INTERIOR PARAMOUR:

The Abstract Paintings of Michael Davidson


By Donald Brackett



I.



“What fragments thought is not the handling of solids
in space, but the dispersal of decisions in time…”

Gaston Bachelard,
The Dialectic of Duration, 1950




Consider this a letter from the outpost, that hinterland place where painting still occupies its familiar majestic posture and still looms large on the horizon of creative possibilities when it comes to expressing the ineffable. The great surrealist Andre Breton once remarked that painting, photography and sculpture were lamentable expedients for exploring the ineffable meaning of existence, but that they would just have to do until something better comes along. He said that in 1927, and nothing better has yet come along. But everyone is in such a hurry to move on already.

But Michael Davidson is not in a hurry to move on, in fact, quite the contrary, he wants us all to slow down long enough to recognize that the essence of painting, and especially the psychic landscape of abstraction, can never be replaced. This is simply because it is a map of the human mind.
Davidson went to that place early in his career, and he has had the astute intuition to remain there, calmly waiting for the return of the culture’s orbit into that very richly textured canvas hinterland. In painting, patience pays off.
His first painting, executed over 24 years ago, was a still life, with imposing Morandi-like vessels starkly positioned in almost empty space. Its somewhat charred and scarred surface rendered the objects with a tender terror, almost as if the attempt to capture their visual essence was a heretical gesture in what was then a broadly neo-expressionist phase in artmaking practice globally.
He has continued to explore the economy of embodiment but more by focusing his attention on both the tightly contained interior of objects, and the looseness of the vast exterior around them, having dispensed with the illusory skin of the vessels themselves and concentrating instead on the identical space which is both inside and outside those and all other objects.

His principal subject and theme therefore, is the nature of being in space among objective things, but without the things themselves represented and without us to interfere with their nature by observing too strenuously, or in the art of painting, by depicting too exactly. This is the Anti-Vermeer.
Bachelard made his comments about the importance of time in 1950, at the height of the supremacy wielded by abstraction around the world. In that same year, a New York painter named Bradley Walker Tomlin also produced a unique insight into these same matters, one well worth considering here:
“One can believe in paintings, as one can believe in miracles, for paintings, like miracles, possess an inner logic which is inescapable. But this again is to believe after the fact (of painting), which is merely to believe in the concrete. In spite of the production of masterpieces, art itself reads as infinitely mysterious…” It was a great thing to be a painter in 1950.
Michael Davidson believes in paintings, and in their mystery, and this is what his do for us and what they show to us: the surprising surreality of high-impact images but without recourse to either or conscious or unconscious representations.



Since I maintain that historical abstraction was the final flowering of the poetic descent into the unconscious of which the entire twentieth century has multiple examples in every sphere of activity, this same strangely stable surreality in which we have all lived since 1900 has only one truly accurate form of adequate expression: the abstract image which comes so close to visual music that there is barely a way of differentiating between them.
This is so, largely because as classical modernist expressions, both the paintings and the music say exactly the same thing: you are listening to music, you are watching paint explain life, which is far more interesting than watching it dry its tears.
A good place to start examining this marriage between the physical and the musical could be Davidson’s painting “Strode Lounge” from 2001.
It isn’t technically necessary to know that this lounge located in Chicago was the site of some of jazz master Sonny Rollins’ most forceful and reflective sax solos, since the visual notes hovering in dank space before the viewer simply come rushing toward us like pure chunks of decomposing sounds and visions, no matter how one looks at it. It’s an insistent painting.


