Japanese aesthetics and contemporary abstract art

Associated media

Rebecca Salter: Into the Light of Things

Gillian Forrester (ed.), with essays by Achim Borchardt-Hume, Richard Cork and Sadako Ohiki

Americans have been particularly good, in recent years, in developing the smartly designed exhibition art catalogue (really a book with a long shelf-life) with highly readable essays written by leading experts (in this instance top-ranking curators and art historians) in the field, all at an affordable price. When it comes to contemporary art, this is no mean feat, and therefore the Yale Center for British Art is to be applauded for such a publication. The catalogue accompanied this British artist’s first major retrospective,  ‘Into the Light of Things: Rebecca Salter, Works 1981–2010’, at the Yale Center,New Haven‚ Connecticut, in the spring of this year, which featured around 150 works: the exhibition includes paintings, drawings, prints, sketchbooks, sculptures and documentary material by Salter.  An accompanying exhibition at the Yale Center situated two of Salter’s works among 15 paintings, drawings and ceramic works by Japanese and American artists, drawn from the institution’s holdings and private American collections. Yale, itself, has purchased Bethany Squares, a suite of drawings created by Salter whilst she was artist-in-residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

Salter is one of many British artists who, since the 19th century, have been inspired by Japanese aesthetics and art forms. Having completed her training as a ceramist at Bristol, Salter was awarded a coveted Leverhulme Foundation Scholarship to study ceramics at Kyoto University of Art and Design. She ended up staying in the country for several years, 1979–85, and became steeped in Japan’s culture, art, architecture and aesthetics; Salter is also fluent in the Japanese language. Drawn to the subtlety of texture, Salter studied papermaking and calligraphy, both of which demand a focused meditative approach; in Japanese culture, the movement of the human hand and arm are understood to be a fundamental part of a creative thought process.  From these beginnings, Salter went on to create drawings and woodblock prints on Japanese paper, seeking to combine both Japanese and Western ideas about art. She has published two books on Japanese woodblock prints and printmaking. Back in Britain, the artist gradually abandoned paper in favour of painting acrylics on canvas, sometimes using cut-up paper and canvas, whilst continuing to focus on texture and the absorbent nature of the surface. Her works continue to this day to combine aspects of painting and drawing. Most recently she has returned to three-dimensional object making, which is a natural extension of her vision of picture making as the creation of objects.

Salter’s art has been described as both abstract and conceptual, but her work is also a statement about the whole process of looking, reflection and experience in a contemporary world. As an artist, with a creative sensibility, she can be said to look out onto the world and then within herself, from which the outcome is the art work.  Her early works show a strong architectural interest in the grid, which relates to the work of many early-twentieth century artists, such as Mondrian, and more recently the American Minimalist ‘painter of whites’, Agnes Martin. While Martin eschewed colour references, many first-time viewers of Salter’s works are surprised to discover that beneath the complex surfaces of marks are numerous colours. The overall effect often suggests optical greys, which range from a near-white to a slate blue and bronze-rose; the even tonality of the works, as well as the carefully orchestrated geometry, recall Seurat and his optical experiments with colour and texture to achieve the appearances of light. Both the intensity and complexity of Salter’s working methods demand that she has a large urban studio (in this instance, in Finsbury Park, London), which is a highly organized, well-illuminated space. It houses only a world of the artist’s own images. This all sounds like a hermetic space, but the catalogue helpfully reminds us that non-representational art can have its origins in observations and physical experiences of Nature. In this instance, Salter’s love of the immensity and scale of the Lake District’s mountains and lakes (which she first visited in 1988) and the sense of rain-cloud-hidden contours and powerful climatic changes.  Salter responds to such shifting visual complexities by creating works that ‘arrest the viewer’ (in her words), inviting them to explore a ‘labyrinthine narrative’.

Salter, herself, refers to her role, as an artist, as being ‘involved with the attempt to capture stillness in movement, a stillness with potential, not a passive quiet’; this is profoundly expressed in her recent architecture design for the entrance space to St George’s Hospital, London. Profusely illustrated and with a text that situates Salter’s art within wider contexts of art history (both historical and contemporary) this catalogue is both a good introduction to the practice of non-representational contemporary art and a testament to one artist’s significant creative passage.

Rebecca Salter: Into the Light of Things  byGillian Forrester (ed.), with essays by Achim Borchardt-Hume, Richard Cork and Sadako Ohiki is published by the Yale Center for British Art in association with Yale University Press, 2011. 272 pp.,  200+ colour and mono illus, £30.00 (hardback). ISBN 978-0-300-17042-9