Yechel Gagnon’s PalimpsestAlexandria Pierce
Yechel Gagnon’s art inspires the same half-sensed longing stirred by Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) in his esoteric writings that encompass Chinese gardens and labyrinths. Palimpsest refers to layering in visual art, while in literary works the term palimpsest refers to “an infinite text, a palimpsest of multiple layers of discourse.” Works in the Exhibition The relief sculpture Palimpsest, measuring 10 x 35 feet (305 x 1067 cm), forms a mural comprising fourteen panels of gouged and chiselled spruce plywood. Created by a subtractive process, it is formed by ripping and chiselling with grinders, routers, sanders and knives to create eroded surfaces suggesting topographical forms, Chinese landscapes and a fictional mapping of the world. In the same gallery, a work entitled Plies, 2004, comprised of three free-standing columns, each 10 x 2 x 2 feet (305 x 61 x 61 cm), sanctifies the Sherman Gallery with its pristine serrated wooden forms that are resonant of Dolmens and temple architecture. Made by an additive process, two of the columns lean at 89.5 degree angles, and the third is completely straight. The monumentality of Gagnon’s wooden panels and freestanding columns implies the force of history, not with the violence of fire and blood as in Borges, but as traces, memory and information. Her work entitled Nuances, 2004, is created by a frottage technique where “rubbings” or visual impressions are obtained by impressing a real object with paper or another material. Gagnon mapped these fragments by drawing them with charcoal or graphite onto paper or mylar. Situated in the Panabaker Gallery, Nuances, measuring 10 x 16 feet (305 x 488 cm), is comprised of seven separate sheets, four of graphite on mylar and three with graphite and charcoal on paper. Positioned on the end wall of this chapel-like white space, it repeats some of the information on the mural Palimpsest in the adjoining gallery. It is a simulation of a simulation, mapping the act of carving onto the realm of drawing. Just inside the entrance to the Panabaker Gallery three vertical embossments, measuring 10 x 2.5 feet (305 x 76 cm), entitled Mindscapes I, II, III, 2004, were created by positioning and impressing thick wet paper over sections of plywood relief sculpture.In Gagnon’s work, the final result appears to be unstudied and never overworked, but the process is as labour intensive and as intricate as computer circuitry. The routering tools require physical stamina and a high level of skill to intervene with the surface of the wood and to raise it to the level of art, rather than to leave it as a defaced slab. While Paterson Ewen (1925–2002) used plywood as his material and a router as his tool, his works are Modernist—the colours are rich and vibrant, the themes sublime, the surfaces are bravado inflections. Distinct from the Modernist concept of artistic genius, Gagnon’s command of forms resembling ink wash painting, and her capacity to select and render conveys an understanding of the moral law in nature, strengthening her artistic integrity. Its elegance belies its origins in wood and paper, mould and product. Gagnon’s art is like the map that covers the surface, providing the comfort of certainty that a map provides. The poured paper moulds become objects themselves when extruded. They are replicas of the replica, thus hyperreal—and free from reality. Gagnon, Borges and Chinese Aesthetics The free play of illusion, together with the mystery arising from the palimpsest of this layering, reveals what is not hidden while retaining an aura of mystery. The delicacy of her art belies her physical intervention with the wood. Just as Wang Meng, one of the four great painting masters of the Yüan dynasty (A.D. 1280–1368) achieved “a final effect of repose” with his “technique of restless intensity,” so too does Gagnon direct the force field of her creativity through tools to the wood under them, to create a world beyond the real. Chinese landscape painting requires years of practice to achieve the requisite control of the body and discipline of the mind needed to master it. Allegedly, painting did not move Borges, because he went blind in early middle age, but Chinese aesthetics fascinated him. His story, The Garden of the Forking Paths, is a labyrinthine tale whose theme is time. The poetic subtlety of Gagnon’s art, its monochromatic delicacy and its evocation of mist, falling water, and caves, is reminiscent of Chinese ink brush painting. The richness of the bland lies in its capacity to offer us an opportunity to transform our gaze into consciousness and to go endlessly deeper. Rather than providing immediate gratification of our most superficial tastes, a bland painting beckons our inner being to immerse itself in it ever further. And so painting and consciousness evolve together… When Gagnon contemplates how patterns in wood contain all the wonders of the The correlation between the artist’s marks and Borges’ world-making with words springs from the same creative drive. Didier Anzieu (1923–1999) writes that “narcissistic omnipotence runs like a thread through the stories: creating a new language (so as to be the only one speaking it), manufacturing other societies, other worlds, gathering in a single library all the books .