Tory Folliard Gallery - Call of the Wild: Paintings by Michael Noland

Catalog Essay: NOTES ON NOLAND, by James Yood, for the artist's Retrospective Exhibition at South Shore Arts, Jun-July, 2007

Intense. Obsessive. Determined. Dramatic. Scrupulous use of repetitive, almost fastidious wavy pattern, sets 3D world into 2D pattern. Affinity for heightened states, some deeply engaged connection to familiar but here potentially ambiguous subject matter. A kind of pictorial busyness, latter day horror vacuii, keeping the viewer bouncing around the picture, a predilection for jamming incident into every corner of his work, sending you on a merry chase after yourself. Like an Aztec artist doing a circus poster, a travel poster. He doesn't represent his subjects, he stalks them into a suggestive strangeness. Controlled color, holds it a bit back. Pattern like the curvy and meandering ripples on the surface of your brain, not linear, kind of tubular, rhythmic, mesmerizing. Chicago chops-descendant of Yoshida, Wirsum, Brown. Folksy, outdoorsy, but as in Deliverance, quality of evil, brooding, dissonance, serpent in Eden. Oddly iconic, central element dominates, becoming a sign.

Yes, some notes on Noland. For this is an artist best approached from the side, so to speak, it's not a bad thing to be a little wary of Noland's work, a little nervous about the exchange you're about to have with him. He ratchets things up, selects something from the world-often an animal, or something else from nature-and then churns both it and its environment through an idiosyncratic transmogrification into stylized and sometimes hypnotic pattern. It's about taking something evocative from the world, something with a level of historical or cultural baggage, something you're already a little unsure of, and then subjecting it to a kind of compulsive stylistic limning into repetitive rivulets of color. It's a fixation of focus, Noland's manner of describing, processing reality through his patient translation of the real into design. And it's crucial; it animates his entire pictorial surface, both visually and iconographically. Everything seems to partake of some life force, there's some kind of energy slowly oozing allover the place, a sense of corporeal tempo every bit as much in a rocky cliff as it is in the body of a hurtling fish. Sometimes more in the cliff than the fish; Noland's focus on some central (literally central, as in the center of the painting) element that he places parallel to the picture plane gives each work a clear protagonist. It gets rendered strange, sinister, eerie, out of sorts, slightly but causally discombobulated, until it becomes a troubled fish or buffalo or wrecked car or deer or armadillo or rocky crag (note his subject matter, a somewhat masculine repertoire, a latter day version of the outdoorsman/hunter), as if it had a dark secret to impart, a tale of woe to tell. But how, how does Noland suggest such sentiments? To my mind, it's through his great mastery of pattern and desperation. Yes, back to those rivulets and striations, to the curvy and the tubular, and to their echoes folded deep within the circuitry of our bodies, to the peculiar meandering geometry of the contours of stuff like intestines and brains. In a stunningly evocative way, Noland renders an inside on the outside, and it culls from us an almost instinctive reflex of fixed fascination, of the recognition that this biologic summoning is sort of what we're made of too.

It's an old cliché in art history that every work of art can be seen as a self-portrait of its creator. Personhood is all, things such as subject matter and style become just vehicles for it to manifest itself. Michael Noland brings to every work a kind of fierceness, a density of thinking and seeing, a strong desire to impose on the ambiguous and fascinating chaos of the world a kind of procedure and discipline that can offer order and structure where it might not really reside. Our relationship to and with nature has never been more strained, more distant; Noland's work is both a testament to the significance of that relationship, and a wistful echo to a time when it might have appeared more stable, more organic. It is rooted in a respect for what might be lost forever, not in a nostalgic appeal to some fantasy of a sylvan past, but summoning instead a sense of the ceaseless and wonderful strangeness of nature, an exotic otherness now best found embedded within ourselves, our history, and our consciousness.

-James Yood teaches art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and writes regularly for Artforum magazine.

Click here to view works by Michael Noland.