On The Work of Gregory Hayes

By Archie Rand

Gregory Hayes is an artist of intellectual and even moral depth.  This is an odd, almost discomfiting announcement to declare for an artist, or their output, today.  The emphasis and criteria, which credential an artists’ worth, have shifted making this claim fidgety, out of step or irrelevant. 

His capacity for engaged research and productivity force his visual investigations to go right to the heart of some of the most important questions being raised in the development of contemporary painting.  These concerns have not so much been overlooked as abandoned in the heat of a western culture bent on updating the currency of its narrative resume. His concern, with gauging the evidence made by traditional substances against the psychological agencies, with which those marks and symbols are culturally received, is an earnest and difficult area of engagement.  The clarity of his work methods and his integrity in this pursuit is beyond challenge while the philosophical matrix, which houses his concerns, remains snug, secreted under the surface of contemporary discussion.

His work represents a recovered “missed stitch” in American painting.  There is a relationship with a mixed group of certain minimalist, process and materials oriented artists, who, although well-known and regarded, have had their initial approaches, glossed over after the 1970’s, re-defined, re-directed, and in hindsight, given fresher costuming, updating their original products to be re-digested within the present critical discourse.  Their works’ ability to accommodate such a transformation is commendable.  These are people such as Linda Benglis, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Vito Acconci, Agnes Martin, Larry Poons, Robert Ryman, Marcia Hafif, and Morris Louis, among many others, whose work dealt, obliquely or directly, with such questions.  More recent affiliations could be made with a swath of artists that include, Polly Apfelbaum, Richard Long, Wolfgang Laib and Vik Muniz who realize that presenting visual elements can carry and relay information other than that with which those sources are inherently charged. 

The half-century vogue for irony positions this outpost as a remark upon, or even subtle inversion of, Frank Stella’s proclamation: “what you see is what you see”.  Philip Guston retorted, “what you see is not what you see”.  But Philip was an Italophile with a heavy shot of the metaphysical leeched into his blood.   Manifest destiny has given Americans no reason to “get” the metaphysical.  The American metaphysical attempts frequently look forced, insincere, verbally directed or surrealist, with an exculpatory neon sign flashing “homonym” overhead.  Receiving his baton, we recognize that Mr. Hayes’ work is located somehow in the fifth column.  He understands all of this and seems to elide.  After all, his work looks crisply and emphatically “american”.

However, it is with those metaphysical Italians, The Europeans, the Zero artists, the artists of Arte Povera and especially Fautrier and the Tachistes with which his work has the most, not necessarily visual, but empathetic similarity.  This unanticipated reinforcement is what complicates and surprises.  It is this oddly familiar but still faint flavor that provides unexpected nourishment, and a mysterious capacity for re-indulgence, from the paintings of Gregory Hayes.  They have in their pocket a reserve of the untapped continental mother lode, a forgotten but hard-wired cultural attachment which was gradually erased from the forefront of the American dialogue with the vanishing of the Abex aesthetic and the, now almost 50 year old, rise of a uniform MFA curriculum which under the guise of education has approved the mandating of a curtailed and stultified palette of excursions.

Europe’s history and respect for the veneration of image gives, for lack of a better word, an understood spiritual imperative to the reductivist products which come from that place.  In Europe, the painting is a substitutional corpus: an enterable, palpable place, through which conversation can be transmitted.  In Europe, and elsewhere, paintings are magic.

Americans prefer not to touch this. 

From Malevich to Fontana to the work of Yves Klein, Manzoni, Rotella, Gotthard Graubner, Fischli and Weiss, Beuys, Polke, and others, there is an emanation of iconic resonance, which is intentional and genetic, in the otherwise mute truths of that version of the stark European product.  It doesn’t travel well and those people it has influenced in America, for the most part, regardless of their stature, miss the point.  This European directive reflects back on that soil and refers, not by accident, to something as unspeakably dicey as religion. Aware of our still dominant, Puritan ethos, this is a characteristic, which, if courted at all by most American painters, is done gingerly. 

What we now revere in the work of Frida Kahlo (eclipsing the achievements of Diego Rivera), and Georgia O’Keefe, and others, as opposed to say, the American Luminists, are not only those factors and symbols which are popularly credited to their gender marginalization but their receipt also supplies a quenching of that desire to access the arcane (but as Ben Shahn asserts – the universal) self.  The subjective self is viewed as a place forbidden to the encompassing agenda of a theoretically egalitarian membership. 

