Rachel Howard: Paintings of Violence (Why I am not a mere Christian)
Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma presents paintings by Rachel Howard, the artist’s largest exhibition in Italy to date, made possible thanks to the generous support of the Bohen Foundation.
Housed in the main space of the museum’s Testaccio building, a former slaughterhouse, “Paintings of Violence (Why I am not a mere Christian)” is an installation of ten paintings and one sculpture. Here Howard continues her examination of religion, mortality and violence, specifically ‘controlled violence’, meticulously planned and calmly executed. The title is taken from two opposing polemics, Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell and Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.
Over a period of five years from 2011-2016 Howard has slowly developed these ten paintings, the dimensions of each mirroring the artist’s height and arm span. She pulls a T-square, reminiscent of a disproportioned crucifix, down the surface of the canvas, dragging rich blood-red paint downwards and staining the luminous pink surface dark crimson. This process is then repeated; placing, slicing, swiping and wiping. Finally, towels used to wipe the T-square, are folded and placed on the plinth, as evidence of the aftermath. ‘The essence of this work’ as Thomas Krens of The Guggenheim Foundation describes ‘is performance: painting as dance, movement, intellectual rigor and extreme economy in the application of an intense, repetitive, layered, disciplined and infinite gestural difference.’
Howard describes “Paintings of Violence (Why I am not a mere Christian)” as ‘…not about a bacchanalian violence, but the steady calm hand of violence on a greater scale. Maximum damage, planned and calmly carried out; hence the slow slice through the alizarin crimson oil paint, exposing the fluorescent beneath, raw and defenceless, the repetition of canvas after canvas, the same but different.’ She refers to the acts of violence planned on a scale that overwhelms; these acts of terror, these threats to the stability of everyday life, have something in common. They are different but also, in many ways, the same.
More of Howard’s new and recent paintings that explore pattern and the grid, are exhibited in galleries either side of the main space. These paintings explore the idiosyncratic qualities of oil paint, unpicking the accepted rules of engagement with this most traditional of mediums. In the large-scale canvases, “Symptoms and Side Effects”, (2016) and “Wood for Trees”, (2016) an interchange between background and foreground is specifically explored. She describes her aim, ‘to bring the decorative forward, to give it a life of its own, to play with pattern as perhaps reflecting a mental interior as well as a literal interior’. These paintings alongside the grid paintings explore ideas of order and entropy.
“The Paintings of Violence” will travel to MASS MoCA, Massachusetts, US in 2017.
