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 Beatrice Findlay fuses abstraction and figuration in a way that is often challenging to a viewer schooled in the separation of the church and state of these two modes of painting. In Findlay’s work, abstraction alternates with figuration. The artist starts a painting by building up color masses suggestive of figures, then works on the masses with both erasures and additions (including drawing) that bring out but also efface the figures. Such a process, counter-pointing abstraction and figuration, leads one to think that Findlay’s primary purpose is to meditate on the figure, and consider its overall situation in the world.

Findlay engages figuration on anecdotal, structural and theoretical levels. One series of works is characterized by dark abstraction, interspersed with collage elements, the figure lurking behind it all. Findlay says that she was inspired to treat the figure in this manner by New York City, where one often sees figures in the shadows on side-streets and has to wonder “what are they up to?” or “where are they going (often adding, ‘at this hour’)?” In another series of paintings, Findlay’s figure is running: here, too, Findlay relates that she was trying to capture the visual effect that happens when you drive by a running figure and see but don’t really see the figure. And of course our cities are populated by runners who may just as well be running from as running for something.

With her approach, Findlay is clearly not dealing with the “figure” as it sits or stands in “figurative art,” but with an index of the figure. In Piercian semiotics, the index is a sign from which an observer may make some kind of inference about the intentions or motives of another. The classic example of an index would be smoke, which even in common parlance often betokens the existence of fire. A smile can relate in the same inferential way to a personality: one infers friendliness, but cannot be sure. The “not being sure” is of course the point in contemporary thought, where meaning is construed as continually running away from us. To relate this approach to Findlay, the artist explores the problem of knowing people or relating to other human beings through the inference of running figures: she makes use of abstraction to problematize the process of inference, and perhaps even (in her darkest moods) abandons us to a state of never being able to get to know another. Such an employment of figuration reverses the traditional approach to the figure, which, in the realist tradition, was meant to make you feel like you belong in some sort of real way to it. Findlay enlists abstraction in order to subvert the expectations of realist figuration, leaving us to worry over the uprooted nature of the self in the world. In Findlay’s work, then, the figure is a sign of presence, but also absence.

In the paintings, however, an equally positive message also appears, primarily from the robust compositional use Findlay makes of the same figures. Most of the structure of most recent paintings is built on the backs, so to speak, of these emergent figures. The composition of the paintings is blocked out around gesture, and the running bodies, for example, move in a way that creates the very architecture of the paintings. Almost in the way of some ancient art, in Findlay’s art body is architecture. From this perspective, abstraction is enlisted only to refine and enrich the space that twists around this embodied structure. As a result, space itself in Findlay’s paintings moves mercurially from surface to depth and from active to passive. Findlay’s paintings consist of hard and soft passages (just like a body), light and dark places (ditto), clear and obscure surfaces, positive and negative charges. The space of Findlay’s abstraction invites the viewer to enjoy the surface features of the abstract painting (texture, facture, painterliness, etc.), but then also feel free to “see figures” behind the surface. As such, Findlay’s paintings may inhabit what Harbison calls “the looser universe” of the baroque: one thinks of Murillo’s virgins, borne up on cottony clouds, or one of Rubens’ baroque thunderstorms of tumbling bodies; or, more precisely, of the defense of the new style by lesser-known Milanese architect Martino Bassi, who called for a nature-based art embodied by “structures that are durable even though they seem to stand on nothing, like the branches of a tree, or the nose on a face.” In all baroque work (and in Findlay’s), space moves in and out of view, it has body (in Rubens’ case, many bodies), but is always evaporating into mist.

Theoretically, Findlay has undoubtedly had to bear discussion of her figurative impulses, played out within the constraints of abstractionist hegemony, in a defensive manner. Figure in abstraction is an aberration, something to apologize for. But in contemporary terms, where the distinction between abstraction and figuration survives as market parlance only, Findlay’s employment of figure within an abstract universe is comparable to the indexical approach to figuration found in work by Nancy Spero, Ellen Gallagher and even Kara Walker, though Findlay has more philosophical, even existential concerns than deconstructing the bankrupt inferences of sexist or racist figuration. Ultimately, Findlay has enlisted the postmodern idea of the uncertainty of the meaning of an index to pass along to the viewer a maximum freedom to make whatever inferences they may wish of her paintings: this allows the viewer to experience and live the paintings, rather than just look at or think about them.

Robert Mahoney
Robert Mahoney is an art writer living in New York City.
Harbison, R. (2000). Reflections on Baroque. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Morrissey, J. (2005). The Genius in the Design: Bernini, Borromini and the
Rivalry that Transformed Rome. New York: Harper Perennial.