Pierre Coupey: Dreamtime

Cryptic, sensational and throttled with colour, Coupey proposes abstract mysteries to be puzzled out.

A review by Mackenzie Perras. Dreamtime runs from January 22nd to February 28th at Gallery Jones, 258 East 1st Ave.

Full disclosure: Pierre Coupey is the kind of old school abstract painter I’m mad about. At first glance his images can seem rather like inscrutable walls of blazing glyphs, rendered tightly in a visual language instantly identifiable as his own. Colour becomes a physical material, light and shadow pulsate with tangible rhythm. The paintings often seem to blast out an internal glow—something like massive neon signs. Take the time to peel back the edges, though, and a whole bramble of roads open up before you into the work.

This exhibition selects from the last several years of Coupey’s roving output, and reveals the many fascinations that fuel his particular brand of painting. A student of diverse and sometimes surprising subjects, you can feel his way of looking reaching out towards the world in myriad ways, translating and encoding his subtle references and experiences into that trademark lexicon.

Take the vertigo-inducing thrill of Shinjuku, a stacked and invigorating take on the dizzying hum of downtown Tokyo’s vertiginous towers. Its staccato pacing and high-impact contrasts blast through the body like an alarm bell—a wildly different tune from a painting like Maqam. This one a reference to a system of melodic modes in traditional Arabic music—particularly beloved by Sufis—it opens up into a far broader horizon. Blazing heat, shimmering mirage and cool pools of shadow incite the eye to rove slowly across broad swathes of desert. Here the beat slows down, mimicking the longing and mystery typical to the musical genre. This way of thinking through muscle culminates for me in Shift, whose machinery wraps around us at warp speed. Here that broad horizon becomes pointed and acute as we barrel forward at breakneck speed, colours blurring beside us as we enter into tunnel vision. Those searing violets and burning brands of orange are broken up by notes of speckled sparrow’s egg—disarming little windows where we can see back to the original purity of the canvas. Ribbed and taught with internal velocity, we experience the painting as exuberant acceleration.

The Night Flowers are comparatively quiet, their weeping compound blacks and mournful indigoes somewhere between still life and elegy. They’re executed sometimes on paper, sometimes with collage, but always with a sense of hush rare to find in the other works. To me this is that prodigious curiosity turned towards impermanence: Coupey thinking through death, melancholy and parting. While anchored around visible signifiers—we see their namesake flowers in more or less abstracted form depending on the iteration—to me they seem more about pausing. All that vibrant thrashing of the earlier works is vacated, and in their spaciousness a powerful silence permeates. Like all flowers, these ones feel not long for this earth: and therein lies their spiritual power.

Most of all, I think these are works about time’s strange shape. Choros and Neither Beginning nor End, when viewed together, approach animation; seeming to illustrate the same subject in different moments of activity. Perhaps strangely, they remind me of Muybridge’s pioneering 1878 high-speed photos of horses racing. These famous pictures break down, millisecond by millisecond, what a horse’s legs actually do while running—all four leave the ground at once, with the animal seeming to fly midair. Until that moment of discovery, few believed this could be possible. This kind of micro-perception, and the almost scientific sense of curiosity and rigour that underpin them, is to me the great thrust of this show. These are the detailed and idiosyncratic observations of a master at the height of his powers. They are the kind of pictures that emerge from an artist still working at full tilt in their 80’s: they don’t prescribe anything, but invite a nebulous pondering. They meet you exactly where you’re at, and will take you only as far as you’re willing to journey with them. To some, they are pretty colours beautifully assembled; to others whole worlds of meaning folded in on themselves. That flexibility is a rare commodity in today’s art world, which prizes singular identity as Art’s ultimate fountainhead.

The Dreamtime comes to us as a concept from the Indigenous cultures of Australia. It is an ‘everywhen’ that is both the remote and mythic past when the world was forged, but is also the very real world of now that we must live in and work through. That sense of deep, circular time maps vividly onto the arc of this show. For an artist who’s been beloved in creative circles since his first book of poetry Bring Forth the Cowards launched to critical lauding in 1964, it feels unsurprising to see another great success. Never too on-the-nose, it’s a show those looking for clear cut answers to straightforward problems might find bewildering and incomprehensible. I think of these paintings more like mysteries, as unsolvable quandaries to be puzzled out again and again along axes of emotion, experience and intention. They urge us to stop, reflect, and feel our way forward through their blazing light—resisting any sense of easy solution. That practice of jumbling around the parts that don’t fit neatly together though is—by my humble estimation anyways—exactly what we need right now to build a better world together.

Shinjuku's stacked verticality and staccato rhythm go off like an alarm bell.

Maqam spreads to a much broader horizon, with simmering shades of desert and oasis.

Detail from Maqam.

Shift’s hourglass-shaped composition mimics the tunnel-vision of driving fast—a strong horizon with the periphery blurred by speed.

Detail from Shift, where the speckling on bare white canvas reminds me of sparrow’s eggs. A masterful bit of delicacy to break up the searing violets and burning oranges.

The quietly elegiac Night Flowers VII in her alcove.

Installation view with Night Flower for Pantera in the background.

Neither Beginning nor End (left) & Choros (right) seem to illustrate the exact same subject in different states of activity.

An illustration by Muybridge showing what his grainier photos had captured in real-time: that for a few brief milliseconds the horse flies through the air. Image from The Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs.

Installation view of Dreamtime in Gallery Jones.