PARIS.- Mennour is presenting its first solo exhibition of the Britishartist Idris Khan.
In 1633, condemned by the Roman Inquisition for the heresy of heliocentrism, Galileo reluctantly allowed that the Earth, not the Sun, was the motionless body at the center of the universe. According to one account, as he was remanded to house arrest, he looked at the sky, stamped his foot on the Earth, and muttered E pur si muove: and yet it moves.
A captivating quality of Idris Khan’s compositions is the way they simultaneously convey and capture the fugitive motion of thought and process, the way they sit still but shimmer with jittery possibility. They are stationary objects, intricate accumulations of the very elements from which meaning is constructed, and yet even at rest they refuse to be grasped. They are palpably impalpable, saturated with information and yet radically vacant. But for an escaped detail here and there—a few words, a musical phrase, Khan’s brooding titles—they are impenetrable, arrested, inert. And yet they have a heartbeat, a pulse of feeling and intent. And yet they move.
These pieces often begin with a text written by the artist, which is then broken into short phrases and fabricated into dozens of wooden stamps. He uses these to mark the canvas, in order: a first layer with the first words of the text, the next layer with the following words, and so on until the language swarms into abstraction. In some paintings he uses musical notes as well, taken from the scores of undisclosed compositions and stamped in the same way; in other works the marks are hand-drawn, as in the triptych of charcoal prints on Korean hanji paper, in which the gesture of handwriting is repeated and swelled to the point, Khan says, “where the word becomes so loose that it becomes movement.” Whatever the sources, the literal impact of each phrase is experienced, all at once, as a thicket of reverberation and echo, a signal generating the noise that finally envelops it.
The centerpiece of “On Reflection,” a grid of monochrome watercolors collectively titled After the Reflection, is a deconstructive study of Reflets verts [Green reflections], one of the eight murals in Claude Monet’s suite of water lilies at Paris’ Musée de l’Orangerie. Khan began by extracting what he feels are that painting’s thirty most important colors, then used a synthesizer to generate a sound profile of its gradations and modulations. A musical transcription of that sound supplies the notes stamped on the surface of each watercolor, on top of which sit collages made from actual sheet music—evoking Khan’s late mother, who loved to play the piano in a small music room whose floor was often covered with paper scores.
Colors selected and sampled from Monet’s mural also underpin another series of monochromes that introduce a new technique and a new materiality: instead of stamping words, Khan uses a type-mounted roller, a hybrid of letterpress printing and Buddhist prayer wheels, to move oil paint around the canvas, sometimes scraping away to reveal the acrylic coat underneath. The result is necessarily messier, the lines earthier and more askew, than the orderly spacing and margins of the stamp paintings. “It’s much more expressive and fast,” Idris Khan explains. “You’ve only got a few hits until it goes too far.”
The exhibition “On Reflection” is tied together by the sculpture After Maude 13 Years, a towering stack of over four thousand blank sheets of paper, each the same weight as a printed snapshot, symbolizing one photograph for each day in the life, to date, of Khan’s newly teenage daughter. It was with Maude, seven years old at the time, that Khan made the visit to the Musée de l’Orangerie that would inspire his work on Monet—this work, the one before which the sculpture now stands, a nostalgic invitation to join father and daughter in private reflection.
Idris Khan’s works are always shapeshifting, seeming to arrive at one form or medium only to recall their past and future lives as another: photographs of paintings or pages from a book, words printed on stamps and layered until they disappear into the paint that carries them, a stack of painted paper representing a series of pictures testifying to a succession of days. Art, they slyly remind us, always contains labor and time, each mark a discrete event, each stroke a gesture with its own context and circumstance; a life, they suggest, contains moments just as a book contains words, as a symphony contains notes. To experience them all at once, as Idris Khan asks us to do by collapsing the structures that ordinarily space them apart, is overwhelming, but also liberating. Their accumulation does not offer or withhold meaning so much as ask what, at any scale smaller than a life, could ever contain it. Whether it is not in fact meaning, be it universal or secret, that never stops moving.
— Daniel Levin Becker
