Via Picta

When I say that my paintings are Western, what I mean is that they seek the concretization of no state that is without the limits of western reason, no esoteric, extra-sensory or divine attributes to be achieved by praying & terror. Those who can claim that these [limits] are exceeded are exhibiting self imposed limitation as to the tensile limits of the imagination within those limits. In other words, that there is no yearning in these paintings for Paradise, or divination. On the contrary they are deeply involved in the possibility of ord(inary) humanity. - Mark Rothko (c. 1950) He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. - Isaiah 53:3

The aestheticisation of violence and human suffering is

a constant - indeed, arguably, a need, a requirement and

an instrument - of the Western artistic tradition. In her 2002

article, 'Looking at War: Photography's view of devastation

and death', Susan Sontag highlighted our uninterrupted

appetite for 'pictures showing bodies in pain', noting: 'The

statue group of the writhing Laocoön and his sons, the

innumerable versions in painting and sculpture of the Passion

of Christ, and the immense visual catalogue of the fiendish

executions of the Christian martyrs - these are surely intended

to move and excite, to instruct and exemplify. The viewer

may commiserate with the sufferer's pain - and, in the case

of the Christian saints, feel admonished or inspired by model

faith and fortitude - but these are destinies beyond deploring

or contesting.'

Despite the advent of abstract painting, and the relative

decline in the instructional usage of religious imagery that

Sontag makes reference to, bodily pain continues to be

a crucial subject for artists. Abstract art seeks, alongside

a means of expressing the infinite and the sublime, ways

of arousing feelings of constraint and unease; of portraying

archetypal violence, as dark as the night when reason sleeps,

as red as bloodshed, and as speechless as the inexpressibility

of the facts and the folly of the motivations - in short, ways

of representing the human condition, the horrors of war,

and inequality. These are themes that have proved central

preoccupations for Rachel Howard, whose work explores how

to convey through colour and technique, or - as here - the

loosely blocked-out sketch of a photographic image endlessly

repeated by the media, what Mark Rothko defined as the

basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy and doom.?

As a symbol of the fragility of earthly life, the image of

the Christs patiens (the suffering Christ) sits at the heart

of Western iconography, transcending dogmas or religious

beliefs. From Bacon's crucifixions to Grosz's depiction of

Christ in a gas mask and Beuys' readymade crucifixion of

bottles and cables, from Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel

According to St. Matthew (1964) to Mel Gibson's The

Passion of the Christ (2004), Jesus' struggle is depicted as

that of an ordinary man, of all men, against the banality of evil

and the violence of power. In the Repetition is Truth - Via

Dolorosa series, Howard takes one of the cruellest and most

dramatic passages of the New Testament as her subject: the

Via Crucis (or Dolorosa), the last hours of Jesus' life - the

two-kilometre path that Christ was forced to walk to his

crucifixion, from the centre of Jerusalem to Golgotha.

The Repetition is Truth paintings are Howard's personal

and pictorial commentary on human rights abuses and

mankind's inherent ability to inflict cruelty on each other. The

number of canvases mirror the fourteen temporal divisions

through which the Church formalised Christ's final hours on

earth. The Catholic liturgy cites these, in order, as: Jesus in

the garden of Gethsemane; Jesus is betrayed by Judas and

arrested; Jesus is condemned by the Sanhedrin; Jesus is

denied by Peter; Jesus is judged by Pilate; Jesus is scourged

and crowned with thorns; Jesus takes up his cross; Jesus is

helped by Simon of Cyrene to carry his cross; Jesus meets

the women of Jerusalem; Jesus is crucified; Jesus promises

his reign to the repentant thief; Jesus entrusts Mary and John

to each other; Jesus dies on the cross; Jesus is laid in the

tomb.° Betrayal, indifference, pity, injustice, the blind brutality

of power, physical suffering, mourning, loss, death, oblivion -

the Stations encompass everything that is experienced in life.

Christian pilgrims had begun visiting the locations of the

Stations in Jerusalem by the fourth century CE. From the

fifteenth century onwards, the Via Dolorosa was replicated at

outdoor sites across Europe. The Stations continue to be

theatrically performed and simulated in the Catholic world in

the days around Easter, with the Pope presiding over the Via

Crucis on Good Friday at the Colosseum in Rome. Their

pictorial presentation has remained fundamental to the

history of Western art, Giotto's exquisite fresco cycle for the

Scrovegni Chapel in Padua (c. 1305) acting as one of the

earliest examples. Innumerable artists, from Dürer to Tiepolo,

and Rembrandt to Holbein, have taken the Passion as their

subject. Modern-day exponents of the theme include Matisse

and Clemente, Hirst and Bailey, Fontana and Newman. The

latter took eight years, from 1958 to 1966, to complete what

became one of the last century's most important painting

cycles. Newman's Stations of the Cross featured a central

visual motif that had preoccupied the artist for a decade

- the vertical line, gash or band, a gesture he called the

'zip'. He eliminated colour, painting directly on raw canvas

with black and white, and produced a series of variations on

the off-centre zip that had no discernible correspondence to

the events of the Via Dolorosa. Newman emphasised that he

was not presenting a narrative, but rather a singular and yet

unifying experience, which the artist described as 'each man's

agony: the agony that is single, constant, unrelenting, willed

- world without end'. Ultimately, Newman's Stations are

concerned with the fundamental Why?' of existence, 'the

question that has no answer'."

