ELEANOR LOUISE BUTT

EXHIBITION ESSAY

In its modernist incarnation, abstraction (exemplified by abstract expressionism) was framed as a declaration of the artist’s authentic self, articulated by the application of unbridled and rapid gestures upon the canvas. Now that the project of modernism has all but been buried, the question remains – what is at stake in abstraction? Eleanor Louise Butt’s contemporary take on the style refutes the outdated logic that painting should operate as a faithful representation the artist’s psyche. Yet, at the same time, Butt’s work is also a personal account of her individual experience. If these paintings act as a record of her 2019 tenancy at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, then they are written in a broader language of anti-modernist abstraction that encompasses less of a direct transference from artist to canvas and more of a strategic process of selective exposure.

It should be emphasised that Butt’s choice of abstraction is not a tool for alienating viewers. Instead, the paintings modestly acknowledge the impossibility of absolute representation - representation that even more illustrative mediums, such as photography or sculpture, still fail to capture. Indeed, this is in line with what affect theorists have continued to remind us in recent years, that absolute representation is an essentially impossible task. As such, viewers are presented with mnemonic approximations of Butt’s experience of St Ives and greater West Penwith. This includes the reverberations created in the artist’s body by the powerful waves of the Atlantic ocean thrashing into St Ives’s  high granite cliffs (Untitled (brown, blue and orange sketch), 2019), which Butt translates through the use of short, linear brush strokes in combination with a palette dominated by brown and orange. As such, the landscape steps in as a surrogate for Butt’s memory, and Butt’s works operate as a double abstraction of the singular and phenomenological to the collective and visual.

Trevean Cliff, near Morvah, Cornwall UK, 2019

Working contra modernist abstraction’s desire to lay everything bare, Butt will often finish her works with blocks of colour that shroud certain portions of the painting. In Untitled (green, orange, white), 2019, for example, the artist has overlayed an earthy base composition with a series of uneven white blocks that obstruct our vision of the work’s underlayer. Interestingly, this white layer acts as a framing mechanism, exaggerating that which is not covered. Butt treats the artwork as a journal –but one in which only select memories are shared with her viewing public. This formal technique might be understood as a reaction to the oft repeated argument that to make a memory public is to immediately open it up to the “invasions of public spectacles of sentiment and clichés”, the result of which is a dulling of the singular, subjective moment.¹ The blocking seen in Butt’s paintings visually fragment her subjectivity to protect it from complete objectivisation from the viewers’ gaze.

Boulders on the hill above 'Eagle’s Nest', Zennor, Cornwall UK, 2019

Butt’s very specific technique, in which she loads her brush with paint and drags it across the surface of the canvas, charges her paintings with tension - a kind of push and pull between transparency and opacity.  This action simultaneously applies new paint to the work while also leaving certain sections empty, thereby allowing what is beneath to show through. As much as Butt refuses to lay everything out in the open, her technique is one that does not erase, rather, it layers. The act of erasure suggests the removal of imagery, while Butt’s layering is really a technique for muddying what is there. The image is still there, only it has been largely altered by the addition of blocks and Butt’s repeated dragging of pigment across previous layers. In many cases, the blocks are varyingly transparent, meaning that strata beneath pierce through to the surface. This is demonstrated most clearly in Composition in brown, 2019. This painting’s yellow underlayer is transformed by the brown block (a nod to the bracken along the Cornish moors) that has been applied over the top. Yet the yellow is not erased. Instead, it is assimilated into the blocking, which results in a glowing effect that tips over into the visceral; one imagines that the underlayer has been compressed by the brown block and is forcing its way through to the surface.  

Butt’s layering technique creates myriad mazes, which begin at the canvas’s base and end at the painting’s surface. The entanglement present in a single work is then mirrored on a macro-level between paintings. Butt creates several paintings at once and, as such, there are always a number of formal slippages — colour, line, texture — amongst her pieces. These slippages resemble a tangle of strands that eventually unravel to reveal a balance between works. Of course, any formal teasing out reflects the process of conceptual resolution in Butt’s practice, where the tension between subjective and objective representation eventually finds a balance. In the final analysis, the complexity of Butt’s painting lays in the work’s ability to operate contra a modernist definition of abstraction as total transference of the artist’s inner-being, while also creating a visual language that allows Butt’s audience to gain a broader impression of the artist’s situated experience.