Sky Garden: Simone Griffin

For Sky Garden, Simone Griffin’s second solo exhibition with Nasha Gallery, time spent away from her Australian homeland has broadened the scope of her painterly output. The tyranny of distance allows for an alternative vantagepoint, culminating in an explosion of experience and understanding. Lodged between Western abstraction and dot painting (a sect of Australian Aboriginal art), Griffin’s compositions splinter out into vivid and rhythmic formal patterns. This isn’t an explicitly Pointillist agenda, however, though Griffin parallels certain fundamental aspects of the style. These paintings are perspectivally challenging, constituting both aerial views of mystical topographies and microcosmic cross-sections of specific locales. In an essay for the Whitechapel retrospective of Prunella Clough’s work, Michael Middleton writes that the artist “is fascinated by the conjunction of sky and land,” a sensibility that Griffin absorbs and expresses as well. The two artists share this investment in the natural world as well as a textural and sublime formal sensitivity.

This work is driven by Griffin’s elastic memory mapping. Rather than pursuing a calculated formal path, her paintings are adrift in a sea of impulse. Griffin, however, maintains certain logics in order to guide the ship. While the compositions are physically flat, Griffin remains concerned with building depth through vapor-thin layers. When confronting each morass of stippled pigments, one is cast into the artist’s imaginative arrangements of shape and chroma. These compositions are consistently attached to real locations - often consigned to Australia. A general spirit of place

is abstracted here, Griffin holding fast to what Clough achieved by atomizing “the memory of the experience of seeing something,” per Sue Breakell.

An unconventional painterly procedure is deployed here by way of the airbrush machine. This technological intervention is not without tradition, however. One can track the machinic mode back to works by James Rosenquist, Barrie Cook, and even Man Ray. Griffin mines the industrial tool for autonomous properties, leaning on its imaginal potential. In the compositional mode, she tracks the weight and viscosity of the acrylics and selects colors based on an innate, visceral response to the overall palette. The device has its own tempo and cacophonic nature, which drives Griffin into a “machine mode.” The consistency of rendering dot patterns is also a meditative process, so a conjunction between automatism and transcendentalism takes shape in her expanded painterly field. This may seem paradoxical–the friction between content and method–however, there’s a relative uniformity to Griffin’s amalgamated format.

Griffin enacts a certain piety in the studio. She clings to Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and, more recently, Simone Weil’s machinations. In Gravity and Grace the French philosopher writes, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” Griffin fades in and out of cognizance as her dots expand and mutate. But when she’s present their formation changes - each dot becomes a moment in time, like accumulated prayers.

– Text by Reilly Davidson