Terry R. Myers |
For Mary Heilmann |
Los Angeles, July 2007
Dear Mary,
Have I told you lately how much I love your work? Walking
through your
retrospective exhibition in Orange County during the opening in May was
an experience I will never forget. It was—as you said—like
a family
reunion. Lush with works from the past forty years, many of which had
never met before, the show’s first venue was more than perfect
because it
brought everything together near the Pacific which has always been a
primary,
if not primal, source of inspiration and imagery for you. (No New
York painter has ever been as unapologetically Californian.) And, like
any
family, if not all of its members get along during this triumphant
American tour, then so much the better because passionate disagreement
reinforces how powerfully complicated real life is, especially when all
of its
realness presents itself so tangibly in so-called abstraction.
I’m writing you now because while looking at the assortment of
works
on paper that you’ve brought together here, it struck me that in
many ways
they are love letters “written” about—and to—many
of the things that
have been important to you from the beginning, most of all geometry. “I
have always loved the truths of geometry, Euclidean, topological, and
the
geometry of time.” You wrote that some time ago, your devotion
has not
wavered. Of course, it’s present in all your work, but this set
of colorful correspondences
shows us with intimacy and clarity the basic reasons why your
abstract yet concrete messages have been so persuasive and well received.
Neon Embrace holds close not only simple shapes that prove to be anything
but (that thin gray line complicates everything: who’s embracing
whom?),
but also a black-and-orange coupling tailor-made for the kind of (latenight)
excitement that was available in New York circa 1980, and, again, it
seems, in 1986, with your sexy Double Kiss. Color is personal and personality
in your work. In these works on paper it gives us as much, if not more,
than what we could read between the lines of a letter: the joyous release
of
Psychedelic Serape #4, the perpetual mood swing between The
Fall and The
Fall Turquoise, the permissive yet “primary” experience of
The Kiss
(Saturday Nite), the more restrained desire of Garden
of Allah #2, and,
finally, the black-and-white-and-red-all-over and all-out fluid passion
of
Half Jack. All of them bring me back to my first time with your work.
So, truth be told, this isn’t the first love letter that I’ve
written you. In
Orange County, Johanna Burton told us her story about writing about your
work for the first time, doing it as if she were going to send it to you
in a
letter. She wasn’t alone. When I first saw your work at Pat Hearn’s
in 1989,
I had the same impulse. Like Johanna, my first review of that show was
an
anything-but-secret love note. I was immediately taken by the way that
your paintings display what I called “necessary activity,” as
if they are able
to have their own lives made up of critical yet everyday things like work,
sex, and love. Completely smitten, my first idea—that the paintings
had
“jobs”—soon led me to suggest that their “inveiglement” heated
up the
room and made us leave the gallery breathing hard. By “us,” I
meant “me.”
After all these years, it’s still the same.
I love you
for that,
Terry
—
TERRY R. MYERS is a writer who was recently named Associate Professor
of
Painting and Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His
latest
book is Mary Heilmann: Save the Last Dance for Me (Afterall Books, 2007).
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