At first glance, Mr. Hayes’ paintings feel like they are skirting this less traveled, conjurors, territory however his sophisticated use of color, deeply considered format construction and masterful use of acrylic technology not only dutifully, but admirably, bolsters the seriousness, and therefore our welcoming of the validity of his offerings.  We are temporarily relieved but somehow not completely convinced.  We read his paintings as if they are being given to us in the proud, simple language of Henry Ford and not as the murmurings of some medieval necromancer.  So visually he appears safe to consume but somehow, still, not openly approachable.

Most recently he has acknowledged the necessity of including the “frame” of the painting as a requested permission that allows the work to be viewed, not just as a picture but also, as an “image”.  This physical extension of the once theoretical Greenbergian “edge illusion” has instigated Mr. Hayes’ most daring and salient works, reduced in their gravity to, for now, an elementary, pedagogical, black and white. 

The layer of foil thin acrylic paint which is attached to, and extends significantly beyond the edge of the stretcher, is an almost Beckettian plea for the understanding that we are left with this tangible ghost in place of, or a residue of, a long decomposed idol. Appearing charred, severe, unflinching but somehow not frugal, they are even charitable in their instructional zeal, which beams from their stripped down armatures.  They are almost metaphorically Christ-like or act ludicrously like Holocaust remembrance ornaments.  In all of their lightness they are that heavy.  And the memory unleashed is not only sufficient enough, but more powerful than, any choice of specific apotheosized subjects which may have been selected for portrayal by this same means. 

Yet, we know, that these are works which advertise no narrative message other than to show the distilled physicality of applications and objects. 

Uneasily we sense that faint waft.  Irrationally, we feel physically moved by a static presence.  We are accounting for a bit more than is stipulated by the American-issue visual digestive practice. We are at once off guard but more satisfied than we had anticipated.  We are witness to the surreptitious incursion of a more European, no, wrong, a more universal, magic. 

There is an old Chassidic parable which states that a certain holy service used to be performed in a forest.  As generations progressed the accompanying worship rituals, the prayers, the fire preparations, the melodies, the garb, and even the location were, eventually, lost to the community’s recall. It is then said that merely remembering that such a heartfelt practice once existed merits to the individual all of the heavenly recognition of having performed the entire act in its pious perfection.

Mr. Hayes provides evidence of the loss of this ritual’s function.  He even hints at the demise of its reason for existence, at least by its original standards, constructed with palpable remnants, newly made, of this tattered belief’s viability.  He gives us a tool for generating that vestigial longing that we may carry inside of us for the reconstituting it’s full former glory, which we know is gone.  We are ashamed of remembering glory.  It is unbecoming.  It has been proven no longer useful.  A predatory bird, glory is situated on the rim of conflict; glory vacuums people up for annihilation. 

Conversely, we are embarrassed, enervated, by our reasoned and proper consent, acceding to meld, assimilate, for the greater good of the whole.  We know this is desired and inevitable.  We know this is right, good.  We know that the prickly and divisive notion of “glory” has been relegated to the clutch of colonialist or banana republic ideology.  It is no longer a concept that maintains legitimate purchase in the new globalism. 

But the power in Gregory Hayes’ paintings comes from the inherent respect for the history – that history – from which western painting has come - now dissolving in that entropy.  This is not identification.  This is not affiliation.  This is nothing as tacky as a eulogy.  He is not looking back.  He is not mourning.  He is just stating a fact. 

Gregory Hayes uses what he has left.  At least on this we can rely.  He maintains the not so much optimistic as stalwart, assertion that we must go on and accommodate a new tolerance, a new embrace, employing the most rudimentary but agreed upon exchanges.

As such, his paintings are both pragmatic and humanist.  A realist, Mr. Hayes is not swayed by the lethal euphoria of utopianism.  The exuberance, the fierceness of his conviction underscores the love, and hope of a non-specified and possibly hypothetical redemption.  But there is a love. There is no hidden gambit, no duplicity.  There are no smartly painted shims, peripherally added for aesthetic insurance.  Raw and pure, it is a John Lennon type love.  It is a love into which we can invest, unafraid.  It is not hopeful and it is not pessimistic - it is a construct - recognized and shouldered without pretense or stance, that is manifested in his work.  A Buddha-like overview, displaying scars acquired arriving at such a point, earmarks his production.  It is received in the spirit of accepting our Rilke-like atomization into the universe.  It is with that consciousness, of an uncontrollable and relentless perpetuity, that Gregory Hayes’ paintings can be not only appreciated but savored as apt and trustworthy icons for our age.