However, once one does know the reference, it provides a kind of narrative structure not unlike knowing something of Caravaggio’s personal life, which was also hidden in his own dark images. Strangely, “Strode Lounge” feels like it could have been made by Caravaggio, if he had been locked in Plato’s cave and invited to decorate its dim walls with a penknife.
The painting’s unknown source of light in the upper centre has all the bearing and demeanor of a classical chiaroscuro effect, but with only our own imagination to illuminate its secret depths, since its space is in a perpetual state of flux. And if the floating forms are not musical in nature, which they might not be to a viewer unfamiliar with jazz, they are still strikingly physical and are part of a recurring Davidson language which often focuses on detached glyphs, calligraphic fragments, pummeled numerals, flayed space, and other marked attempts to articulate the void.
“Strode Lounge” is an ideal point of departure, since it also so clearly presents a recurring theme and subject in most of this artist’s work: the romantic (in the best sense of the word) desire to depict the vital void at the heart of the forest of things. It is into the interior of this forest that the voyage of these paintings takes us, on an odyssey of amorphous transitional states: deep into the place where painting’s interior paramour resides.
A contemporary artist like Davidson, who has been slowly perfecting a personal and gestural language of absent images, while using a highly focused syntax in pigment for a quarter century now, has also been looking and listening carefully, and well, to what classical abstraction has taught us all, listening to its most important lesson in fact: there is no end to its infinite variations and compelling ways of expressing emotional temperatures. It seems abstraction is often the only language capable of conveying sentience.
Coherence, continuity and time’s melting presence, these are the principal qualities and the primary theme depicted in Davidson’s often simple yet sumptuous works. They are diagrams of duration. Nothing says concrete duration like a good painting, mostly because paintings are all about duration, even though the best of them are timeless.
A good painting is the result of a long process of decantation, wherein the painter is the decanted substance. The sensation of time leaking out of the canvas of a master metaphysician is a truly remarkable experience to encounter, and one which leaves us breathlessly feeling that we have experienced our own entropy. This is of course, one of the crucial side-effects of sentience: knowing it is woefully temporary.


At first glance perhaps, a painting such as “Black Star” from 2003, might appear to be about entropy, its core having been emptied of the contents which we are used to seeing in the illusory windows of pictures. But what if instead it has undergone quite the reverse kind of process and is about to burst open from a fullness so taut it cannot contain an image?
“Black Star”, also notable of course for its utter absence of darkness and for performing an ironic twist on the void of a celestial black hole, contains a different sort of physical music in its clenched pale hands. Rather than a flurry of jazz notes, it almost presents a visual parallel to something known as “discreet music”, an invention of the ambient master Brian Eno.
Its key, so well exemplified here in paint, is the ability to convey intense feeling and content at a very low volume, almost at the threshold of hearing, or in this case, the borderline of seeing. As such, it captures the essence of another musical parallel, the notion of high statistical density: a near overwhelming sensation of tightly-packed information which takes actual time to become acclimatized to, not unlike an exotic geography which only appears to be minimal on the surface from the sky.


In fact, Davidson’s images are quite the opposite of minimal, and even those paintings which appear to contain a frozen tundra of whiteness, such as the aptly titled “Glacier” from 2007, are loaded to the maximum limit with subtle gestures that speak on a grand scale. Though they speak in a very quiet voice, what they actually say is very commanding, since absence is an even more obvious metaphor for the forest of things than is presence.
“Glacier” also is only empty at first glance, and only snowy at first glance. Upon reflection, the true subject of this painting feels more like the term “glacial”, the slowness of geological time compared to the frenzy of our human time scale. Underneath its brittle shell there seems to be an exhausted landscape engulfed by the void, the only place where there is no time, and the place towards which all the best abstraction tends.
If “Black Star” is the shimmering landscape of Eno, then “Glacier” might be the indeterminate landscape of John Cage. Tossed, as if untroubled. But in between these two signposts to emptiness, a very full and corporeal painting called “Zen Crusher”, from 2006, introduces quite another resonating theme. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. In this opulent painting, as filled as the others are empty, a single calligraphic gesture attempts to forestall the flow of lava about to engulf us.
We are attracted to the ambiguity of its somewhat naughty title, enjoying the unknown angle at which the tongue pokes into the cheek: is it a zen crusher or a zen crusher….is it zen being crushed or is it zen doing the crushing? This would seem to make it qualify as a visual haiku, a phrase that I recall using back in 1997, when I described his work as providing a new way to contemplate space. It still does.
Like all contemplation, the kind perfected over many hours and years of concentrated effort devoted to the task at hand eventually begins to pay off in discreet but telling signs of success. And so it is with painting, as is demonstrated so clearly here: if you resist the temptation to give up and say it’s day is done, and instead, you put your sore shoulder to the grindstone and paint, the results can be equally revealing.
The painting mine-shaft still has plenty of ore left in it, perhaps especially so, since back in circa 1961 (approximately) when everyone started to make the mad dash away from abstraction, they obviously left some sizeable nuggets and veins laying around.



