LAWRENCE CALVER – INFINITELY GENTLE

I’m not sure if collage is a fitting descriptor. After all, for Max Ernst, collage supposes the combination of dissonant materials on a plane that is further disjunctive. Calver, however, produces large canvases in which unevenly cut textiles are sewn together into an irresistibly beautiful and gentle concert. Aurally, I’m reminded of the music of Eric Satie, of sounds as limpid, as soft, as easeful, for this, undoubtedly, is the mood and sonography of Calver’s art. There is, for instance, a patchwork, rather than collage, composed in a symphony of pink, with elements of blue and orange subtly integrated. In the composition, pieces are cut and shifted about. If the colour field is deemed too strong, too stringent, the composition is then  bleached, or, inversely, redyed. Colour is never a given in Calver’s world. And if Rothko is a core inspiration, it is because he understood the integral and numinous matter of light.

Lawrence Calver, in his studio at the Cape Town Art Residency, photo credit: Yulia Zhilina

Calver declares that he ‘brings out what is already there’. This supposes an artist who treads exceptionally lightly, who refuses the imposition, say, of ego, for whom composition is an intuitive, even Taoistic, exercise, that allows as much for release as it does composition. Here, again, Satie returns to me as an infinitely gentle – though not infinitely suffering – thing, for his world, like Calver’s, and unlike T.S. Eliot’s to which I’m inferring, holds little interest in pain, whether psychic or physical. Rather, Calver is wholly immersed in the sonority and beauty of the world. Indeed, a work is completed only when he sees ‘the beauty in it’.

Lawrence Calver, in his studio at the Cape Town Art Residency, photo credit: Yulia Zhilina

That Calver doesn’t like his ‘hand being in the work’ further illuminates the nature of its making, in which removal is not detachment. The hand, typically, is integral in the making of craft and art. Calver’s hand, or hands, and presumably a foot attached to a sewing peddle, assume a constructive interposition when stitching the work. But when it comes to dyeing and bleaching? Surely here hands get ‘dirty’ as it were? That Calver insists upon the withdrawal of the hand in art, must refer to something other, given that its presence is irrefutable. I think that Calver’s conceit hangs on desire – what he wishes the viewer to experience and see, which is not the mechanics of their making but the sonority of their unique being. His is a vision of art that is transcendental and sacramental.

Lawrence Calver, in his studio at the Cape Town Art Residency, photo credit: Yulia Zhilina

This ideal in no way overrides the fact that the making of his art requires not only a sewing machine but ‘a mental drive and physical process’. Calver’s core point, however, concerns the economy of reception of his work – how it is seen, what it is seen to be, how it is felt, or intuited – which favours the sacral, typically associated with Rothko’s paintings. This predilection on the part of the artist is not a personal quirk, but historical. That abstraction now dominates the global optic in the artworld is, in fact, unsurprising. After all, after a recent and still current history consumed by moral piety and sententiousness, by rage and divisiveness, the artworld finds itself exhausted. Now, identity politics holds comparatively little sway. Now, we no longer care to be told what to think, or when to shut our mouths. Now, we find ourselves returning to consolatory art. As Matisse famously remarked, on returning home after a tiring day at work, the businessman wishes for nothing more than to kick off his heels, slump into a cosy armchair, and behold a restful work of art.

Lawrence Calver, Untitled, photo credit: Yulia Zhilina

This is Lawrence Calver’s goal. He well knows that abstraction is not an intellectual game, but the stuff created by theosophists and mystics. It is that tradition, inspired by wonder, drawn to beatific contiguities, which he has made his own. One particularly splendid work has stayed with me. Calver has worked on both sides of the thin canvas, drained the colour, so that what we see, barring one irregularly shaped block of ox blood red, is a subtle compound of striped and matte creams, with one blob of creamy yellow. Nougat comes to mind, something milky. But this, contra Barthes, is not milk that turns, but a milk, some balm of pale custard with slivers of berry, which is utterly soothing. Because now, we are done with moral peacocks, done with noise. Now, we linger longer, inhabit the world more slowly, gently … kindly.