The thinking of art seems final when
The thinking of God is smoky dew.
The tune is space.
– Wallace Stevens
Contributed by Sharon Horvath / Prominent critics have written extensively about the paintings of Merlin James, and James himself is an erudite art writer. Still, I am compelled to explore how it is that his painterly magic works on my mind. As I walked through the two rooms of his current show “Hobby Horse” at Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, the paintings struck a chord, bringing up half remembered lines of Wallace Stevens’ poetry, plucked out of context.
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
The show includes 23 paintings made between 1982 and 2024. A particular pleasure for long-time admirers of James’s paintings is the surprise that comes from juxtaposing works from different times and places. Some here were started and stopped, then completed years later. Viewers are thus invited to a pictorial family reunion; paintings that emerged over a span of decades depicting childhood, stages of adulthood, transitional objects in transitional spaces. The immediate sensation is paradoxical. How do these pictures radiate such intense feeling with such understated means? What is painting, anyway, and what does it really represent? Do the paintings need one another? (Yes.) Do they need us?
While looking, I adjust to their internal damp, northern climate, heavier than the air here in New York City.
In my room, the world is beyond my understanding.
But when I walk, I see that it consists of three or four
Hills and a cloud.
The last body of work James exhibited in New York, in 2022, focused on interiors, walled spaces or views out of windows. It is as if, between then and now, he left the house and walked around again. Maybe the recovery of older canvases from the storage shelf is akin to taking a years’ long walk. For the most part, the paintings selected for this exhibition are outward looking, cropping an eroding expanse of loose ends and interruptions, framed to fit our understanding.
James’s paintings seem to comment on their nature as constructed reality. In some works, translucent polyester is stretched tight as a drum over elaborately constructed wooden stretchers or strainers. We see through the screen of the picture plane as if recto and verso were visible at once. Small objects are affixed on or in the gauzy surface. In Hobby Horse, a small cut-out hobby horse prances along the equatorial crossbeam. Cigarette-sized holes are burned, aligned with touches of paint. James fuses an anti-academic, offhand manner with intense exactitude. Scale shifts drastically within the pictures: As a wooden pipe organ would loom larger when a small toy is placed on its keys. We slow down to experience the impulse of a hand grasping an inaccessible toy behind a veil of illusion.
Nothing must come between you and the shapes you take when the crust of shape has been destroyed.
A familiar feature of James’ paintings is a sharply pointed ellipse – the Shape – standing as a central axis in works such as The Oval Rug and Garden. It appears alien in the pictorial space where it hovers. As if spirited from Flatland’s two dimensions, it is incommensurate with our world. Hobby Horse includes the Shape in proximity to an actual measuring stick and a small wooden cowboy. The immeasurability of imagined things or abstract ideas is thus compared to the size of a child.
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye,
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way the ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.
As an incarnate phenomenon, the Shape can shift and lend its form to recognizable things: a surfboard, a tree, the edge of a pond (Garden), a rug (The Oval Rug) a space between two legs (Untitled, 2024, Girl). Is the Shape an apparition, a symbol of abstraction itself, a female lingam, a companion self, Stevens’ “sovereign ghost”?
The soul, he said, is composed
Of the external world.
James paints himself outfitted as a boy-cowboy, riding a hobby horse in the backyard of his childhood home in Cardiff. A crumbling stone wall partially encloses the yard, where an array of toys and objects are strewn on the ground. The three backyard paintings include a rug, a gaming table, a fenced pool, and birds. It’s easy to imagine these objects magnified in the child’s imagination, playing outside of the confines of a grown-up world. The small cowboy-shaped wooden cut-out is a toy version of an American cowboy in fully accessorized sheriff regalia. A badge pinned to the cowboy’s vest is a gold star painted with a tiny brush. Did this token of the mythical American West fuel a penchant for romanticism? We see a child in reverie, represented in scumbled paint and ghostly charcoal marks, by the older artist whom he has now become.
I was the world in which I walked. And what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
In Untitled, 2024, the picture plane is a mirror into which a youth seems to peer, beholding an erect “little man” through vertical legs, their opening the shape of that pointed ellipse. Behind his head, breasts press forward, compressing the intimate image. This painting and its companion, Girl, might give you the feeling that you have not earned such intimacy with them. It’s as if in a first meeting a person reveals details of their life too soon, leaving the impression that behind the naked presentation a mystery persists. The paintings make the viewer aware of the power of an image to raise mixed feelings. This points directly to the paradox of painting: the being of the naked referent verses the stronger seeming of the penetrating illusion. Untitled, 2024, is painted with such delicate beauty that it is easy to imagine it hanging next to Chardin’s Soap Bubbles in a museum, where both bubble and erection last for centuries.
I placed a jar…..And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
A motif repeated in four paintings is the Arnold Circus bandstand in East London. At age 19, James left his Welsh home to attend art school in London. He occupied a studio near this radiating structure, which may be a central axis around which memories of his youth revolve.
The color like a thought grows out of a mood.
Markedly different atmospheres are palpable in each bandstand painting, as if to memorialize the location over the course of time. The air is charged by the appearance or absence of figures. Moods shift with the days or seasons in what could be a subjective mnemonic color coding: when was it that she walked towards me, or what about the other time when I was so late that I missed her? And so forth. James uses acrylic with the sensitivity of oil paint and brushes that are “nothing special.” He conjures strong presences with delicate touch. You follow the painter’s thinking when he leaves well enough alone.
Paper souvenirs of rapture
James doesn’t let you forget that here, inside the paintings, moonlight is almost graspable, made of our stuff, be it dust, hair, pasteboard, or ashes. The paintings’ planned nonchalance and physicality is charming, Yet James’s pale greens and yellows offer cold comfort.
“Merlin James: Hobby Horse,” Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, 530 West 22nd Street, New York, NY. Through April 5, 2025.
About the author: Sharon Horvath is a painter who lives in Queens works in Brooklyn and Andes, NY. She is Professor of Painting and Drawing at Purchase College, SUNY.