But the painting experiment ended far too quickly, lasting only about sixty or seventy years, and it ended artificially, in keeping perhaps with the impatience of the modern world. They told us the zenith had been reached by the first few generations of abstract painters, say from Kandinsky and Malevich on to Rothko, Reinhardt and Newman, and we all believed them.
But abstraction’s demise was mostly just part of a cultural advertising campaign for forward movement, and just like the second and third and fourth generations of jazz, there was so much more to be explored through a continued dedication to the program.
Why didn’t this happen during the end of the first golden age of abstraction, did we run out of shovels? Was it a sudden fear of the overwhelming aroma from the sublime coming up in steam jets from the cavernous cracks down there?
But still somehow, exposed and abandoned, these same veins have recently been revisited by painters six generations later, new painters with a new accent, and more importantly, a new dialect for the classical language.
Painters like Michael Davidson. Paintings like “Zen Crusher”. But these are not mere vestiges of a more vertiginous time in history, these are veritable diagrams of the vertigo itself!

In Davidson’s successive bodies of work there is the obscure but discernible sense of a pilgrimage of sorts, of stepping onto a territory which some of us believe is almost sacred: the territory of the belief that it is possible to reach a peak moment of flow and in one expressionistic and emotionally abstract gesture to capture the meaning of life, at that particular time and in that particular place.
Some of his anti-images however, seem to so effortlessly arrive at a transpersonal and universal place, one perhaps laden with both archetypal structure and mythical posture, that it is easy to slip into the reverie they offer: the tale of all tomorrow’s travels, the nomadic exile on a quest for either the golden fleece or the golden painting.
The search for the golden painting is something built into the very dna of modernist thinking, even though there are many of them, and in varying shades of gold. In Davidson’s case, the search takes the form of a pressing physical metaphor, the myth of the wanderer, and though it unfolds in the classical manner of an epic poem within a Homeric cycle of perpetual absence and arrival, it also naturally assumes the physical shape and emotional texture of a classically modernist aesthetic venture.


II.
“The lamp stands vigil, therefore it is vigilant. And the
narrower the ray of light, the more vigilant it becomes….”


Arthur Rimbaud 1870




At least two Davidson paintings are definitely based on multiple layers of mythical content from the classical age and they yet also perfectly mirror the modernist myth of the golden painting. Both “Argonaut” and “The Lamia” are drastically different applications of a connected myth to radical hand and mind gestures, with indeterminacy and discontinuity being rendered in the classical expressionist manner.
Coincidentally one of my favourite of the heroic Greek myths, Jason and The Argonauts tells a section of the Odyssey adventure relating to social intrigue between the gods and certain mortals. Jason assembled fifty heroes for a perilous voyage aboard The Argo to the fabled Colchis in search of a legendary golden fleece, which was chronicled by Appolonius in the 3rd century BC.
To be an Argonaut is thus to be in the company of heroic figures such as Heracles and Orpheus, whose harp helped drown out the Sirens’ hypnotic wails. But like its namesake in mythology, Davidson’s painting of “The Lamia” is an intuitive representation of what happens to a shared fragment of the collective unconscious when it is passed from culture to culture the way children pass on a saying to the next person, and the next, until it has changed irrevocably from its origins. It transmits its myth like a message sent through time.
“The Lamia” is therefore not a persona, not even a personification of feared forces, but rather a cluster or a constellation of myths moving around an empty centre, an evacuated core. Absence and abandonment, exile and return, time and its bleeding, are all that remains of the burned out edifice which spawned the mighty migration of meanings associated with the myth’s crucible, and with its formation down below.
Like Bachelard in his examination of poetic images, Davidson is devoted to portraying the dialectic of duration, showing how it functions in our perceptual and conceptual lives, and how the process of time’s dispersal is even more important than the management of objects in space.


