From the Sierra de las Nieves
Isabella Evangelisti previews Michael Cullen’s first exclusively
Spanish-themed co llection on view at Taylor Galleries, Dublin until
mid December
When Michael Cullen first visited Spain in 1969 as a curious young artist he discovered a deep vein of inspiration that remains productive to this day. In formal terms travel opened his mind to the expressive possibilities of colour, and in the environment of southern Spain light began to infiltrate his canvases. Personally, it was the beginning of his life as a vagabond, as travel only served to increase his curiosity and thereafter became his modus operandi as an artist, taking him ‘out of the backwater and into the mainstream’.1
Since 2002 Cullen has spent protracted periods of time in Spain, living and working in the small village of Casarabonela. Located in the Hoya de Málaga valley in the Sierra de las Nieves, Casarabonela has a turbulent history because of its once great strategic importance, overlooking the ancient sea port of Málaga on the Andalucian coast. A settlement since Roman times, it was invaded by the Moors in 711, who held it for over five hundred years. Following the defeat of the Moors, it was at the centre of the uprising against their suppression and forced conversion to Christianity, which led to two years of bloody civil war in 1568. Today, with Europe’s power centralized and consolidated, like so many peripheral places, it faces economic and cultural decline.
‘Paintings from the Sierra de las Nieves’ is Cullen’s first exhibition to feature solely Spanish works. Coming to know the place again, after a lapse of time and a settling of memory, has prompted him to re-evaluate its pictorial possibilities, and to exploit them more fully than he could as a young man. The passage of time has wrought changes on both painter and place; he has come full circle, and is interested in these subjects for their own sake rather than any possibilities they may contain for pushing the boundaries of representation. The cyclical nature of this re-engagement has led to a return to an earlier mode of representation, one in which perspective has not been distorted or space fractured, resulting in simpler, more direct paintings than much of his work of the previous decades. As T S Eliot wrote: ‘We shall not cease from exploration, And the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time.’2
Cullen’s long connection to Casarabonela and his sense of a shared past with its people give the paintings an authenticity that could not be arrived at by the casual visitor. El Pistolero is a striking portrait of a local man, Don Sebastian Gomez. Known to the painter since childhood, Gomez was even permitted to give the painting its swaggering title (Fig 2). The feeling that sitting for Cullen forms part of the community’s social life is evinced by the sense of mutual trust and empathy in this painting. Other paintings in the exhibition depict the Feria, or annual fair that celebrates the culture, costume, and gastronomy of the area. The Feria is a natural tourist attraction, but this is a place fighting for survival in the modern world and its more poignant purpose is to bring the young people together in order to find partners, to marry and maintain village life. The juxtaposition of images of Caballeros and Flamenco dancers with signs of the workaday life of the village cast these romantic subjects in a less sentimental light, and show the precariousness of their existence.
Apart from figural subjects, there are landscapes which have a luminosity suggestive of plein air painting, but in fact most were completed in the studio, from memory and intimate familiarity with the surrounding countryside. Two in particular make a neat point of comparison in the effects of colour and light. Landscape, La Sierra de las Nieves (Fig 4) in which the white primed canvas and the thicker impasto combine to give the effect of shimmering midday heat. In contrast, in Nocturne, Casarabonela (Fig 3) colour has been used tonally and the earth colour of the canvas allowed to show through the rough strokes of colour in the foreground, to create a very different mood that yet retains the same vibrancy of colour. It was painted from the roof of his studio. According to local lore, Cervantes passed through the village on his travels through Spain, and Don Quixote and Sancho Panza make a brief appearance in one of the landscapes, as travellers along a road. Cullen’s work bears comparison with Cervantes, particularly in the cast of picaresque characters which frequently inhabit his paintings, and enliven their narrative possibilities. But Cervantes is not the only giant of the Spanish Golden Age whose presence pervades the work. The observant viewer will spot the tiny version of Velázquez’s Las Meninas in the background of Study; Interior, Midday (Fig 5), a complex study of filtered light penetrating through shuttered windows into the cool, dark interior that beautifully evokes the oppressive heat and stillness of the Spanish siesta.
