Two Rivers: Paintings by Robin Pacific

Two Rivers: Paintings by Robin Pacific

When the Greek sage Heraclitus wrote that it is impossible to step into the same river twice, he meant that both human life and the identity of the world are ephemeral, irreducibly wedded to the swift contingencies of time. Fundamental cosmic element, source of spiritual purity, the flowing water of rivers provides an image of both birth and mortality, fertile life and final dissolution, and is therefore at once celebratory and mournful. Life’s winding, downward course is a river; death’s other shore is the far side of the river; oblivion and redemption are found in the waters of the river.

Robin Pacific is an artist whose practice to date has tended to be conceptually driven, community oriented, and stridently activist. In Uniform – Collaboration with Protection Service Officers at the Art Gallery of Ontario in December, 2003, an institution which has become increasingly corporate and alienated from the community which surrounds it, she asked AGO security guards to be photographed and to describe their histories and their relationship to the art they are employed to protect. The seventeen brightly colorist, sensuously painterly works which comprise Two Rivers mark both a formal and emotional departure from her earlier work. They enact the process of mourning for her late husband and exorcise a damaged self from grief’s inner solipsism back to life’s open present. Pacific has confronted the challenge of oil painting, that most difficult and historically loaded of idioms, because of its fleshly intimacy, its solitary introspectiveness, and its emotional subtlety. Painting is a daily practice, like meditation. Painting is a place where the self is exposed, and perhaps also healed.

Two Rivers is a cycle, a journey with its own flow and counter-flow, and hence it needs to be contemplated in sequence. In the opening painting, jagged white rivers angle from the upper and lower sections of the canvas, and in the center a creamy rectangle frames a bursting swarm of paint. The second painting has a thick, crude off-green square pushed to the edges of the canvas, within which is a tangle of blue and purple gestures. The slowly converging rivers still far apart, in the third painting of the series is a grey circle trained on a red conflagration and violent scratches, and in the fourth painting a smaller, yellow circle is slathered over with a muddy, downsliding mass of green. The white rivers, diagrammatic and without perspective, represent the course of parallel lives moving toward one another, but they also have the pure anonymity of transcendent spirits and their incremental motion is almost fatalistic. The rectangles, squares, and circles, basic geometric forms, often rendered in sticky pinks and yellows, are less mathematical than fleshy, and they appear as attempts to impose order on eruptions of raw emotion which are finally uncontrollable, spilling over onto the unframed sides of the canvases.

The paintings in Two Rivers are not so much pictures as the dialectical traces of a painful inward journey made visible, and for that reason both the artist herself and her husband’s spirit are constant, invisible presences: the paintings are not objects but intermediaries, screens between worlds sliced by the precise shapes of the canvases. This may explain these paintings’ ambivalence and volatility, their dizzying shifts from lyricism to violence, the tension between cool black, blue, and green and warm yellow, pink, and red. As the series progresses, there are places where glimpses of natural imagery begin to surface. The swaths of blue-grey in the fifth painting, for instance, naturally evoke the wet dawn sky, and the oozing pinks and yellows in the sixth painting suggest the rising sun. Both of these paintings reflect a shift in tone in the series, a turning point; then, in one of the most tumultuous paintings in Two Rivers, full of furious blood-red, fire-red marks, a roughly drawn boat appears. It is important that boats often figure in funeral rituals, from ancient Egypt to India to Japan to the native cultures of the northwest coast. Boats symbolically convey the dangerous and vulnerable body and spirit of the dead from the shores of the living to the land of the dead.

Pacific’s boats, however, are not so much in the paintings as floating over them, and they serve as magical emblems or talismans gathering death and spiriting it away: the death of a loved one is no single thing, but is an absence scattered through the matter of life. In the ninth painting, for instance, there are four boats, one near the top in a yellow, sun-like disc, others free-falling in the painting’s downward rhythm, and in the tenth painting boats roil in wild, scribbled greens. The living cannot follow the dead, but they cling to them covetously, morosely transporting themselves into an impossible, liminal realm that is neither life nor death. As the two rivers converge, the boats multiply amidst anxious but weakening resistance. Then, in what is perhaps the strangest and most moving painting in Two Rivers, the boats suddenly vanish, and the number 6 rises in a rectangle in the center of the painting. “6” is Robin Pacific’s portal number, and here it represents her division from the world of the dead and her final access to it: it is the secret portal through which she too will eventually pass. The rivers have united. Soft explosions of pale purple and blue lift up into dark summer green.

The last three paintings of Two Rivers are calm, open, and joyful, and they constitute the triumph of the living present. Sky blues fan upward; deep reds pour down through thickets of green and blue; luxuriant purples bloom. One is reminded here of the serene eroticism of the paintings of Hans Hoffman’s old age, or of the hard-won pleasures of Joan Mitchell’s late Giverney paintings. Life may be illusory and haunted by the prospect of suffering, as the Buddha observed, but it is also ecstatic in its sensuous indeterminacy. Yet as I contemplated these paintings, I kept imagining the number 6 looming behind the play of colors, a reminder that our daylight consciousness is continuous with the timeless presence and authority of oblivion. One senses that the colors slide over the united rivers’ rising water, which is now too close for either shore to be visible.

Daniel Baird