Steve Kirby: The Joining Run

Steve Kirby: Between Choice and Chance

Art is that moment at which life can touch chaos, most joyously… art is that momentary

opening up to chaos where we can enjoy a fragment of chaos, now bound safely, in a

frame. In art we come closest to enjoying chaos without being destroyed by it... And this

is how art can return us to that unliveable from which we came and gives us a

premonition of an unliveable to come.

Elizabeth Grosz, Sensation: The Earth, a People, Art, lecture given at Faculty of Architecture, University of Sydney, 2 August 2007.

I’m going to start this catalogue essay with an unusual confession, which is, when I

visited Steve Kirby’s studio to view the works for this exhibition, one of the paintings

made me cry. I’m not accusing the painting of being morbid, or sad, or painful, and nor

would I anticipate that anyone else would have the same reaction. I can’t explain why

The Joining Run made me feel so sad. Generally I’m not in the habit of crying in front of

paintings, and Steve’s work tends to provoke feelings of joy rather than sadness; the

jewel like colours are spun gossamer across the surfaces of the works, often in

compositions reminiscent of lace, or marquisette jewellery. Generally I’d say that Steve’s

paintings embody a life affirming delight in the world and the capacity of paint to stretch

the eye and imagination of the viewer beyond a representation of the existing world into

remaking new worlds and new possibilities of seeing, sensing and living.

Kirby’s paintings hang somewhere just on the edge of meaning; composed of intricate

forms that remind us of things, that we can almost name, but then slip away, just like the

symmetry of much of his compositions, hinted at and then evaded. The forms that emerge

in his work are protean, reminiscent of marine life, or cells, or even fleshy protuberances

like buttocks, encased in visceral linear forms, which take our eye away from the point of

naming what they are, and into the strange rhythms of the painting itself, patterns

spreading across our field of view, marking out, filling in and moving across space and

time.

The time aspect is important to these works, as they do not represent a fixed scene or

invoke a deadening stasis. Movement pulses throughout, and our eyes are continuously

taken across, up and into the works: through the forms, enfolding and encircling each

other, along the lines that are not quite lines, that meet each other and meet our eyes with

a remarkably odd delicacy. The lack of aggression only adds to the strangeness of the

works; they nudge us with the grace of an oddly coloured butterfly, hovering on the edge

of our field of awareness.

The works are imbued with a diachronic temporality; we see the time they were painted

in, within each mark, particularly within the squelching coils of spiralling lines, spanning

the surface of the paintings, weaving in and out of the picture plane, generating their own

geometries of paradox. The painterly finesse of this technique is based on extensive

experimentation with the viscosity of the paint, and working the mediums up to a level of

flexibility that can suspend time, and sustain the delicate films of translucent colour

Kirby uses. The fragility of the paint mixture grounds the marks, the gestures, the forms

made by the paint as much in the chemistry of the paint itself, as the techniques Kirby

uses to amplify gestures, to test the limits of his body and imagination.

There is something in the paint, which manages to continually slip between its materiality

as oil paint and what we experience as viewers of the work; as we encounter colours

oscillating across a surface and the suggestive qualities of the marks and forms that Kirby

has spun and woven the paint into. This experience doesn’t belong to the artist or to us as

viewers, but hovers and slips and slides within and outside of us, like sunlight reflected

off water. Perhaps it was this that made me cry.

Maybe I was too close to the work, well within the eighteen inches that Mark Rothko

suggested to the viewers of his paintings. I was less than a foot away, slightly to the left,

where concentric amber rings fading into the white of the board caught in my eye, and

made me shudder and sob. I felt part of something lost inside, as a nameless sensation

met with the paint, and the scraping points of light seemed to expand and overwhelm me.

It seems strange to write about something that is so far beyond words, and my point is

that painting as art affects us deeply. The way that light bounces across a surface and

enters our eye, the way that colours scintillate and marks oscillate and vibrate within us

like music, affect us emotionally and physically. Painting is not about pictures, but about

paint, and the wordless intensity that can fill us with sensation and take us somewhere

else, such as an impossible intimacy with the artist, and ourselves. Kirby’s works

approach this metaphysical condition of art, a space where we can open ourselves up to

not understanding, but to experiencing the joy of looking with our whole bodies.