It was on that first trip to Spain in 1969 that Cullen first encountered Velázquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas (1656), with its ambiguities of pictorial space and of subject matter. At the time it hung in a room on its own in the Prado with a mirror on the opposite wall, and it was many years later, while working in Annaghmakerrig in 1988, that the memory of the painting was sparked by the chance sight of a similar mirror.
Thus began his series of variations on Velázquez’s painting, an artist he acknowledges as his mentor, admitting that ‘no artist exists in a vacuum.’ Cullen’s speech, like his art, is littered with allusion. He makes easy connections between images in word and paint, and he is as alive to the possibilities in art historical sources as he is to the physical world around him.
Copying a painting from a master has long been common among artists. It is an obvious way of assimilating technique and composition, which became a standard part of studio practice in the Renaissance, and remained part of art education until the 20th century. But, aside from its didactic function, creating variants on another artist’s work has a particular fascination for artists. It can be seen as an act of homage, or a spur to problem solving. Norman Bryson explains the problem for the ‘latecoming’ artist, as that of existing within a tradition and continuing its aims and objectives, while at the same time advancing the medium in which those traditional ideas are expressed.3
Cullen’s most recent variation of Las Meninas, is painted on a massive scale, even larger than Velázquez’s original. However, scale is often arbitrary in his work. Some large paintings result from the chance availability of a huge canvas and he doesn’t distinguish between large and small works in terms of importance. Often the large work is described as a ‘study’ for smaller ones that follow, and his total output of paintings can be seen as a monologue that continues uninterrupted despite changes in volume. He works in series because each painting is a glimpse, an attempt to convey an emotion rather than to make a definitive statement. More interested in process than product, he intuitively works the medium for its greatest expressive potential, and is open to chance elements that take the work in unplanned directions.
In Studio Scene with Elephant: Study after Velázquez (Fig 1), exhibited at this year’s annual RHA show, he insinuates himself, as artist, into the centre of the composition, displacing Velázquez to the far edge of the canvas and depriving him of his subjects. The modern painter is seen as the magpie in the nest, which could be interpreted as an oedipal desire to oust the figure of authority. However, this is not the kind of subversive appropriation of an image that we see so frequently in contemporary art, and that has become a hallmark of postmodernism. Rather, it is an on-going dialogue with the problems of representation. The supposed subjects of Velázquez’s painting, King Philip IV and his queen, barely register in reflection in the mirror on the back wall, as Cullen returns more insistently to the real subject matter, a deliberation on the practice of painting itself, and its relationship to experience. Most problematic of all is the large elephant, his bulk dispersing the figures from their accustomed places, his back legs trampling on the artist’s canvas.
Elephants have appeared in Cullen’s works previously, but here, as a time traveller to the 17th century, this huge beast intrudes upon the composition, just as Velázquez’s painterly concerns clearly intrude upon Cullen’s imagination. If the painterly challenge posed by Velázquez and taken up by Cullen remains unresolved, perhaps the ludicrousness of ‘the elephant in the studio’ suggests a permanent irresolution that lies at the heart of representation. One observation made about Velázquez can equally be applied to Cullen; ‘the meaning of any of his paintings ought to be sought precisely where it was achieved, in the painting itself.’4 Aidan Dunne has referred to Cullen as an ‘unmistakeably Irish artist’ but ‘seen anew through the richness of European cultural tradition.’5 Perhaps this is what facilitates his connection to the people in southern Spain with their hybrid identity, still known locally as Moriscos on account of their Moorish past.
Cullen has never lacked the courage to paint subjectively, allowing ambiguity to remain in the work, unexplained. But this is balanced by the universality of his vision and of his iconographical references, both of which invite the viewer to engage fully with the work. As in the revered work of Cervantes and Velázquez, the viewer (or reader) acts as an accomplice, rather than merely a witness to events depicted. Though doubtless unintentional on Cullen’s part, it is this process of inter-subjectivity between artist and viewer that has ensured both his critical and commercial success, and makes one look forward with anticipation to his newest work.
1 Brian McAvera, Michael Cullen: Profile, Gandon Editions, 2007.
2 T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding, Four Quartets, London, 1942.
3 Norman Bryson, Tradition and Desire, Cambridge, 1984.
4 José López Rey, Velázquez: Catalogue Raisonné, Cambridge, 1999. p.9.
5 Aidan Dunne, Irish Art: The European Dimension, RHA, 1990.
