Paintings of Passion, Space, Decisision and Care.
Katherine Porter´s paintings shock because they are naked. To unroll one of her canvases and suddenly experience its burning proximity is to come face to face with an exposed, almost “improper” intensity with wild impulses, absolute commitments and resentments, defiant self-confidence, and a savage fearlessness of stylistic explorations. There is no place in her ardent art for truth masked, no trace of a polite “potpourri of indecisions,” as Picasso once derogatorily referred to Bonnard´s refined subtleties. Affirmation of emotions exacerbated up to the point of primal screams, sometimes so piercing that they can no longer be heard, and decision as definition of differences reign in Katherine´s work. Her oeuvre, the vast domain of spontaneity untamed is simultaneously, paradoxically, tempered, subjected to rational control. By a supreme act of self-critical concentration, the free flow of freedom intersects with the intervention of Katherine´s will to attain unambiguous pictorial and emotional statements. Loaded with energy, each of her saturated hues brilliant, or subdued, each line band, shape, tone and rhythm are posited as individuals. One distinct from the other; they meet on a magnetic field and cross without losing independence and uniqueness. The same lucidity with which she identifies the components of her painting qua painting is at work in the suggestion of kinds and degrees of passion, spanning prevailing fierceness and the road to caress.
But neither expressionism nor Cartesianism can distance Katherine from the hard realities of facts and events. Abstraction in her work intermingles with representational vestiges and is intentionally referential. Ultimately, Katherine hopes to somehow militate on behalf of underprivileged children, wronged communities, the plight of humankind as a whole. These, she says are the starting points and constant themes of her work. She seems to have “taken over the sins” she attributes to her own country and does not polish the rough edges of her outrage against moral evil, perhaps against herself. Indifference is irrelevant to her. And if such dedication may seem dated to neo-conformist cliques, Katherine is in fact tuned to the pointed reorientations of such postmodern leaders as Jacques Derrida, who in the last few years turned from language to its meaning, from a focus on signifiers to a consideration of their human referents, of the joint problems of friendship and democracy. Her approach to art conforms to, without being influenced by, Derridas´s new theory of care through creative activities implied in his recent 1997 history and analysis of the Politics of Friendship. Unlike the philosopher, she trusts the latent existence and future implementation of a democratic politics patterned on fraternity without discrimination. Friendship inundates her canvases, but virulent rage resonates in all of them. Is it because she cannot accept the power of evil in the here and now that she leaps beyond the boundaries of earth and heaven that one sees into the boundlessness of physical spaces other than our own?
In this rage at least one of the agents that has triggered her leaps into the cosmic landscapes she paints, her stressful pumping of compassionate violence into the muscles of her vertiginous pictorial universes? Porter feels at home in the chosen lands of her flight from merely terrestrial, she is not disoriented in their puzzling extensions and is capable of telling the precise, inclination, recession, projection and relative position of two-dimensional section. Turning in the three-dimensionality she is liberated from flatness. Like Picasso and Gonzales before her, but without their programmatic explicitness, Porter “draws in space” and sculpts its apparent emptiness. In delineating its transparent facets, she discloses the infinite worlds within worlds they contain. The rectangles and diagrammatic figuration of the earth harbouring cosmic nests of circles, the rings, the ringed fragments and trajectories, the spirals, the spheres and the hypnotic concentricity passing from one composition to another revitalize – like circularity in Kupka, Delaunay, Duchamp, Klee, Kandinsky and Robert Smithson – what Panofsky and AlexandreKoyré, the historian of cosmology, have termed the abiding “hantise de la circularité.”Yet the sphere and the two-dimensional projections of sphericity in Porter, do not signify Platonic perfection but rather a “postmodern” lack of stable totalization, decentering by the multiplication of centers and openness instead of closure. The see-through pyramids she builds in the fluidity of space-recreating the tradition of Tatlin´s stiff, material Monument to the Third International – her striving vertical structures, the floundering superimposed steps, or as she says dominoes, as well as her cosmic whirlpools parallel however, perhaps most closely George Batailles´s ecstatic contemplation of glorious and lethal outer spaces wherein his alienated self sought to plunge in order to attain wholeness by joining the large supporting matrix of the universe. But again differing from Bataille, for whom integration meant loss of self and existence, Porters tottering cosmic systems are throbbing with the sense of a life energy which language cannot precisely name. Vitality, she knows only too well, cannot, however, function without an intimate collaboration with menacing extinction. Planets and constellations explode though they may also recall fragrant fruit and the vibrant blue skies of home.
Look how exuberant ascension is watched from the background by the ghost of minimalist geometry and stasis in Mr. Li´s Story; see how biting a big chunk from the brown compositional body deconstructs its completeness in Noon Knives; how one solar half is everything that the second liquid half is not, to acknowledge the legitimacy of the collage aesthetic in Ulysses is a Milkman; how a dark shiny hemisphere is planted next to blue aerial markers and dominates like an immense “black sun” planetary and stellar acrobatics in Master of the Three Paths. A checkered rectangle sternly guards the caprices of rococo embroideries and the impudence of graffiti in Kingdom.Clamoring oranges, blues, yellows, gold, rust black holes and black openings in The Chancellery of the Water clash with the visual and affective registers created by matte and soft grays where bloodless biomorphs float aiming to uncertain ends on the right in an untitled mirage. Horror of the vacuum in Blue Chasm contradicts the bursts of radiating entropy in Space Conquered Time, The Conqueror and seems to target the unsuspecting, undulating dew in Blue Skies. Squares, polygons, rectilinear and arched stripes circulate on the roof of a dusty city in Ashes To Ashes.A piece of the gestural hurricane above falls into the zone of soothing silence below coiling like a satiated snail inside its spiral shell in In Order to Speak. Porter´s whimsical, ironic and allusive titles steadily spell out her love for poetry and music, her insight into their correspondences. Her paintings of passion, space, decision and care, sing.