The Pursuit of Perfection in Paint:



Recent Work of Malcolm Rains




by Donald Brackett







“Beauty is the promise of happiness.”

Stendhal, 1837





There is a stubborn beauty at work in the paintings of Malcolm Rains. I’ve watched it operate for nearly thirty years. It is stubborn in the best possible sense, though persistent might be a better word. It is cunning. It is serious. But it is also paradoxical and whimsical. And it plays Rains like a violin, audaciously using him as a living tool to achieve its own ends. Considering that these marvelous paintings are the end result, it is both a benevolent haunting and an elegant partnership.
It often seems that painting is a fugitive in the arts of the twenty-first century, not quite on the run but definitely being stalked by its own digital shadows. It also certainly appears that painting itself has become a fugitive from the burden its own long history, but that history is largely a parade of one liberation after another anyway, until each subsequent purpose or function of painting was replaced by an ever expanding array of new visual possibilities for those terms. Including not having any purpose or function other than to provide a pure viewing experience.
From my perspective at this moment in our shared cultural history, and with the wisdom of hindsight, it now feels utterly obvious that as soon as the first camera shutters starting clicking in the 1840’s, it was already then that the paintings of Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Yves Klein, Robert Ryman, or others of the same sensibility, became almost inevitable. As did the later visions of Yves Gaucher, Guido Molinari and Ron Martin, a list to which I would also add the name of Malcolm Rains, for reasons that become as clear as his recent two groups of paintings, the “Sunyata” and the “Olympus” series.
The shared spiritual approach of all these artists, the ritual totality of pure paint as a retinal bath, is the logical consequence of the illuminating and convulsive liberation of painting from the classical mimetic task which spontaneously occurred in the Impressionist artists concurrent with the camera’s arrival, and which rapidly rose to complete prominence in the heroic scale of modernism in general.
But ironically, this beauty that persists throughout Rains’ oeuvre is not in any way hiding from modernism, in fact in a quirky sense, it represents the height of modernism itself, in terms of its rigorous self-analysis and determined exploration of the limits of the limitless. In fact, the quiet and under-explored zone where Malevich converses with Morandi is a place that Rains has been quite comfortable working in for years.
Equally elusive and fugitive these days is the former artistic affinity for and allegiance to beauty as a viable aesthetic option for self-expression. As early as the 18th century in fact, beauty was already being denigrated in favour of the sublime, a state of mind or condition of the spirit where admiration for the visual appeals of proportion and harmony was replaced by a supposedly more rigorous appreciation for the awesome powers of nature hidden behind and above the beauty.
But the sublime is, after all, only the result of turning up the volume on the beauty-dial until it overwhelms the senses of the viewer, and more importantly, their sensibility, thus rendering a state of palpable astonishment available to them. Access to astonishment is also the hidden purpose and function of ultimate or absolute painting, especially as practiced by Malcolm Rains; painting which aims to reveal the ongoing inter-relationships between matter, beauty, spirit, the sublime and consciousness itself. Simply put, those relationships are based on the reciprocal maintenance contract between being and nothingness: we are the dotted line on which that contract is signed. Rothko tried to document this territory, and he succeeded, but it frightened him terribly and caused a surfeit of sadness.
It may come as no surprise to viewers familiar with the poetic reflections of Malcolm Rains that they have always been beautiful, however what may surprise many are the reasons why. His long and successful career as a painter’s painter appears to contain some obvious urges to show us the real world in a pigmented vision of startling clarity, usually associated with his well known still life works, the almost fetishistic depictions of either fruit or sculptural paper forms in empty space, or the watery expanse of lake-scapes, themselves also empty.
And one of his earliest works was a series of sculptures from 1979, a plaster object which nonetheless has a highly minimal and monochrome painting incised onto its apparently empty surface. Thus this new work is a return for Rains, not a departure at all.
But the true surprise may be contained in the realization that he has always been a conceptual painter, but one who harmonizes mind and matter. He has never been an artist solely concerned with the fidelity of re-presenting organic or synthetic objects in a kind of pristinely pure environment, even though that seems to be one of his chief talents. Nonetheless, in my viewing of his work over the long distance race in which he is engaged, I have always suspected that the deceptive subject matter being depicted was not the actual content but rather only the form that the content was temporarily assuming.