It is around a similar convergence of the human and

earthly, existential and everyday that Howard focuses her

own cycle. Her fourteen canvases do not depict the Passion

of Christ, but rather, through the title and the rhythmic, almost

imperceptibly changing sequence of painted shadows on

their surfaces, evoke a broader violence - one that is extreme

and persistent. Howard deliberately uses industrial paints to

create a tension between day-to-day life, utilitarianism and

essentiality. She employs gravity to influence the direction of

the paint, applying numerous layers, so that the final piece

is determined by the weight of the material and by chance,

as much as her own intentions. Often working on three or

four canvases simultaneously, she leaves the paintings to

rest between the application of each layer, and then, once

dried, she will sometimes turn them 180 degrees to repeat the

gravitational pour'; a continuous balance between control and

the renunciation of control. The opposing forces of certainty

and uncertainty are expressed through the tension between

the physicality of the process and the subject matter.

These paintings demand the viewer's active participation.

The glossy, almost-reflective surfaces change colour

according to the light in which they are displayed, at times

Rembrandt, Descent from the Cross, 1633

Rachel

Howard, Paintings of Violence (Why I am not

mere

Christian),:

2011-2016

seeming to emulate the viewer's own shadow like inseruiable

mirrors. They invite us to lose ourselves in the watery

movement of the paint, in the tonal vibrations of the reflections.

in a visual oxymoron, the glossiness of the paint appears to

obscure the content, like a descending mist; the cumulative

effect is one of loss. The shimmering tones - from grey to

ochre - as well as the larger-than-human scale, give the

canvases a monumental gravitas. Thresholds to nowhere,

inaccessible veils, interrupted variously by shadows of

blood-red streaks, or a funereal black box, the faded and

trembling trace of a sepulchre.

in Howard's more recent series, Paintings of Violence

(Why I am not a mere Christian) (2011-2016), she makes

explicit use of the evocative potential of the colour red as

representative of blood, and therefore violence. As in the

Repetition is Truth series, the paintings see Howard forging

a connection between the sublimating energy of abstraction

and the symbolic trace of figuration, albeit reduced to its

minimum terms. In the ten works that form the Paintings of

Violence series (along with a single sculpture), Howard uses

a T-square, itself reminiscent of a crucifix, to slice a layer of

blood-red colour onto the canvas from top to bottom. This

process is then repeated using the same colour, until the

surface is saturated in alizarin crimson oil paint. Displayed

in sequence alongside each other, they appear as enlarged

details of the rivulets of blood that dripped from Christ's body

on the cross - an image that has been dematerialised in

pure paint by artists including Fra Angelico, Mantegna, van

der Weyden, Grünewald, Cranach and Velázquez, and in

pure colour in more recent work by Twombly, Richter, Nitsch

and Kapoor.

In 2011, the Repetition is Truth cycle was exhibited in the

church of Santa Maria Donnaregina in Naples, alongside a

series of fourteenth-century frescoes by Filippo Rusuti and

the school of Pietro Cavallini, depicting events from the lile

and death of Christ and various other martyrs. Howard's

canvases worked in perfect dialoque with the Golhic sacraly

of the church, with its powerful frescoes and extraordinary

tuneral monument of Mary of Hungary by Tina dl Comano and

Gagliardo Primario. The decision to exhibit them there was

taken many years after the conception of Howard's @yole, lif

the juxtaposition of figurative and abstract forms, dealing

with the same themes, in a single interior space, strengthens

The thesis that the abyss of violence can be expressed not

only through bodily representation, but also through silence

and the negation of the image.

At the altar of the Santa Maria Donnaregina, Howard

hung a fifteenth, smaller canvas - Study (2015) - a fulfilment,

a prologue, a visual epitaph of the whole series: an image

of a hooded prisoner tied up with electric wires in the Iragi

prison of Abu Ghraib. The painting is taken from a photograph

of Ali Shallal al-Qaisi being tortured by US military personnel,

the focus of a media storm in 2004, replicated countless

times over all around the world. Depicting al-Qaisi standing

on a box with arms open - his stance evocative of Christ on

the cross - the image has become a contemporary symbol

of brutality and evil. Like the multiple representations of the

Christs patiens, a crucial source of the image's potency

sprung from its mass repetition, through which it became

an immediately recognisable emblem, a reflection of the

insatiable, abiding cycle of worldly suffering. The force of the

Abu Ghraib image was also, in Howard's mind, attributable

to the forms present in the photograph itself. The box al-Qaisi

stands upon - almost a plinth - appeared to the artist to be

a succinct, twenty-first-century manifestation of the crucifix,

an object defined by its banality, yet complicit in the most

excruciating degradation of humanity.

It is this conflation of the contemporary and ancient,

iconographic and abstract, that partly accounts for the

extraordinary power of Howard's rhythmical, circuitous

series. It is also, however, its universality. In her 1939 essay,

The lliad or the Poem of Force', Simone Weil noted that the

human soul never ceases to undergo modification through

the force that is both wielded by men and rules over them.

Weil maintained that this force, which drives our present

and our future as much as our past, finds its 'most beautiful

and flawless of mirrors' in Homer's ancient poem.5 Howard's

Repetition is Truth series acts similarly as a mirror; it does

not preach or moralise, but plainly reflects the fragility and

complexity of the human condition with clarity and exquisite

beauty. Simultaneously, it concretises the essence of painting

and its continuous, necessary presence in human history.

BIE

Albrecht Dürer, Bearing of the Cross

(from the Engraved Passion),

1512

1 Susan Sontag, 'Looking at War:

Photography's view of devastation

and death', The New Yorker (9th

December 2002)

2 Mark Rothko in conversation with

Selden Rodman, Conversations

with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair,

1957), p.92

3 As cited in Sara Maitland and

Chris Gollon, Stations of the Cross

(London: Continuum, 2009), p.3

4 See Barnett Newman: Selected

Writings and Interviews, ed. John

P. O'Neill (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1992), p.188

5 See Simone Weil's The Illad or the

Poem of Force': A Critical Edition, ed.

and trans. James P. Holoka (New York:

Peter Lang Publishing, 2006), p.45