John Berry’s Garden of Forking Paths
By Michael Mackenzie
John Berry is exhibiting eight new paintings at Josef Filipp Gallery in Leipzig. They were inspired by Berry’s impressions of the Schrebergarten in Leipzig during a residency at Pilotenkueche in the Spring of 2018. He was fascinated by these allotment gardens, regimented spaces for living out individual freedom and fruitfulness within a tightly gridded framework, but also by the diffident attitude of his German acquaintances towards their outmoded, kleinbürgerlich sentimentality. Back in his American studio these fenced-in little garden plots continued to work on his painterly imagination, taking on new dimensions, or rather, being compressed into the shallow, impacted spaces reminiscent of DeKooning’s greatest canvases. Rule-based compositional systems and trellis-like grids would be the framework for this new series, in which luxuriant improvisation was always on the verge of overgrowing its boundaries. At the same time, what were formerly depictions of actual brick walls and other built barriers have in these new works given way to folded and collapsed spaces formed by contrasts of opaque and transparent color, providing what Berry calls pockets of real space for retreat in a world dominated by the screens of our devices.
The compositions look riotous at first glance, but are tightly constrained at the edges and by edges of differently textured shapes, little plots abutting one another. These textures are achieved through the use of a variety of different media, including acrylic, spray paint, and Flashé. Berry stakes out the borders between these shapes with tape at certain moments during the painting process. The compositions are also partly worked up on the iPad, using the most basic, pre-loaded graphics app, with the simplest color ranges, which Berry will sometimes methodically recreate with real pigments. The use of an iPad and a projector – commonplace tools in most painting studios now – presents Berry with what he perceives as a set of deep, almost philosophical choices. His compositional activity is centered around an ongoing decision-making process, in which he constantly seeks to test the limits of the original parameters that he sets for himself, overturning or overwhelming self-imposed rules that become too constraining. This often results in the decision to overpaint the pictorial field, leaving ghostly images of earlier compositions visible beneath the surface. Earlier, such a decision-making process would have left little trace in the resulting painting when it finally left the studio, other than the complexity of impacted space and sedimented paint layers. Now, with the use of the iPad, Berry can work through multiple iterations, saving each as he proceeds. But what is the status of each of those branches on the decision tree, those paintings which might have led to other works, had their path been chosen? As with the alternate sequences of chess moves worked through by a player analyzing a difficult position, they lead to alternate outcomes, more or less successful and equally possible, all available to be recalled from the program, projected onto a fresh canvas, serving as the starting points for alternate versions which are also new paintings. The iPad functions in Berry’s studio therefore as a tool to preserve the other forked branches on the decision tree, folding them back into the process, opening up further spaces in the paintings themselves, spaces that hover on the threshold of visibility and definability. Like the World War One-era spy in the Borges parable “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Berry conceals his own authorship of the work in plain sight, by embedding the final outcome in the infinite set of its alternate possibilities. In the Borges story, the garden of forking paths is both a real garden labyrinth and, of course, a text. Berry’s work is both a body of paintings and branching tree of digital files. All – or at least some – possible versions of a painting’s labyrinthine spatial arrangements exist simultaneously. Each composition contains within itself endless possibilities, and endless places to secret away hidden truths.
While many painters now simply post their iterative design process to social media in real time, making the studio and its contents another overshared space in our crowded screen lives, Berry covers his tracks with false narratives and branching paths that end in one painting only to reemerge in another. Hiding the path that he took, leaving the choice of paths as a puzzle for the viewer to solve – or not be able to fully solve – creates, in Berry’s words, “an openness for the process of interpretation for the viewer.” The garden of forking paths is a private space where viewer and painter meet, a refuge from the overcrowded public space of the glass screen, with its collection of fine-grained user data and its constant tracking of our lives. It is not a tool of exposure and transparency, bringing the studio and the world, and the datamining machinery of user analysis, into one another. Like Dostoyevsky’s novels, Berry’s forking path rejects the degrading determinism of social data analysis, but instead “always represents a person on the threshold of a final decision, at a moment of crisis, at an unfinalizable, and unpredeterminable, turning point for their soul."[1] In his process, first determining formal parameters and then seeking ways to exceed or subvert them, Berry is working in a mode that is, to borrow another term from Bakhtin’s analysis of Dostoevsky’s poetics, dialogical, rather than monological, providing spaces for multiple voices, rather than a unified authorial intention. Ivan Karamazov famously argued that, if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. But, like Ivan’s brother Alexei, Berry has said that freedom can only exist in paintings if there are parameters, which, having first been put into place from outside the painting, Berry is free to exceed, or not, once he is inside the painting, as it were (with a nod to Pollock). As Berry says, “There are times where I lose awareness of the parameters. I'm still operating within them and I'm not aware of them.” This is a double move to establish the freedom represented by painting as meaningful and nontrivial. The parameters of painting, the allotment-like divisions and grids, and the selection of materials, are first chosen in freedom, and then freely submitted to as though they were preordained, so that the artist loses awareness of himself as the source of the painting’s parameters. As Berry has said to me,
“The paintings are making a philosophical bet that these things are objective, that these values are objective. What I am subjectively trying to build or point to is a series of relationships that activate something about the human experience that is true. More than just subjectively true, or at least a kind of universal subjectivity.”
The second move then comes when Berry then, essentially, rebels against what now appears to him, when he’s in the painting, as an outside law. Compositions are reworked, painted over, repainted with different materials to achieve different textures or color temperatures, tape is pulled off and reapplied elsewhere. Space is pushed deeper or pulled up closer to the surface. He gives the painting a life of its own, once again directing attention away from himself as an authorial presence. Earlier iterations are brought back into play; connections are cut through to other paths in the garden. The painting arises out of its own interconnected set of possibilities. Berry is actively avoiding demonstrations of facility in the conventional means and materials of painting, experimenting instead in uses of materials that will challenge his own training. To paraphrase Kierkegaard, the objective conventions of painting are matters of indifference; he aims to become a painter in each work, not to demonstrate that he already is one. And in order for the struggle to achieve a painting to be a real one, to demonstrate authentic freedom, the risk of failure must be real. The paintings in the current show are the ones that succeeded.
[1] Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 61.