At least one of his true subjects has always been and still remains the portrayal of Time, which makes consciousness possible, as conveyed by light, which makes it palpable. Otherwise it is utterly immaterial and is only accessible to us through the mirroring concepts we project toward the outside world, a theatre set which we ourselves are far more responsible for constructing than most people might suspect, even though quantum physics has been warning us for years.
Even in such masterful works as the still life series of meticulous fruit portraits, which I believe continue the ancient vanitas theme in a most dramatic manner, or the classical series of paper sculptures, which I believe are all about entropy, another form of vanitas in slow motion, or the lake-scapes, veritable diagrams of formlessness, there is a consistent theme which moves effortlessly forward and on through to his newest body of work. We are time.
But with “Sunyata”, and to a great degree the follow-up motifs in his latest “Olympus” series, there is no re-presentation here to speak of, there has been a complete merger between the form and the content. They are one, and never before has the modernist credo that form is content and content is form been so obvious and gorgeous at the same time.
These are, quite simply put, quantum paintings: depictions of open-ended moments which support any and all outward manifestations, without necessarily being attached to or limited by them.
In other words, such moments are the ground upon which any figure must appear, and out of which previously the fruit and paper rushed towards us. But look closely around the fruit and paper still life works; all around those supposed subjects is the true hidden subject, namely the void out of which they, like us, emerge. As an experiment: try noticing that when you are absent and not thinking, the pictures in the Sunyata and Olympus series are present and accounted for, but when you are present, they suddenly appear to be absent, and consequently, empty.
Electrons do the same thing when you stare at them, they shift from wave formation to particle formation. Do they do this because they are shy? No, they do it because they are us. As the French author Antoine Ste. Exupery once remarked, “What is essential is invisible to the eye and can only be seen with the heart.” With these new paintings, Rains is making a definitive declaration that such is the case. The palpable desire of these images, and of their maker, is to transcend our everyday assumptions about what the world looks like, and that desire is amplified through their purity, simplicity, and near trance-like vitality. In the end, even though the works may really be about a condition which is inherently beyond desire, they are still stunning evocations of the journey toward the desireless state: roadmaps to infinity.
For Rains, this quest can be summed up simply: the way to the immaterial is to reduce pictorial sensibility to raw matter, and to reveal that matter is, in the end, only more mind.
Once again, the contest between beauty and the sublime is an entertaining but illusory one, since they are not separate now and actually never were. What is matter? Never mind. What is mind? No matter.
Each of Rains’ visual phases, looked at collectively, is also part of a shared sensibility devoted to exploring matter as an extension of mind, and objects as the skin surrounding the void. The fruit and paper paintings were things that were not holes. He has always shown us the way we see things, as much as the things we see, things emerging from this groundless void and made possible by it. But now, Rains is depicting the void itself, portrayed as the energy-ground for all figures, which was always quietly lurking right in front of us in the deceptive literalness of his earlier phenomenological pictures.
This is the operation of a profound continuum in action. Continuum is often misunderstood to mean some vague connecting wavelength between things or events, but what it really means is the link between things that change into one another so gradually that one can’t tell where one ends and another begins. The link in Rains’ case is twofold: first, the stubborn beauty of his images and the persistence of our retina in wanting and needing that kind of nourishment; second, the actual content of his work is sight unseen, it is really the act of looking through sight, of seeing through sight, and not of looking at anything at all.
That reciprocal relationship between being and not being, between looking and seeing, that is what Rains is really proposing and expressing in these new works, as well as a corporate merger between the head and heart, two companies which usually compete with one another, much to our detriment. In nature, this relationship gives rise to the patterns around us that suggest order and proportion and it always follows the same harmonious design, in resolution. In culture, it results in pure abstraction, and that results not in a revolution in permanence but rather in a permanent revolution.
“The Pursuit of Actaeon”, one of my favourites in the recent Metiver Gallery “Olympus” show, is also about the pursuit of perfection in paint, surely one of the most elemental missions of classical modernism. The swampy lagoon-like environment of Actaeon’s pursuit is the place where the mythology of modernism comes to rest. Before it moves on. Again.


Donald Brackett is a Toronto-based culture critic and curator.
Malcolm Rains is represented in Toronto by the Nicholas Metivier Gallery