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Denise Green

Semantic Amplitude

Ingrid Periz
Eyeline 86
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Two orders of marks: the photographic and the graphic, or rather, the graphemic, a looping doodle, a curlicue of o’s circling back and round on itself before venturing further. In painter Denise Green’s Ardennes Uncovered Forays 1 (2015), a black-and-white photograph of the Ardennes forest is interspersed with excised strips of a multi-coloured drawing. The two kinds of marks coexist in random stripes, the circles of white enclosed by coloured pencil offering a false homology—the fallacy of isomorphism—with the photographed spots of lichen on the trees’ darker bark. What are we to make of this similarity, and how might we understand the place of the photographic mark within a self-theorised painting practice that has long privileged private meaning?

It is now almost forty years since Green was categorised generationally and formally when her work was included in the Whitney Museum’s New Image Painting exhibition in 1978. A temporary grouping of ten painters whose approaches would subsequently diverge, the exhibition catalogued an ongoing effort to maintain painting’s viability in the face of minimalist and conceptual challenges. Green’s work fitted the general New Image schema of reduced forms placed against typically monochromatic but painterly backgrounds, and while New Image painters’ continued engagement with painting was soon eclipsed by neo-expressionism and a broader return to figuration, her own work moved for some time towards greater abstraction.1 She developed a repertoire of shapes, some of which had featured in work in the Whitney show, among them the house, the amphora, the fan, and the rose and it was clear that these images functioned less as representations than as something like symbols.

Green’s painting has been informed by both her graduate work at Hunter... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Saar (and Subjectivity) Section 2, 2014. Detail. One drawing and two photographs, 213 x 113cm each. Courtesy the artist.

Saar (and Subjectivity) Section 2, 2014. Detail. One drawing and two photographs, 213 x 113cm each. Courtesy the artist.

Ardennes Uncovered: Airborne, 2015. One photograph and seven drawings, 56.5 x 72cm; Installation view, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Belgium. Courtesy the artist.

Ardennes Uncovered: Airborne, 2015. One photograph and seven drawings, 56.5 x 72cm; Installation view, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Belgium. Courtesy the artist.