Alex Gibbs
Inner Trialogue

I.

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: What if my leaves are falling like its own! The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, Sweet though in sadness.

[…] O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

– Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’

Anyone who has lived through a Berlin winter knows how the capital can be overwhelmed by a remarkably provincial atmosphere; brought on by the collective project of der Winterschlaf, or a retreat to hunker down, the streets are deserted for want of sunlight. This is the subject of Haven (2022) by Alex Gibbs: there is no horizon and little distance, and as the painter looks out from his studio window in Moabit, it’s as though he is telling us that space is something that boxes him in rather than allows the painting to be opened out. As a composition, Haven replaces an atmosphere common to many works in the present exhibition no matter the season, in which everything is driving inwards, and nothing escapes from the edge of the canvas – not least the dispersed arrangements of flat colour. We find ourselves in the painter’s small world.

There are few artists working today who really represent the capaciousness of sensation at different phases of the year, to truly chronicle the transformation of the seasons in the city; Gibbs manages to see with the photographer’s trained eye for a framing device and translates the world outside with the poet’s sensitivity to the spontaneous overflow of feeling in solitude. It’s compelling how he creates the outlines of his compositions first, as here: by constructing the matrix of birch trees as the initial plot of the picture, it’s as though their branches are outstretched in surrender or surprise, like witnesses to a crime revealed by the instant flash of a torch at dusk. Bone-pale, the recent snow fastens like fur to the branches. In the far distance, some of the modular forms of the 1950s Aufbau Programm building flicker with interior strip lights, while earthy tones of brown and burnt plum cascade, to borrow from Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.’ We’re kept behind the glass window yet bitterly cold, but something is at work outside; you can almost smell the fragrant revolutions on the aquamarine silhouettes.

And then every year in Berlin there is a new moment. It’s difficult for me to believe that there is a city in the world which most longs for, and most deserves, the arrival of spring. In a sonorous and rhapsodic landscape seen from a window, entitled When the Chorus Sings Again (2022), we encounter the trees from multiple perspectives at the same time. The brushwork on the right of the picture recalls Pierre Bonnard in a flurry of activity: notice the leaves, and how the knife-edge juts of glinting pigment in near rectangular and triangular forms disrupt the dense oval quality of the rest of the buds; look at how the pastel pinks and opaline amber suggest an almost impossible arena of colour beyond; take the overlaid blues and greens that wrestle with one another for sunlight.

It’s spring like Bonnard’s A Spring Landscape (c. 1935) is spring: the irrepressibility of life that has at once everything and nothing to do with us (and that would go on being there if we didn’t notice it) but has become transformed like a remembered landscape that stays with us long after we have taken the train home. The trees are as reverberantly painted as Bonnard would have done them, and they lead us to the meeting of the sky and the horizon line – which isn’t really sky but a brushstroke. Gibbs knows that his landscapes could never mirror nature; When the Chorus Sings Again is a triumph because (and not despite) of its acknowledgement that painting is always the crystallisation of someone else’s world that is also, however different, our own too. An artist who thinks deeply about the relationship between perception, time, and painting, Gibbs’ works ask phenomenological questions about our experience with art: ‘if there is a constant dialogue in your mind, do you absorb less information of the world through your eyes?’ A provisional answer follows: ‘Time appears to slow down in accidents, such as falling from a tree, because the brain simply retains more information in its state of arousal.’ Whatever bearing falling from a tree might have to apprehending one from the distance of a window, Gibbs’ paintings pay close attention to the world when all around us we are herded to distraction; these are paintings made by a busy mind engaged with fundamental about sensation and solitude, and they arrive with all the thrilling desperation of a world in motion.

Then comes May, when the morning light hits the buildings before it hits the trees. The neighbourly hum of First Light (2022) captures that on-switch by vibrating amidst another cropped, unique perspective up and over the tufts of grass below. The dappled sunlight elbows through the branches like a feral child who has been called to playtime. The Pissarro- like painting has an extraordinary capacity for continual revelation: notice how the greenish- yellow pigment dances with the vegetal greens on the top-right of the canvas, as though the footprints of a wild ballet, or how the rag-tag workman’s blue paint on the obscured window tells you everything you need to know about the city’s D-I-Y attitude. Everything is obscured and yet in full view; different areas of interest compete in a kind of push-and-pull for our attention. Like James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Gibbs has sat and ruminated, and painted and marked, the scene from outside his apartment into the inside/outside of what’s begrudgingly called communal living. On a listless early October morning, which was cold for summer and warm for autumn, Gibbs asked me: ‘Is a window for looking out, or for looking in?’ Surely both: a window is a picture on both sides; or the perfect metaphor or conceit that shows us the truth while separating us from it.

