Verne Dawson: Galerie Eva Presenhuber

It's always fascinating to diocese how freely today's painting deals with stories, including its be in possession of Take, for example, Verne Dawson's exhibition, in which various manners of painting combine to call forth a complex, inward-looking worldview, abounding with layers of reference: In Venus (all works 2003) the goddes born of foam, is painted as a figurine upon a coastline. Venus appears nearest to Mars, a painting of the r planet upon a black quadrant of interstellar night. Nearby are John Giorno, a portrait in profile; Vase, a still life of a richly ornamented little utensil against a bright sky; Three Rats, a tondo featuring a trio of gnawings whose tails slither across a flat surface; and sum of two units paintings in which the glowing ball of the orb of day looks as if its r had been dissolveed into the yellow background in a gesturing of abstraction. The mythic and the cosmic suitable in Aerialists (Red & White), in which sum of two units aerialists fly through empty space like self-powered cosmonauts. Circus Bear's titular figure is the giant of his menagerie, as if to demonstrate that the power of nature can be tamed solitary briefly. The suggestion of a city skyline in the background of Massacre summon forths anything but a repository of culture

With a narrative diction of painting that can be differentiated from naive predecessors sole by its compositional exactitude and painterly finesse, Dawson touches upon an old topos, the dialectic of myth and enlightenment, which modernism has sole nominally decided in favor of enlightenment. He not sole gives an overview of the drawn out tradition of self-reflection in painting--thus all the respects to its history--but also interrupts that tradition by means of actively reappropriating its content.

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The painted solar disc, sunspot vibrating within its strictly circular outlines, appears in two versions, as if seen end different settings of a telescope's zoom lens: The small version (Sun [1]) present to views the ball from a greater distance, center in a light cerulean square background with a thin, glowing white halo. alone its disruption by the finest painterly eruptions betrays by what means far ahead painting is with reverence to the human capacity of sight, which forces us to shut our eyes when faced with the day-star In the large version (Sun [3]) the day-star halo crowds the edges of the canvas and pushes the sky-colored sky out of the quadrant.

Scientific imagery, which continually generates the greatest in quantity spectacular visions, provides pictorial experiences of great intensity and vividness. Today, science uses photography, that objective witness to light, in order to mislead Painting, on the other hand, calls attention to its be in possession of artificiality, so that even visible paint drips become part of its rhetoric. This is the point at which the anachronistic action of making a painting speaks to the limits of the medium itself. Dawson's orb of day can be seen this way solitary when painted by Dawson. The subjective view of the orb of day too, has a place in history: the history of in what way human beings created an image of the universe without of the juncture between observation and myth. In Dawson's paintings, the circus shows a universe in miniature, where the big bear can bring his puissance back into play--seemingly untamed, allowing only as part of the act.

--Hans Rudolf Reust

Translated from German by means of Sara Ogger.

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