realm. In a similar fashion to Steve’s ‘Orbis Tertius’ painting, oblong marks of gold, white and bronze this time formulate an angular path spreading outwards from the centre of the pink plane. Once again, these markings and pathways control the eye’s route of passage across the lullabying field of pink. 

Even the subtle pencil lines echo the early works of Larry Poons. This  alternative network is a fainter though no less significant matrix contributing to the overall web of meaning and the labyrinth’s gravity. 

A striped edge of white and gold on the left side of the painting becomes a sort of gauge, of distance or time perhaps, or both, or neither, or some other qualifying measurement of Tlön’s being. A striped blind or a curtain pulled away to reveal a portal to another world. This two-tone measuring device offers a sense of proportion to the other linear forms of the work.

Reflecting the tension and complexity of a narrative by Borges, we come to accept the hidden meaning of Steve’s painting. 

The existence of the planet of Tlön is justified by Borges in his short story. Through the discovery of a strange compass, books and a bizarre dense metal cone, the world of Tlön is subtly inserted into our ‘own’ world within the story’s narrative. In the same way Steve’s painting radiates an otherworldly energy into ours’. 

Could Steve’s painting be a epilogue to Borges’ narrative, a further piece of evidence proving the existence of the apparently illusionary planet of Tlön?

We are transported to a curious dimension where what is real and what is unreal; what is fact and fiction; what has been painted and what has been rubbed away from the surface of the canvas all congruously exist. We fall into and through these many layers of meaning and circumstance as if in a sci-fi film. Our fall is cushioned only by the very existence of this painted labyrinth. 

The work’s complementary accents become more than a mere visualisation of an illusionary place. They become the exact and yet approximate world of Tlön itself. A world which exists only in the existence of another. A fictitious labyrinth within a work of fiction. Or a painting within a gallery. 

Borges’ Tlön gradually becomes the world and the world gradually becomes the fabled planet of Tlön. As such, we approach Steve’s painting with a sense of the Sublime. In the calm tranquility of acceptance and the metaphysical terror of intrusion from an otherworldly dimension, we receive Steve’s pink-hued painting as a portrayal of the ‘New World’ of our contemporary – and possibility even illusionary – age.   

V

Curves and angles perform a choreographed dance both ascending and descending along the central axis of the painting ‘Garden of Forking Paths’. Lines and parabolas echo the brick archways of the Gallery space. 

Steve began this painting following a trip to the railroad town of McCook in western Nebraska. The influence of the region’s green corn fields is evident in the soft toned palette and columnar format of the work, reflecting the rows and rows of vertically growing stalks in the American Midwest. A landscape of the Sublime.

Reflecting the mechanics of an unknown object, such as the ribbons of an Olivetti typewriter, the work even calls to mind the pillars and archways of a viaduct. The engineering wonders of the railway swiftly and radically transformed American life. A more connected and accessible ‘New World’ is perhaps represented by the columns and curves of a railroad swooping across a vast plain, possibly symbolised in the green backdrop of the painting. Echoing established conformities of the ‘American Sublime’ and the influence of earlier artists such as Claude Lorrain, the constructed yet fragmented feel of Steve’s painting may even recall the ancient Roman Aqueducts found across Italy and the rest of Europe.  

Dappled, like soft rays floating in through a stained glass window, the overall feel of the piece is delicate and mysterious. Gold lines frame the left side of the work; this is repeated on the right, though no enclosure is constructed. The lines are left open as though an entry way on an architectural plan. These partial borders, reflected in the painting ‘Orbis Tertius’ almost enable ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ to take on the form of a modernist style window. A window of a Scarpa design, overlooking a garden home to paths that twist and fork. 

Borges’ short story The Garden of Forking Paths tells of a secret agent’s last hours as he fulfils an assassination mission. Full of suspense and drama, the short story plays out almost like a thriller, the hunter becoming the hunted.  

The narrator discovers his target, Albert, lives in a Garden constructed by his own ancestor, Ts’ui Pên. Albert reveals Ts’ui Pên’s perplexing compositions – a circular book and maze. Yet the twist in this story is that the book and the maze are one and the same. The first page of the book is the same as the last page, making Ts’ui Pên’s book as chaotic and complicated as a maze. This incomplete but not false image of the universe is imagined and visualised by Steve in this painting. 

The diverting lines and painted lanes of Steve’s ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ take on a more complex meaning. Each mark may represent a divulging future, a universe splitting at a particular time as a choice is made or an event occurs. Therefore, it is a painting representing variations of shifting timelines. Yet, here, as with Ts’ui Pên’s circular book, the forking paths represent the idea that every single option in a given moment occurs, leading to the generation of new paths that fork themselves. . . 

Within this sublime view – whether from a window, or the pages of a circular book – is a lost maze of time. Rivers, provinces and kingdoms may be discovered within this painted velvet. Flooded, washed away and rebuilt, great landscapes of continents and sublime mountain ranges within gardens all reside within this painted construction. An infinite labyrinth engineered to spread between the future and past, reaching beyond the stars. A universe within a maze within a garden.

Just how the answer to Ts’ui Pên’s perplexing compositions are revealed in Borges’ short story in the danger of a secret mission, Steve presents us with an idea of sublime grandeur. We are presented with the very notion of something being beyond our control. Across centuries and centuries events only happen in the present moment, just as ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ finds itself inside a gallery with a garden – the Garden of the Zodiac Gallery. 

'Court of the Lions (Delos)' 2024, Mixed media on canvas and wood panel, 48 x 48 inches

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