The forest of things we move through, though positioned in space, is much more vitally anchored in time. The story of paint is the story of time, it’s as simple as that. Compelling portraits of time’s mask-like face also occur in a many other works by this steadfast painter. Each new painting resembles time peeling back the wallpaper of the third dimension and seems to give us a glimpse into the contract between all embodied beings and the clock.
Several paintings share a Homeric ode-like feeling we have come to associate with the heroic voyages of titans before history became supposedly better organized. Perhaps this is fitting, since there is a strong stylistic bond here between those other N.Y. titans who first put abstract painting on the global map. Indeed, Jason’s fifty heroes could just as easily be our own crew of modern painting heroes championed by captains such as Greenberg and Rosenberg.
“First and Last Judgment”, “Distant Shore” and “One Thousand Crossed and Lonely Miles” all bear the hallmarks of a journey through the mythical waters of modernist painting. “Distant Shore” is clearly a reiteration of the Lamia cluster of multiple meanings, but from the perspective of the figure rather than that of the ground. This intimate relationship is crucial to seeing both these pieces of a piece.
The space within which the constellation of meanings hovers and swells in “The Lamia” has been subsumed by one of the constituent parts in “Distant Shore”, where it has reoriented the ground around itself and given a central stance to one particular meaning. This is temporary, a moment later, perhaps after we look away, the ground will have reasserted itself and divulged its empty centre. These two paintings should always be viewed in proximity: they demonstrate how form and content are no more separate than a myth and its mutation.
Is the space within “Distant Shore” the same space as that within “The Lamia”, and that in “Glacier”, and that in “Argonaut”? Unequivocally yes. Suddenly the story expands to include the teller of the tale, the painter of the picture. In quite recent paintings such as “One Thousand Crossed and Lonely Miles” and “Rhinelander”, this same space, the self-same space, is again touched upon. Not in the manner of re-visiting a site, but rather in that of stops made along the way towards the last painting.
What is the last painting? Perhaps in keeping with modernism’s fetish for finality, the last painting is that grail-like object searched for by anyone serious with a brush, the painting after which it won’t be possible or necessary to make another one. This is the border where Breton’s notion of the lamentable expedient is forgone and forgotten.
Except that it never arrives. There is no last painting, there is only the next painting, and even more important, the one after that. Bachelard wrote about the poetics of space and reverie, and Davidson paints about the poetics of absence and reverie, clearly reflecting it for the duration of the time it takes for a painting to explain life, which of course varies from painting to painting.
In “Argonaut”, the meaning of life is the search for the meaning, and the time it takes, the journey towards a familiar place we visit for the first time, as it also is in “One Thousand Crossed and Lonely Miles” where the pilgrim pauses to aerially contemplate his own passage. Not surprisingly, the road in “One Thousand” is definitely the original jug in “Still Life” from 24 years earlier, but knocked over onto its side, having given up the idea of containing and instead demonstrating the containment of travel.
It makes a better road than a jug anyway, and contains more than any other vessel ever could: the road is a vessel for our journey, for the pilgrim’s passage, for painting’s history. But this road is not a physical path to a material place, it is the road to the last painting, to that most immaterial place of all. Its pursuit requires that an artist be a perpetual slave to risk, in the service of what Davidson calls “the fundamental dialectic of painting.”
That dialectic involves a shared duration between the painter, the painting and the viewer, a shared journey taken through the painting so to speak. “Rhinelander” however, seems far more like an arrival than a journey, and in this painting we see more evidence for the notion that all along in our history we may have been only colonizing the void, putting up fences surrounding nothing.
Both “Rhinelander” and “Telemachus Bridge” share a similar subterranean connection to “Glacier” and “Black Star”: the same space is being traversed, the same territory is undergoing a cartographic process, even though the physical ground of each image is becoming more and more tenuous, less and less substantial. Yet still, a marvelous map results nonetheless, though perhaps it is a metaphysical map? It’s not a map to where, it is a map to what, and perhaps eventually to why.
“Rhinelander” is of course a bit of a visual pun. The viewer imagines some ancient place along the Rhine river in Germany whose source is in the Swiss Alps, with the raw red parallel lines suggesting another road or indeed, a riverbank. However, Rhinelander is the name of a little town in Wisconsin, a fact which suddenly makes the painting even more enigmatic in its depiction of a homeland. Except in this case, it is the homeland of abstract painting which is being both evoked and explored.
“Telemachus Bridge” in fact seems to be an even more penetrating look into the molecular space out of which matter emerges and within which matter and energy are interchangeable and indistinguishable. In each of these paintings, just as it does in an actual galactic black hole phenomenon, gravity seems to pull apart and fling to the edges what nature and the painter try to assemble in the centre. But the age of the centre is over. Today, only the edges are real. But how to traverse the open space between one edge and another? A bridge is required, even if only a bridge of sighs between freedom and incarceration, between long voyage and final arrival.
This painting, which so subtly sums up the transition between boyhood and manhood explored in the Telemachy which chronicles the dilemma of the son of Odysseus, appears to offer us an another aerial view of the breathy territory our gaze touched upon in “Glacier” and “Black Star”, and even perhaps the same zoomed-in foliage strewn along those “One Thousand Crossed and Lonely Miles”, but if so, it is an aerial view at the sub-atomic level, the ethereal level of ghost particles passing through all matter, ourselves included. It is as much a bridge between mind and matter as between the heroic voyage and return of the exile.
This juxtaposition of extraordinary works has a subtle yet forceful impact, and conveys pictorially a feeling for paint as an emotional language that the artist has acquired at a very deep level, and over many years.
Such devotion is essential in order to be prepared when the orbit returns.
And despite the difficulties of day to day devotion to a near existential and arcane craft, Davidson still characterizes it as “embracing the remaining, the vestigal, the pellucid language, carved and painted secrets of some future to come….”
Pellucid is also the perfect word for me to borrow and use to describe how these paintings feel (by which I mean of course, how their aura feels when one is standing in front of them, which is only approximated by reproduction) since that excellent word denotes a great objective in painting: that which admits the transfer of light and is translucent, and that which is transparently clear in style and meaning.
Ironically, a third tier of the word’s meaning involves marginal degeneration, the very pictorial device which recurs repeatedly throughout so many of Davidson’s images, but in particular is active and really goes to town in “Glacier”, “Black Star” “Rhinelander” and “Telemachus Bridge”.