Critics like to say of painters that their art is either true or false, authentic or spurious, but aren’t the best artists those that manage to tell you something you already know but had lost somewhere in the miry recesses of memory? I take Non Stop Finzi (2022) as a painting that probes this question. Every morning as he paints, Gibbs listens to twentieth-century English classical music on an Ariston Q-Deck record player: Gerald Finzi, of whom he has every available vinyl; the arching pastorals of Ralph Vaughn Williams; Ivor Gurney’s lyrics like hyacinths in the mad-house garden. Non Stop Finzi evokes those same months that compelled Finzi to compose his elegiac pastoral triptych The Fall of the Leaf (1929). Whereas Gibbs’ title suggests the continuous playing and re-playing of a favourite composer, Finzi’s identifies a moment that is an instantaneous passing moment, the lightest of crumpled matter shepherded by air, and yet wrapped up in a whole symbolic universe of change, transition, and the irredeemable march of time. Several other paintings recall Finzi’s autumn and the period of this exhibition, such as Maudlin Sensibilities of the Lonesome Mind (2022): a red squirrel transfixed by the eating of a chestnut while the leaves, in surreal shades of blue, purple, and yellow, fall like feathers all around.

II.

Watching you in the mirror I wonder what it is like to be so beautiful
and why you do not love
but cut yourself, shaving

like a bind man. I think you let me stare
so you can turn against yourself
with greater violence,
needing to show me how you scrape the flesh away

scornfully and without hesitation until I see you correctly,
as a man bleeding, not
the reflection I desire.

– Louise Glück, ‘The Mirror’

Oh Bringer of Great Joy (2022) is an unusual perspective for a self-portrait, to be sure; we seldom see so much of the artist. With that said, there is a complete sense of frontality, by which I mean the compelling organisation of perspective insofar as wherever you stand in front of the canvas, it’s as though you are apprehending each constituent part head-on and not by any relativistic sense of depth perception. The more we look the less like a man the artist is. The painting calls to mind Al Leslie’s self-portraits from 1966: larger than life-size, each square inch is seen not from below or from the side, but from the front.As Gibbs has arched and crossed his knees in an X-shape, the painting is organised by an extraordinary architectonic layering of panel-like body parts: the shins, the forearm, the heavy-set shoulders, and a face that is to a primate what Pablo Picasso is to the minotaur. The artist is rendered as a kind of sexual force, staring back as though he knows we are staring at him through the proxy division of a transparent glass pane. The radical vulnerability unnerves us. Notice, too, the relationship between the eye and the fingers holding the paintbrush: the marrying of our most powerful sense, sight, and our greatest physical aptitude, the hand. If the rest of the body is pared back, lost amidst an overlaying of yellow and then jungle-green, then the hand reaches to us. We are held at a distance but in full proximity, dare we say intimacy, with the artist at his barest.

Taken as a series, each of the four self- portraits in the exhibition increase by 10cm each time: a gradual development and one of several simple devices employed by the artist designed to service cohesion. Like Howard Hodgkin, Gibbs stacks his canvases against the wall of his studio. Some of this is expediency: there is enough room only to paint on one work at a time. The array of little fingerprints on the sides of the supports testify to their portability across short distances. Those smudges also act like signatures; traces of the artist at work in miniature. But to stack backwards is also a refusal to become too familiar or complacent with what has been purposefully maintained in a holding pattern for the future. To look at these paintings without the close focus and attention to bring them into being is to not look at them at all. In this way, by placing the supports in verso Gibbs finds another way of thinking about the uneasy relationship between seeing and being seen, between the canvas as an arena in which to act and the canvas as a site of reflection; the unresolved tension between care-free mark- making and indecision.

III.

Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable

– Richard Diebenkorn

In Buff Accretion (2022), which titularly refers to polished glass, a hue of yellow, and the gradual accumulation of layers, Gibbs depicts the artist’s materials: oil pot, brushes, a scraping spoon, palette knives, the tools in the studio. A torrent of golden light floods the table while the temperate tones of blue flecked with white form angular layers that pulse to the canvas edge like tide against rocks. There’s something reminiscent of Giorgio Morandi’s still lives in the way that the scene is arranged: the occasional moment of ostensibly prosaic objects on a table takes on a revelatory sense of meaning in having their own reason for being there. Gibbs never paints straight from the tube. Whereas some artists use their brush to mix colours on the palette or directly on the canvas, which often makes for a more ‘painterly’ or muddier mark, Gibbs disperses the colours with a knife on the palette and then uses a brush to apply onto the canvas. While this invariably makes for a more precise compositional terrain, and forms cleaner and more well defined colours, it still appeals to the smudged landscapes of memory that we try and recall against the pressures of forgetfulness.

The swift transition from moment to moment is one of the most remarkable things in Gibbs’ painting. The denotative and connotative rub shoulders with each other, scuffling at thresholds where there are no fixed dividing lines; a levelled yet expressive smearing of brushstroke vexes what promises to be a coherent realistic panorama or still life. There’s this suggestion that it is really an abstract composition of forms that seems to be always lurking in the background, or the foreground for that matter, of an ostensibly straightforward account of a painter’s tools laid on the table. Let’s remember that the still life is always like that; the eye deals with some of it, finds meaning or familiarity or irregularity, and neglects the rest. Other painters have made the point, but in Gibbs’ case the transitions are so gradual, the differences between forms so close, that his grammar of styles can easily go unnoticed. Of course, the viewer never believes themselves to be looking at a truly representative account of a table-top (or, for that matter, a landscape or a self-portrait) but what they may not realise is how the constituent parts have been dismantled and put back together again almost seamlessly.

Exhibition catalogue essay by Matthew Holman