The connection, which suddenly arose in the question, is for the doubting grasping and poetic in a way that perhaps is the trembling alien. The devout Catholic James Joyce seems in his work to have repeated the process in reverse sequence – foresight and context in Stephen Hero and Dubliners, which ultimately give way to the anarchistic in Finnegans Wake. Here, he avoided at least being accused of having certain presumptions. The wild beauty struck me when I was about 20 years old – approximately 10 years before I consciously began creating art. The painting series "ababab" was produced half-blind. The title is an abbreviation of “ababababoldhargothatkammniaronkronkronbrotnnonrenrontunnthuntravorhunownowtoohhohoordenenthrunuk.” Each painting is an excerpt from Joyce's words for the eternal noise in Finnegans Wake. There his sound effect for the worker's fall from silence, the angels' fall from Paradise, and everyone's fall from grace is, as we tend to put it, a scream. According to Irish tradition, it is the scream that accompanies a person's departure into death, God's silence. This silence also seems particularly gripping to atheists.

William Anastasi. January 8, 1987.

Reviews

The Sound Becomes Images

Painting as the Poetic Metaphor of Sound

William Anastasi. Stalke Gallery, Admiralgade 22. Tue-Fri 13-18, Sat 11-15. Until May 7.

One panel is added to another, and that one to the next. Letters emerge from their array of bright colors and continue the sequence in the combined image fields. They do not make sense on their own. "Bababad" are the first letters and immediately reference James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (which we always have on hand, don’t we?), first page, third paragraph. Here, the sounding-out words depict the fall—a hundred letters representing "the great fall," not just of Finnegan the builder, but of all of us.

Sound-painter Joyce has always fascinated image-maker William Anastasi. This lyric effect—"the worker's fall from stillness, the angel's fall from paradise, all of our falls from a branch, the one we’re sitting on now"—in Anastasi’s interpretation, is equated to its recreation within the duration of the painting. Was the sequence of images placed in such a way that one could almost hear the scream of the fall?

Unfortunately, the space at Stalke is too small to allow this. He breaks down the large image sequence into smaller segments, where the coherent process is fragmented. At the same time, one can look closer at the individual fields' painterly details.

Anastasi has a background in minimalism and conceptual art. A practice from those days lies behind the Bababadseries: the so-called "blind drawings," where he placed the processed image fields on top of one another and worked them with pencil or acrylic paint. An attempt to approach what art historian Rosalind Krauss calls "the optical unconscious."

Here lies a sense of sound's density and saturation in color, texture, light, looseness, and strictness, compacted and concentrated. And, to some extent, he inserts Joyce's series of letters with typographic precision (Anastasi actually projects the letters onto the canvas). Letters emerge as words that never fully form and simultaneously collapse. It’s like the music of composer Morton Feldman, who, like Anastasi, viewed sound as an echo of its own plastic shape: without beginning or end, but in a shared formative space.

Anastasi leads Joyce's concrete text into the "blind" abstraction. The shape of words is almost lost, but the sound of the scream remains, and the painting becomes the poetic metaphor of sound.

Øystein Hjort

STALKE GALLERI - ENGLERUPVEJ 62 - 4060 - KIRKE SAABY - DENMARK - PHONE: +45 2926 - 7433

CONTACT:  STALKE@STALKE.DK

OPEN BY APPOINTMENT