an aesthetic was being formed which could be summarised by the idea of a dispersal of gravity by light
When she was training at the Slade, the life room drawing class offered the opportunity to develop skills related to analytical modes of observation, but instead of the clear distinction of figure and ground relationships, she became fascinated by much more ambiguous attentions such as the point at with the body of a model touched the surround of background wall space. This could be defined abstractly as the points at which visibilities touched upon, or found continuity, within the invisible. Out of this labour, an aesthetic was being formed which could be summarised by the idea of a dispersal of gravity by light. Instead of the plumb line certainty of objective place, there was instead the production of a floating space without the clear distinction of a singular gestalt of figure and ground relationship.
Within the subsequent painting practice there has been a distinct connection to a tradition of painting which extends from late Titian, through to Romanticism, and the Symbolism of Moreau and Redon. The figures within this lineage are that of dissolution, evanesce, incarnation, fragmentation, de-materialisation, intensity, blindness, illumination, depth, and sublimity. Rather than being an image close to the impulse of naming, the image instead flickers on the edge of its dissolution by threatening to disappear back into the empty ground from which it first appeared. In this sense the image is retained as a hypnotic pulsation beyond the threshold of representation. The image is therefore closer to a condition of a musical rhythm detached from objects of attention. Something emerges on the edge of the instant on which it finds occurrence, but it continues as a form of endurance without touching a future which would inscribe it within permanence. Therefore, the real is portrayed as the vulnerability to the stoppage of time, an infinite vulnerability. The question for this as an art is of retaining it surface, whilst presenting to wreckage of the force of dissolution through which it passes through? This question is retained as a condition that rather than being dispensed with, issues out of the vulnerability of time that is foundational to the image (out of which it emerges). It is this very vulnerability that gives rise to a ‘sensuous shining’ that announces itself as an art.
Gustave Moreau exerted a both a pronounced and more hidden influence on Modernist painting. Most importantly this influence was exerted by his use of light which appeared to be both within and without the painting. It is as though these different orders of light cohere together to form a surface of the painting, but it is this optical and mystical mixing of light that solicits attention on a multiple of levels. In context of late Modernist art this relationship between the employment of distinct plastic mixing of pigments to create optical experience opens out the possibility of disavowing a mechanical approach to the presentation of light as given. This has become particularly evident in terms of a marked incline in the way many painters have discovered with Baroque and Symbolist painting in order to reinscribe the conjunction of the painterly mark with the possibility of announcing invisibility on the level of its trace.
In the painting practice of Nina Murdoch, there is a loss of instrumental directionality and therefore nothing is presented as an arena through which something might be grasped. Within this space of painting, misrecognition subsumes the activity of the concept rendering a radical passivity in its wake. What is implied within this is that rather than be made by the image we are undone by. This also indicates that that aesthetic experience does not enter presence and instead it resides within the opacity that might be experienced as obscurity within the reception of the image. The same gestures are repeated because there is no way of passing through the knot which constates the drive that gives rise to the image. There is in this a way of being with this experience which rehearses a way of stay close to the intensity discovered within the play of rupture and rapture enacted outside of programmatic schema. It becomes difficult to write about such an experience of painting because of the complexity of layering that is at once materialist but also consists out of a process of folds within the processes of subjective formation.
Within this circulation of this art, the sense is of delicacy that holds onto a balance between material trace and ecstatic release. The shimmering of light that is generated as part of the play within this circulation that stages dissolution and offering, is at the root of the aesthetic experience. As an experience it is detached from the object and attracts the subject into its orbit to close the difference between object and subject in order to stage the feeling of a single substance as a generative principle. For Romantic artists such as Friedrich and Turner light was deity amid all appearance but in these works, light is linked to the sense of the beyond of representation. Thus, the shimmer of light is linked to the power of difference which resists conceptual reduction.
What links the shimmer, the pulse, the tremble, the shine, a quality of radiance, that might be experienced in aesthetic experience, is the way that material substance has been linked to the ontological exposure. Within painting the experiments linked to the layering of paint, optical mixing of pigment, the employment of glazes, blobs and stains, dissolves and washes, are all linked to the pursuit of the encounter with light. With this are the counterpoints of shadow, the night, spectrality, blindness, and dissolution all serves to link the ecstatic with the space of the tragic or trauma This in turn provides the link between the visual and the temporal. With this digression, there might be a claim that the assembly of a surface of the painting is not the starting point of the exploration of the depth of the work but rather the means by which the dialectic of surface and depth become a substance in common, thus negating the dualism of appearance and essence. Thus, painting in this instance, is rendered as exposure, experiment, and ecstatic trace. The art of Nina Murdoch both renews the memory of such a circulation, but also restores an impulse towards the difference that is constituted within its fabrication.