…” Borges’ writings spring from near chaos, collapsing history, time, and all possibilities into uncanny juxtapositions by stimulating the irrational and questioning conscious reality. By way of juxtaposition, in contemplating the detailed passages or compositions of Gagnon, one may enter a similar matrix of shifting ground. Her skill as an artist allows her to incorporate imaginative responses to the complexity and ambiguity of existence to map it in a visual form at once metaphysical and concrete. Pleasures of the Imagination If Gagnon’s art describes an intangible world, it still relates to an internal world of thoughts, volitions and emotions…and also of extensional reference, since one may imagine—when looking at a detail or scanning all the “information”—references to human history and activity. Gagnon’s art, while fictive, arises out of the empirical or experienced world since she physically creates it, and in this act she not only imagines it, she intuits it. For Borges, thinking and reasoning were significant activities, while Gagnon suggests that seeing sets in motion its own imaginative connotations of an ideal abstract world. Borges’ short story, The Library of Babel, suggests that an existential void arises when the language of books is unknown and the feverish, fruitless quest to translate them thus has no meaning. Gagnon’s art suggests the pleasure to be found in unknowing. Some commentators describe Borges’ writings as esoteric, understood by only a select few, possibly because his work is not widely known. Borges revelled in being mysterious. That the word is not as clear as the image is perceptible in Gagnon’s art. It acts like Borges’ Aleph, the small window onto the universe that reveals all mysteries of time and the universe, since they can be seen. George R. McMurray deduced that “Borges intensifies the emotional impact and leaves the reader with a combination of heightened awareness and ecstatic expectancy evading intellectual formulation.” Similarly, the exhibition Palimpsest suggests epistemological and ontological solutions to what literally is under the surface of things and of thought. It offers a refuge from confusion by delimiting complexity into defined fields separated by white space or a lack of noise. The dialectical interplay between intense passages and the nonbeing of emptiness balances tension and creates a vitality without passion. In the absence of linguistic signifiers, a pared down truth emerges. It is both enigmatic and completely open, strong, yet delicate, inspiring, yet sobering in tone and restrained in effect. Gagnon’s technique of recording information may be compared to Borges’ methodology of enclosing a story within a story. All parts are segments of a whole, and everything is connected. The pleasure of Palimpsest rests in the imagination.
2. Jean Baudrillard, The Vital Illusion. Ed. Julia Witwer. New York, Columbia University Press, 2000. 3. Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1988, p.166. Richard J. Lane, Jean Baudrillard. London and New York, Routledge, 2000, p. 86, identifies this fable as Borges’ “Of Exactitude in Science.” Baudrillard also refers to the “fable of the map and the territory” in The Vital Illusion, p. 63. 4. François Jullien, In Praise of Blandness, Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics. Translated by Paula M. Versano. New York, Zone Books, 2004, p. 24. 5. Baudrillard explains this in “Simulacra and Simulations,” Selected Writings, pp. 166-184. 6. Vital Illusion, p. 74. 7. Jorge Luis Borges, A Personal Anthology. Ed. Anthony Kerrigan. New York, Grove Press, Inc., 1968, p. 92. 8. Barry Till, Chinese Painting from the Bei Yi Zhai Collection. Victoria, Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Exhibition Essay, 1992, unpaginated. 9. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths. Selected Stories and Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York, New Directions Publishing, 1964, pp.19-29. 10. Labyrinths, pp. 27, 28. 11. Labyrinths, p. 28 12. Gary Michael Dault, “Yechel Gagnon at V. MacDonnell Gallery,” The Globe and Mail, 9 February 2000, p. C6. 13. In Praise of Blandness, pp. 24, 25. 14. In Praise of Blandness, p.106, 15. In Praise of Blandness, p.133. 16. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph,”A Personal Anthology, pp. 138-154. 17. Labyrinths, p. 221. 18. Didier Anzieu, preface to the French edition, 1989 of Julio Woscoboinik, The Secret of Borges: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry into His Work, cited in the English edition, Lanham, University Press of America, 1998, p. XI. 19. George R. McMurray, Jorge Luis Borges. New York, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1980, p. 151.
Copyright © 2004 Alexandria Pierce
©2001 Yechel Gagnon |