in perspective

IN PERSPECTIVE:

Considering the Paintings of Anne-Marie Cosgrove


By Donald Brackett



“Each line is now the actual experience, with its own innate history.
It does not illustrate---it is the sensation of its own realization.”

Cy Twombly




The paintings of Anne-Marie Cosgrove being celebrated in this fifteen year survey show are ideal emblems for the abstract process by which the everyday life experience of an artist is graphically transformed into embodied moments of exceptional beauty and profound rigor. Her graceful collisions of calligraphy and brushstroke are also an effective means of exploring abstract ruminations on life’s minutest details. The resultant images in this perspective are raw but refined, accidental but organized, linguistic but silent. They are often also a vivid unconscious diary of the living process that created them.
Jo Petty has observed about great painting: “Mark making is the beginning of it all.” This perspective show is a veritable celebration of the magic of making such marks. It is the marks themselves which articulate the painter’s narrative, from one body of work to the next, in images where sign, signifier and signified are all synonymous.
For Cosgrove, there is far less of a boundary between the left brain that produces words and the right brain that produces images, since both can produce poetry: “Words are integral to what I do. I come to my visual perceptions through language; the subject of my work is loosely framed in a dialogue between the articulated surface and the politics of existence where I find myself.”
A work like 1998’s “The Messiness of Hope” for instance, seems to suggest a radiant poetry of the physical, a realm of structural meaning that mirrors the very arena in which language itself operates, and that painting, like all the bodies of work over this creative time span, utilizes a visual syntax and optical semantics made up of line, colour, shape, and composition.
The curious family resemblance between brushstrokes and sentences in 2001’s “Alphabet romantique” reminds us that long before language took over the job, graphic pictures were used to convey literal meanings. Indeed, this selection of paintings suggests that graphic form and colour content have their own personal dialect, one that provides pure retinal meaning.
The fierce quantum net of intersecting strokes suggesting a tapestry gone bonkers which we behold in 2010’s “Habitat” indicates a clear evolution of visual motifs introduced much earlier in this painter’s career arc. This is precisely the kind of thematic continuity we hope for in the art of painting and it is also the most crucial feature of the persistent gaze that is so clearly evident in all of Cosgrove’s work.
From the elegant urban cacophony of 1995’s “The View From Here” to the austere splendour of today’s “Habitat”, there is a stubbornness, commitment and dedication in evidence which rewards repeated viewing. Here, idea and language are merged with and mutated through the spontaneous contents of intuition and image as they both mutually graze on the experiences of everyday life. Though the written word itself serves as the principal motif that runs throughout her work over the past two decades, in her case neither word nor brushstroke is placed in subordination to the other. What you see, as Stella once remarked, is what you see.
Her ongoing oeuvre contains a total aggregate of the things to which the word abstract is applicable: she invites us not only into what the Greeks called the very forest of things, ourselves among them, but also into the forest of language, and the words we use to describe those things around us.
But things, just like the words that attempt to capture them, are in a constant state of flux, which is the other significant temporal reality consistently being explored in her work over the years. One common trait shared by the several bodies of work assembled here, apart from each being both visually beautiful and aesthetically rigorous, is that they capture some of the essence of what every good painting is really all about: time and its passing through us.
These works remind us how visually fresh and topically urgent painting can still be in this digital age. They also remind us of one very useful artistic adage: though no painter can go back and make a brand new start, everyone can start from now and make a brand new ending.

“Anne-Marie Cosgrove: 15 Years of Painting / A Perspective” was exhibited at the Propeller Centre for the Visual Arts, Toronto, from April 14th to 25th.

Donald Brackett is a Toronto-based art critic, curator and educator who teaches an integrated culture course at OCAD exploring the history, issues, theory and practice of art, design and architecture. He is currently curating an exhibition exchange between Canada and Belgium called “FUGITIVE: Painting In The 21rst Century”.