Accumulating Subtractions

Judy Millar The Future and the Past Perfect Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland, 2 March–19 May curated by Roland Wäspe Frozen Gesture: Gesture in Painting—from Roy Lichtenstein to Katharina Grosse Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, 18 May–18 August curated by Konrad Bitterli, Lynn Kost & Andrea Lutz

Judy Millar’s painting was the subject of an overview exhibition curated by Roland Wäspe, Director of the Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland from March through May 2019: Judy Millar: The Future and the Past Perfect.¹ It was a rich, concentrated, enriching and concentrating exhibition, undertaken with care, insight and remarkable acuity by both Wäspe and Millar. Shown in seven large naturally lit rooms on the first floor of the neo-classical revivalist museum, the paintings and masking-tape works offered a compelling invitation for engagement, contemplation and activated response both as objects and as representatives of painterly enquiry.

If I propose this exhibition as exemplifying Millar as an artist in-between, I need to make it clear that this is not a state of being stranded or lost. Indeed not, for the notion of the in-between is a critical necessity for art and perhaps most particularly painting in the current epoch. What it means for painting is that painters and practices are not singularly oriented towards some ongoing mode of representation or narration, not caught in a reductive interrogation of formalist concerns of the medium alone and not in retreat to some form of intuitive or creative solipsism—affirming only this creative impetus, this creative individual. Rather, they find the task to think and make painting between these reductive culs-desac to be galvanising.

It seems increasingly important that painting operates in-between—in-between traditional nodes of enquiry, in-between proclivities of audience and critical interpretation or response, in-between presence and absence. The in-between in painting is neither safe nor comfortable; it involves a repudiation of safety and comfort tied to certainty (of self, of representation, of formalism) or ontology. French philosopher François Instead he affirms the unique advantages of painting as an exploratory medium. Although a longish quote, Jullien affords insight when he writes: at least since Maurice Merleau-Ponty, philosophy has sensed that painting is engaged in an exploration that escapes its mastery, something it fumbles to grasp and even fails to conceive . . . philosophy’s means of expression is closed in on itself, unable to experiment and dissolve ideas, as the painter’s ‘making’ does . . . . Philosophy is deprived of the adventurous fumbling of the hand, torment and opportunity at once, that makes the painter always try again and take ever greater risks.