Cracking abstract codes

THE ARTS:Through a long struggle to make his botanical drawings inform his abstract paintings, American artist Terry Winters arrived at the mature style, an art of the 'manual imagination', writes AIDAN DUNNE

THE TERRY WINTERS exhibition, Signal to Noise, is the American painter's first major show in Ireland. He's had solo exhibitions at both the Tate and the Whitechapel in London, he featured in one of the last of the Rosc exhibitions in Dublin and his international standing is high, but he doesn't have quite the high profile of some other artists of his generation – he was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1949 – even though his achievement is second to none.

Over the last 30 years and more, he’s produced a formidable body of work that builds on the great tradition of 20th-century abstraction, while substantially reinterpreting and reinventing it in ways that heighten its relevance to our own cultural context. Winters’s methodology in his paintings and drawings particularly addresses the technological, scientific and philosophical underpinnings of our contemporary views of the world.

Take a glance at his work, however, and a contradiction between form and content immediately suggests itself. We might reasonably expect an artist who is interested in science and technology to employ new, technological media to produce sleek, hands-off art, but Winters will have none of that. His work is almost obdurately rough-hewn, gnarly and hand-made.

While it conspicuously evokes various kinds of modular systems, complex networks and technical diagrams, it does so in a thoroughly informal, one might even say primitive, way. That's not to disparage it: the earliest works in the show, from 1997 or so, form part of a series called Graphic Primitives.

His is an art of the "manual imagination", made with the simplest possible means. As he put it himself in an interview published in Art in America: "My approach is very basic; it's like drawing and writing."

At the Irish Museum of Modern Art during the installation of his exhibition, he comes across as a calm, amiable man, elegantly dressed and quietly amused rather than – as artists can be – stressed out by the hurly-burly involved in putting a show together. He’s clearly delighted to see so much of his work assembled in one venue, though not for egotistical reasons: his absorption in what he’s doing is palpable, and he remarks a few times that seeing particular pieces in a new context has made him really keen to get back to the studio.

WINTERS HAS A STUDIOin Manhattan, where he has mostly been based, but also, for the past few years, another larger one in Columbia County in upstate New York, and although he's a city boy, he finds that he's quite happy in his rural abode and enjoys working there.

He is married to the curator and writer, Catherine de Zegher, a former director of the Drawing Centre in New York.

Winters knew he wanted to be a painter from an early age, he says, and with that in mind, he attended a specialist second-level school, the High School of Art and Design. This meant that, by the time he went on to study at the Pratt Institute, he not only had a grounding in technique and art history, but he was also thoroughly au faitwith what was going on in the vibrant New York art scene in the 1960s. He liked the work of "the process people", artists who were inclined toward minimal forms, whose work was defined by the material and processes that produced it.

He also admired the heroic generation of post-war American artists, the Abstract Expressionists, including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

“They established a level of scale and ambition that everyone coming after had to deal with,” Winters says. But it was “the triumvirate” of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly that particularly engaged him. They brought an analytical intelligence, a certain distance, to the emotionally charged language of Abstract Expressionism. “For me, they gave it more traction.”

After graduating from the Pratt with a BFA in 1971, Winters supported himself by working in construction and then picture-framing. “After a day of dry-wall construction,” he explains, “you were physically tired, too tired to paint. Framing was better.”

It has been noted that he didn’t rush to exhibit. In fact, his work started turning up in group shows only from about 1977, and his first solo show was at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 1982. He evidently wasn’t in a hurry to make his mark, which, in the competitive art world environment, suggests real inner resolve and self-confidence.

After the Pratt, as he recalls it, he was making fairly straightforward minimalist paintings, but at the same time he was filling sketchbooks with drawings of botanical and other forms. The problem was that the two didn’t go together. Within the abstract pictorial idiom of the paintings, “the drawings of plants and minerals and so on were surprising, even embarrassing”. Yet he wanted the drawings to inform the paintings. “It was a challenge, and I kept trying, pushing it further and further.”

Eventually, out of this struggle between the image and the organising principle, as he terms it, the voice of his artistic maturity emerged.

Throughout his career so far, the fortunes of painting have periodically waxed and waned as it has fallen in and – more often – out of fashion, but his commitment has never wavered.

“I never got taken with the whole death-of- painting debate,” he says. “The difficulty of painting, maybe. I’d certainly have time for that debate, but not the death, no. It’s always seemed to me that so much has come out of painting, it’s been so productive.”

As Winters sees it, painting has managed to engage fruitfully with every technological or theoretical development that might, notion-ally, have rendered it irrelevant or obsolete.

THE CORE OFthat engagement is, for him, the physicality of the process. "People talk about the information age," he says. "But so long as information is refracted and processed through our physical selves, through bodies, painting is relevant. The analogue world of gesture and touch provide ways into invisible and psychic realms."

He is anything but a Luddite though. “I’m completely sympathetic to the opportunities that electronic culture opens up, but each of us has a personalised relationship with technology.”

Whereas some of the Abstract Expressionists dealt in abstract absolutes, such as nature, space and nothingness, Winters addresses a more specific agenda, notably including technical and mathematical constructions. But he doesn’t differentiate these from nature. When he refers to botanical forms, they often have a modular, schematic quality. “Everything is based on pre-existing information” is his view. A plant goes through a life cycle according to an inbuilt code, and so do we. “I try to subject these principles of structure and organisation to the painting process in the hope of making new kinds of pictures.”

At the same time, Winters is not aiming to produce blueprints. He prefers to think of his work in terms of the “rhizomes” proposed by French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari: wildly unpredictable, heterogeneous networks with myriad interconnections, ranging across all manner of disciplines and ideas.

He once said that painting, if anything, is “a place of conjecture”. Just as Giotto opened up one kind of space of conjecture, Pollock opened up another: “He gave us a new space to work with.” Winters sees his own paintings as offering another kind of space again. He likes to keep himself off-balance.

“Beginning a painting is both reassuring and terrifying, but it’s not the terror of the blank canvas, for me, it’s a terror of cliche,” he says. “I don’t want to slip into cliche. Surprise is the goal. How do you short-circuit your own sense of what you know? I want to push painting, and what I hope is to be surprised by what happens but also to get that buzz of recognition, so that you know you’ve arrived somewhere.”