In her collection Cadaver Speak, poet Marianne Boruch, tries to use words to enter death, to dissect its power and relentless ordinariness by watching medical students learn through practice in an anatomy class.
By both having a body and being a body, we are constantly negotiating the idea of aftermath: how to comprehend running out of body with the only tools we have: the brain in a body that can never experience beyond life’s limits. This moral ambiguity of human consciousness is explored in the poignant and quietly assertive paintings of Sam Lock. They move between amorphous grounds of often monocoloured, worked surfaces, to decisive mark-making that marks the moment in time and yet beyond time, conjured by the immediacy of drawing. As poet MTC Cronin puts it:
‘Listening to everything and hearing myself. Eternity with time taken out of it.’ (1)
What Lock refers to as the ‘fullness and emptiness of intuitive decisions’ comes across as an elegant invitation to mystery in ‘Presence and Absence’, (2019). Here, melancholy is insouciant, even bordering on contentment, caught in the frail blue threads that lead from the outline of a box or house, expanding like music into space, in the lower third of the canvas. It’s impossible not to read a horizon in the line where light lifts and separates pale blue sky light from cream sea light. It proves primal how we seek out this magnetic horizontal, as we would gather round an open fire. A faint gold swash slightly burnishes a patch to the left of the plane, like a lost or last sun ray, emitting something like hope. ‘It’s the fizz of things,’ explains Lock. ‘Acidity and harmony. One on its own isn’t interesting.’ Lest the openness of the elements becomes overwhelming, Lock places a geometric bar of darker blue to weight the top righthand corner of the painting, disrupting and anchoring the space and thoughts in space and about space. What was determined as sky now becomes sea; what was sea becomes land, just as on white coastal days when the line between sea and sky is indeterminate and our vision fogged, disorientated, a pier or ship in the distance can re-locate us.
Lock’s advice to himself is: ‘Be unsure of your devices’ and this sense of wrong-footing or outwitting one’s own aesthetic unities badgers all artists to the point where they attempt to make a ‘bad’ painting to unlearn or unhinge cohering or merely polite habits. Lock keeps nimble through experiment. In ‘Above, Below’, (2019) two square shapes echo each other across a straight line bifurcating the plane. Here one half of the painting is looking for the other, searching for the mirror of recognition or fulfilment we seek when encountering one another. Questions hang unanswered, met with the vague insubstantiality of a dream, as we watch the artist in the act of trying to pin down thought. How do we build on a ruin? How do we match our own best selves? Is there something or someone we’re missing?
The painterly gestures that describe the movement between certainty and uncertainty, the attempt to give consciousness form, recall similar strategies in the paintings of Cy Twombly, Raoul De Keyser, José Toirac and Rita Ackermann. In ‘Under the Moon’, (2018), Lock suggests enclosure, safety and the idea of containment in the washy grey-blue rectangular surround. Inside this wonky frame, there are efforts to articulate something else, perhaps fragility or restlessness, captured in the loose strings of white oil pastel that endeavour to complete a half-hearted circle but run aground. The tentative, rubbed smudge of grey holds nostalgia for soft exposure. Then comes that lower line of bright pink that strikes out, making its own decisions, pinning the whole painting down, changing everything. The tenderness of the rest of the painting is underscored by this pink defiant stroke, much as the way in which a sudden insight reconfigures a blurred day, a woolly state of mind, rendering it kind, re-purposed.
There’s also a sense of complicating the notion of safety in ‘Overhead’ (2019). A thick blue arch evokes a shelter, dome or tent, drawn on a layered whitish world. A band of navy overhead introduces heaviness or regret, while a sharp, fast line of green comes in at an angle, transgressing between inside and out, knocking out the perceived balance of the composition and making it whole. Just as a new love, child or new country are adventures that can stabilise us, here Lock appears to suggest that risk creates harmony. This is key to his practice.
In slightly earlier works like ‘All Things Flowing’ (started 2016), Lock uses the surface rather than the mark as the vehicle. He now wonders if this meant that he was almost hiding himself as a painter, rather than look at what was hiding in plain sight. In this subdued work, what could be the frayed rim of a land mass – sandscape or estuary – looks as if it is threatened with dissolution or even concealed by tide twice a day. Something like a misted sun seems to be coming through, a moment of clarity perhaps, or even consciousness itself trying to become matter. Where does consciousness lie? In us or around us? And if it is a thing, is it a thing that exists in all things? This painting invokes the aura of a veiled sun, the rough edge of one human meeting the smooth of another, our human consciousness lighting upon and lighting up the forms we come upon, within and without.
The isolated spaces of Samuel Beckett influenced some of Lock’s approach to paintings like ‘Broken Path’ (2018) which evokes a sense of loss or erasure. Here he inserts straight-edged gold bars onto an amorphous, pale ground where gestures have annihilated each other layer upon layer. My eye is drawn to a small, collaged square which looks like a scratched out photograph of a boy: could it be Lock as a child, or his son, or a found photo operating as a cue for memory’s figuration and its inability to ever achieve an accurate representation? Lock laughs as we discuss this. ‘It’s the best face I’ve ever not painted,’ he says. ‘It’s a sandpapered piece of a magazine image but it wasn’t a face.’ It creates a holding in or holding on, as it sits in wait for the abstraction to speak to it, to us. Is it looking for a way out or way in? ‘The painting floats in nothing, going nowhere,’ Lock explains. It reminds me of what film-maker Chris Marker once said about the relation of memory to forgetting:
‘I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?’ (2)
Similar tensions of texture work to great effect in the sequence ‘Twenty into Twelve’ (all 2019) in which Lock painted an ongoing sequence on a twenty-metre scroll of unprimed canvas, leaving it to framers to cut it into twelve sections of equal length. The random construction of these paintings elucidate Lock’s quest for a more spontaneous painterly language to speak in. They move from the stifled vocabulary of impasse and impossibility, say in ‘Twenty into Twelve, No.1.’ to the fearless, streaming eloquence of ‘Twenty into Twelve, No.2’. Here looseness and tightness, release and fixity, speak to potential and sadness, resilience and doubt.
Poet Alice Notley calls the poem ‘a lefthand path’, a going against the dominant path, an awkward, less polished-off appointment with self-expression.
‘This story without bandages will take place, my left hand is unwrapped.’ (3)
Lock is undoubtedly a painter who’s unwrapping the wounds of human experience and beginning to trust a trembling assurance that the hand’s gesture offers what the hand itself sometimes cannot. These are bold, articulate paintings with enough guts to allow shyness. If you can make vulnerability reassuring, rather than despised or ridiculed, or simply hidden, surely your art will enable us all to live towards greater emotional truth.
‘Ride Down the Nerve’ paintings by Sam Lock
‘the blind ride down the nerve …
It’s the bolt: to be beside
oneself. To know what happened, what has to.
Oh yeah, says the body ever after, quite out of body.’ (4)
(1) Cronin, MTC, from ‘Anyone who knows does not come to listen’, Speaking the Future (NYC: Spuyten Duyvil, 2018)
(2) Marker, Chris, Sans Soleil, cine-essay, 1983
(3) Notley, Alice, Disobedience (Middlesex: Penguin, 2001), p.29
(4) Boruch, Marianne, from ‘Mind and Body’, Cadaver, Speak (Washington: Copper Canyon Press, 2014)
Quotes by Sam Lock taken from a studio interview with the writer, January 22, 2020.