The Stain of Memory by Colin Glen

‘A fantasy of referentiality sustains the entire will to see.’ Georges Didi-Huberman

I have long been haunted by Rachel Howard's portraits. In the gaze of each subject there is a quiet poetry, a returning

look. Each encounter suggests the simplicity of direct contact, a knowingness of one experiences when in the presence of another being, another person. What has fascinated me for so long is how the artist has articulated this experience of presence.

Howard selects a face from her archive of photographs of friends and family which she has steadily accumulated since she first possessed a camera, and stains it through from the back of the canvas. She then works into the images by hand in a manner which is reminiscent of the touching up of negatives with special inks in early photographic portraiture. Howard embraces this the contingency of this act of staining, allowing the suggestions of indeterminate shapes to swell and billow so that each visage becomes the coalescence, rather than the construction, of features. Like the 'amorphous mass' figured in 'Les Chants Des Maldoror' or in Marcel Duchamp's "paysage fautif", the irregular form of a seminal stain that constituted a lover's gift, Howard's imperative is to recognize and articulate a certain liquidity in our experience of the world.

Following visceral instinct, Howard's responses to the images through the touch of her hand, show a certain irreverence for the photograph's status as index; its 'authenticity' as evidence of contact with the world. Many artists have worked across the borders of photography and painting, but Howard's portraits operate simultaneously as photographs and paintings in the eye of the viewer. As photographs one immediately trusts that they are a record of a real person, they manifest the quality of presence of absence' which Roland Barthes attributed to a photograph of his late mother as a child. We desire for the image to be almost a remaining fragment of that person, a touch of their presence. Such personal photographs draw us back into the past, "the photograph will open a window on the past and the past will return our look.? However, Catherine Keenan suggests that personal photographs need not only induce passive absorption in nostalgia, but can also actively invest the present with meaning? She cites her own attempts to attribute to photographs of absent friends and family on her pinboard the status of memory-image, and in doing so re-investsing the images with 'aura', that quality which Walter Benjamin described as 'the associations which tend to cluster around the object of a perception'4 The 'aura' that Howard's portraits exude comes from her practice of developing a relationship with the image by painting into it. We can feel the touch of the hand of the artist even while we desire for the image to be a 'pure' photograph. We sense that a person has been there in the making. As a consequence of this process, the paintings convey in Duchampian terms more the quality of an 'apparition' rather than a mere appearance'. The portraits emanate that uncanny quality a traditional portrait often possesses where one has the sense that someone is present in the room. In Howard's paintings the subjects are in the process of coming to form whilst at the same time suggest the evanescence of life. Howard has always envisaged her portraits sitting in the context of a Museum and it is particularly appropriate that the work should hang in place of the family portraits in the domestic setting of the Museum Van Loon. This emplacement, analogous to the way personal photographs can stand in for memory, articulates her awareness of how cultural memory operates. In the project of Modernism, the genre of photography was seen to replace representational painting as a more appropriate genre for the new, attempting to affect amnesia of the tradition of the history of art. It was the portrait genre which lost out most in this purge, replaced almost overnight by photography as early as the mid 1gth century. In Howard's deft move of imperceptibly conflating the touch of the hand with touch of the real, she allows the suppressed memories of a pantheon of faces from the history of art to stain through the white walls of Modernism to our consciousness. She does this by working with images which display a generic gaze, using and her contemporary rediscovery of sfumato", the blurring of expression around the eyes and corners of mouth. In turn, the resulting paintings mirror our recovered visual memories of a host of faces from the history of art. We recognise a Reynolds in a child's face, a Velasquez in an old face, the wistful blankness of Watteau's Gilles in one, the cool seductiveness of Manet's Olympia in another.

Howards' portraits perform for a cultural context what Keenan describes as possible for the personal photograph, they invest meaning into existing forms, not the gravitational pull back of nostalgia into the past, but an enrichment of the present through the cluster of associations. Where a downward draw ofin her 'suicide paintings' manifests what Brian Dillon has called bare life', the subjects of Howards' portraits are suspended on and within the canvas. They hang weightless, the canvas being not the confines of the image but suggestive of an expanded field of possibility which the subject inhabits. The subject is suspended like a butterfly, the last thing to emerge from Pandora's box, as if by hope and belief alone. Rather than the petrification of reality through the photographic, the portraits, encased as they are in dark cabinet frames, speak more of Howard's professed interest in immortalising her subjects. These works speak of the exquisite fragility of hope.

TBC