These paintings are transparently clear in style and meaning. They are also about the future. The recent future. The perspectives of the entire series of paintings seem to shift along with the pilgrim: close up, near to, far away from, depending on the time-frame for that particular painting to unfold.
Sometimes we are on the landscape (more of a mindscape really) while other times we are inside of it fighting our way out, while yet other times we are floating high above it, contemplating our own awareness of the space.
A suite of four smaller paintings called “Minnow Net 1-4” (or a four part larger painting, as I personally prefer to imagine it) once it is seamlessly hung horizontally suddenly produces a startling piece with an almost overwhelmingly elegiac quality.
Though many of the larger white pieces also involve a complex erasure system with layers of subsumed spontaneity, and also carry a natural and authentic elegiac charge, this piece is the one that seems to come right out and say I am an elegy.
In a way perhaps even more powerful than carving something visually similar to Motherwell’s famous series, “Minnow Net” is itself a quiet elegy to what I still like to refer to as modern painting. Section two of “Minnow Net” is also one of my favourite moments of viewing experience.

A Rhinelander-like strip cuts through the left side, turning what felt like a passageway, a way across the border, into one of several bits of flayed something. This one suggests The Sirens’ Song, the secret modernist urge to end (ironic considering its allegiance to endless progress) and could be thought of as the elegiac last word on a style of expression, after which, the Sirens whisper, there will be no need of any more paintings. But of course, it is not, and the Sirens always lie in order to seduce new sailors.
“Minnow Net”, whether viewed individually or as a suite, is a conscious pause before the arrival in port of The Argo, safely distant from the cooing Siren’s finality, where so many painters have ended up on the rocks of the great afterward. Bereft of what comes after modernism. Simply more modernism.
This flayed something is history itself, suspended in the net of the modern age, unable to turn back, unable to do anything but continue onward through the entropy of our temporary empire on earth. Or else, it’s a minnow.
Either way, the beauty of their raw charm is palpable: each of the four panels has four flayed somethings, suspended in the midst of an apparent and alluring nothing. But is the erased environment the net in question, or is the net this series of dark shapes hanging in nothingness?
Look closely at the nothingness, however, for the answer. It is no more nothing than the shifting shapes are sometimes something. Perhaps the most unsettling of the sumptuous vistas of Davidson’s recent work, “First and Last Judgment” is also one of the most profoundly human and humanist. Who knows why we immediately suspect, feel, or simply know that once we make the first judgment, the last one is a fait d’accompli?
Everything else perhaps is just caressing the abyss, as these forlorn figures appearing to be doing in this quite scary picture. The familiar suspended shapes, perhaps having paid their dues to the void, are now allowed to assume a rough precursor to humanoid form. As if of their own volition the shapes begin to interact and slowly mutate in grasping motions that convey the desire to coalesce, to have a discernible vessel, to reincarnate into fresh form, to sink into the corporeal again, in short, to live. But for now, no subject and no object.
The unity of awareness and space, that inseparable quality of knowledge and absence, is what certain existential comedians refer to as dzogchen, the great perfection. Things being perfect just as they are. When we’re not looking directly at them. And although this notion is never explicitly displayed in the paintings, the state of mind which best appreciates them is definitely one which no longer differentiates between subject and object.
The absence of a figure ground relationship is also one of the key features to another painting about the voyage outward/inward. “Here, Not Lost” is a painted way of saying “waving, not drowning”. The twin-sister of “Zen Crusher”, it likewise is comprised of the reclamation of space from things. Foreground and background are the same ground, objects around us and we ourselves are the same thing, viewed of course, from the vantage point of the voyage.
In a recent work such as “Central Supernatural”, a close cousin to the lamia constellation and one containing that same obscure source of light emanating from its core, we are in the company of a visual drama evoking the ultimate in peripheral vision. Pushed and pulled gently to and fro, our retina eventually surrenders to a still-point, a place where fragmentation is overcome. Perhaps this is what makes Davidson a peripheral visionary?
