Essay 2002
Timeless Change, by John Brunetti
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Timeless Change: the work of Carol Pylant
The paintings of Carol Pylant are imbued with transformation. Subtle, and yet profound, changes weave through her work like the ancient winds that blow through the stone crevices of the Celtic ruins that have long served as her inspiration. Conversion would seem an unlikely preoccupation for an artist who has embraced representational painting throughout her
distinguished career. Her refined interpretation of classicism’s tenets
would seem, on first appearance, to be about grounding her subjects in the
firmness of resolution. It is her choice of subjects, however, that
emphasizes this dichotomy between metamorphosis and stability.
Pylant selects timeless images from prehistory, specifically the Neolithic dolmens and pictographs from the British Isles and Ireland. These are forms that have lasted centuries. And yet, through a personal and quite decisive physical immersion in these subjects, and both intense and sensitive formal and conceptual probings of these images, she peals back layers of preconceived interpretations. Her quest compels us to reflect on the shifting physical and spiritual influences of people on the places they inhabit, and the reciprocal affect of the environment on the psyche of individuals, long after layers of ancient soil have consumed the bodies and liberated the souls of the forgotten.
Indeed it is the soil and stone of Ireland and Scotland, where Pylant
spends her summers sketching and painting for future studio works, that has shaped her distinctive perceptions of the special relationship between
person and place. Throughout the ages there has been a powerful spiritual
bond between the physicality of these beautiful and desolate landscapes
and the people who have claimed them. As a result, these lands have been imbued with a particularly anthropomorphic character that Pylant has
embraced in previous paintings as a means of examining the temporal nature of perception. Slabs of carved stone thousands of years old, standing on end in circle, whose original purpose has long ceased to have meaning, are animated personages to Pylant. Emerging from the ground but peculiarly at one with the atmosphere surrounding them, inanimate and yet human, these stones and their surrounding landscape provided her past paintings with a subject whose assumed certainty was the perfect vehicle for testing the fallibility of sight. It became clear that even in these exceptional representational paintings observation and comprehension were complexly intertwined.
Pushing the contradictions between seeing and understanding further in
her new paintings required Pylant to make a radical formal departure in
the ways she constructs her images. It is the relationship between spaces that has informed her past works and plays a significant role in the major shift in her recent body of images. Now layering “windows” of representational images on top of abstract fields of color, incised with the silhouettes of ancient pictographs, she breaks from the singular viewpoints of her previous compositions. It is a bold decision that will undoubtedly shock those whose familiarity with her previous work was limited to its
most overt formal structures. Yet, her new approach compellingly elevates her paintings‚ inherent conceptual underpinnings that have always asked one to question, rather than accept, the surrounding world.
The perceptual, albeit spiritual, relationship of object and space that
was the marrow of Pylant’s earlier works has now been focused more
specifically on the psychological and emotional relationship of the
contemporary individual to his or her environment. While the dichotomies of Pylant’s earlier landscape imagery were articulated through a type of sleight-of-hand to capture the ineffable qualities of her subjects, her current multi-layered work relies on its overt and highly physical spatial juxtapositions to address the internal contradictions of her mute protagonists.
Mirroring the ritualistic carvings that are etched into the face of the
landscape, yet are distinctly no longer of their time, or ours, Pylant’s
figures and animals seem to be out-of-sync with the two worlds they inhabit. They are instead in a state of perpetual limbo. Keyholes of volumetric illusion and tonal gradation in otherwise planar fields of saturated color, her representational images seem as alien in these compositions as the prehistoric images seem to us in their real-life settings. It is as if Pylant has been able to reverse the timeline of history. The people and cultures that produced the dolmens have discovered 17th century representational images amidst their worlds, and are as mystified by our classical vehicle of expression as we are by their linear outlines. Curiously, these Neolithic pictographs juxtaposed next to Pylant’s representational figures, or animal surrogates, feel more “alive” in their primal urgency of elemental shapes and lines than the painstakingly modeled figures. It is, nonetheless, the complex interaction between the two very different means of perception that creates the powerful resonances of these works.
Two particularly poetic paintings from the current series,
Secular-Seclusion and Metro-gnome, address the nature of woman and man. They display Pylant’s graphic fusion of abstraction with the spatial
tensions she adroitly explored in earlier dolmen-inspired pieces. Now
contrasting depth with flatness, reality with iconography, she underscores
her perception of environment as a place where true separation between
person and space, present and past, does not exist.
Boundaries are deceptive in these two vertical compositions. Multiple
backgrounds share a common edge, causing one to question the litmus test
for depth and flatness, symbolizing Pylant’s continuing preoccupation with
transformation. Secular-Seclusion juxtaposes the profile of a contemporary
women clasping the back of her head with the much larger contour drawing of a squatting goddess. Metro-gnome layers a male nude, his back to the
viewer and also grasping his head, on top of a larger-than-life silhouette
of an ancient standing man. The intensity of the light Pylant generates in
her oil glazes of both nudes simulates the brilliance of a projected image.
Rendered with the utmost delicacy, these figures and their surrounding
capsules of gradated environments appear to burn illuminated openings into her otherwise tactile, opaque surfaces. Echoing the presence of the
dolmens‚ stones, these vertical containers of reality have an otherworldly
presence that extends beyond what they literally depict, energizing the
surrounding space of the canvas. Pylant in her new works asks one to
question the emotional and psychological ramifications of defining
inclusion versus exclusion in a tension-filled world that continually
redefines the parameters of belonging. She continues to create evocative work because she compels us to be open to the powerful influences of our
evolving worlds.
John Brunetti
March 2000
Chicago art critic and Illinois Editor of dialogue
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