THE SPACE BETWEEN TONDOS
The Space Between Tondos Series is a look at
nature. It questions how to see nature,
both visually and conceptually, now that the virtual world and its companion
imagery have become more real than reality for so many.
Contemporary experience of nature is rarely in person. On a daily basis, rather than having bare
feet touch the grass, or move along a wooded trail, it is primarily through the
digital imagery of photographs, videos or movies that we connect with nature. Our views of nature are selected and manipulated,
as is our visual focus. Our
non-immediate world (television, advertising, journalism, film, video, email,
the internet) is mediated through photography so completely that we are often
blind to the distortion and manipulation of the camera’s eye. The Tondos paintings redirect the photographically-derived
focus that pervasively informs our perception so that the human eye intervenes
with the camera’s eye and takes priority.
At first glance, the imagery is not obviously landscapes of trees
and the spaces between them. Instead, a
variety of subjects seem to appear.
These could be micro views through a microscope of amoebas, bacteria,
cells, viruses or other organic forms.
Just as easily, we could be looking through a telescope at macro forms
in the vast cosmos of outer space. Using
a round format, the tondo (Italian: rotondo)
also suggests views through lenses, portholes and other various viewing
devices. As concentric systems organized around a center, circles seem both
self-contained (due to the equal, repetitive distances from the center to the
circumference) and to imply cropped and bounded infinity. Tondos from Greek antiquity and the
Renaissance were shapes uniquely qualified to house the transcendent, as per
works by Michelangelo, Raphael, Pontormo and Botticelli. Traditionally, landscapes
use a horizontally-oriented rectangle in response to the weight and
horizontality of nature. In tandem with The Space Between Tondo Series, my ongoing
The Space Between Series paintings use
a square format. The square is a hybrid
that contains aspects of both the circle (centricity) and the rectangle (the
grid). As a compositional device, the square
– like the tondo - reinforces the notion of landscapes situated at the intersection
of physical and conceptual space.
It is purposefully provocative to choose to paint trees as a
vehicle for scouting through the familiar art-landscape topography in order to
slip into a spot located between the hackneyed and the potentially sublime. Voids or the spaces between trees are as
important as the trees. ‘Empty’ spaces
create the image. Voids are nothing and
everything simultaneously. These blurry
‘spaces between’ are the tale-tell and normally ignored signs of photographic
sources now altered to replace their former selves. These paintings highlight
the power and role of focus in controlling vision. Tree branches may appear as mere wisps,
nearly as ethereal as air in this process of condensation, dispersion and
reinvention. In the work of 19th
century landscape painter George Inness, nature is abstracted so that the
shapes between landscape elements are as important as the landscape itself. Similarly, Piet Mondrian’s early realistic
landscapes ultimately morph into pared-down abstract grids filled with both
voids and colored shapes that move back and forth in spatial extension, with a
suggestion of the infinite cosmos in his late work. The same sense of
boundlessness seems to be trapped inside these tondos paintings, in spite of
the enclosing foliage.
As landscape hybrids, the tondos oppose the representational
with the abstract, the romantic and with the scientific, the illusion of
infinite space with flatness and the rough physicality of paint with machine-like
smoothness. The Space Between Tondos
Series examines and manipulates nature through the filter of these contradictions.
Margaret Keller
August 2016