That, after all is also the aim of all abstract art: the absence of fragmentation. Ironic perhaps, since so much about modernism seems to be inherently about fragmentation, but that is precisely the point, because the best way to produce an elegy to great painting is by producing another great painting. One that unifies thought and touch in order avoid the fragmentation that results from bad timing, which is the cause, according to Bachelard, of all our troubles.
Michael Davidson’s story, or his visual narrative to be more precise, is thus true to two kinds of experience: his own perceptual aspect, a lyrical glimpse into space and time without limits, and the conceptual aspect, the history of modernist painting, a spirit hovering over its fortunate inheritors.
As a result, his painting practice operates in two valuable continuums: his own steadfast and stubborn commitment to paint as a language and abstraction as its advanced dialect, and the continuum of post-war New York action, a subterranean world which continues to evolve, albeit more quietly, today. But in true classical abstract form, Davidson continues to colonize the void with the emotive gesture, to treat space as thought, and thought as expression.
Like all the most arresting abstractions, those of Michael Davidson denote a state of mind by transcribing it, rather than by describing it, they don’t connote. As a consequence, his anti-images offer us the total aggregate of the things to which the word abstract is applicable: he invites us into the very forest of things, ourselves among them. Most importantly perhaps, he also reminds us that white is indeed a colour, it is not the absence of a colour-tone but is the ultimate expression of all tones at once.


In his paintings we are lost in the forest of feelings, with only the painting itself to help guide us in, out and through, since the pictures in the paintings and ourselves both share an identical thingness. Often, the only twilight which guides us forward is the dim necro-glow emanating from the empty centre of several pieces, almost as if what used to be a celestial body used for navigation has long since morphed into a shimmering visual echo.
And both of us, the paintings themselves and their viewers, are in a constant state of flux, which is the other significant temporal reality constantly being explored in the works. Flux is everything. Flux is forbidding only until we accept it as the central reality of our lives, the central supernatural so to speak.
Michael Davidson is painting in the shadow of the history of painting and he is making work which yields images of where modernism might have gone, if it had been allowed to continue on its trajectory. By so doing, he is also offering a renewed and highly pertinent fragment of pure abstract meaning for a new and dangerously fragmented time, simply by so diligently following that trajectory.



The historical traces of that trajectory reveal a mythical voyage almost as lofty as the odes of epic poetry used to convey the mythological cycle upon which so many of this artist’s paintings are loosely based and which they evoke so boldly. By turning the voyage inward, Davidson has touched upon a form of perpetual travel which contains its destination in every brushstroke.
In every emotionally charged brushstroke, Michael Davidson pens a fresh love letter to the interior paramour. To focus our attention in the most intense way possible, in a way that allows a unique rendezvous to take place. Perhaps that is essentially what Rimbaud meant by the more narrow the ray of focus, the more vigilant the light.
That kind of light, the kind of unique glow that seeps out of Michael Davidson’s works, shines into the darkness of only one place. These paintings are postcards from a place that the great American modernist poet Wallace Stevens wrote about in Harmonium, in 1923:
“Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves. We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole, a knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous. Within its vital boundary, in the mind.”


by-line
Donald Brackett is a Toronto-based critic and curator, his recent book
“Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter” was published by
Praeger Press, Connecticut, in 2008. His upcoming book on Modernism, “Dynasty of Dissonance: The Demise of Beauty in the 20th Century” will be released in 2011. He is currently curating an exhibition called “Fugitive: Painting in the 2lrst Century”