John Eisler
Per Second Per Second
Paul Kuhn Gallery
June 5 to July 10, 2004
“Only thought resembles. It resembles by being what it sees, hears, or knows; it becomes what the world offers it.”
~Rene Magritte
On October 14, 1947, Capt. Charles Yaeger established a new record by flying a rocket powered XS-1 at supersonic speed thereby breaking the sound barrier. Subsequent flights by successive intrepid aviators would quickly supercede Yaeger’s initial benchmark. The corresponding terminology, however, and in particular the concept of a ‘sound barrier’ would rapidly enter the popular lexicon.
Although it is a misnomer, because a barrier being broken implies an analogy between a sonic boom and a tangible limit which is of course materially absent, the term does serve as a useful metaphor when addressing images, and painting in particular with its attendant and often shifting discourse. A barrier implies a threshold and thus aptly illuminates the oft perceived disconnect between the potential referents an image might evoke and the discourse invoked on behalf of images to render intelligible both referents and images alike.
Similarly, linguists have argued that when verbal inflections shift across spoken dialects within a certain language structure a corresponding tonal shift within the dialect is necessary in order to distinguish the marginal differential between every newly established vowel sound. Without this rearrangement of the sonic landscape languages would become indistinguishable from one another thereby rendering mute their capacity to meaningfully signify concepts.
For example, whether considering the faux gravitas of omniscient monologues that accompany theatrical trailers or the sober decorum of TV news anchors, information deemed critical to our understanding of broader narrative implications is generally presented directly via a speaking messenger or voice-over.
An underlying visual discrepancy surfaces, however, with respect to the dissemination of information in this manner. The ontological universe implicated through audio-visual media preserves circumstantial aspects of an experiential context but divorces that context from lived experience thereby effecting a scenario where cause and effect are rendered indistinguishable. In other words, the institutional voice of discourse in effect disavows alternative interpretations of the images it purports to verify, explain or otherwise render visible.
John Eisler’s recent paintings occupy an uneasy space along this trajectory animating the relation between thought, which resembles without similitude, and image thereby occupying an intermediary stage in their own right between an objective universe and our imagined perception thereof.
Undermining and redirecting the morphology of speechified visual strategies, a supra-linguistic arsenal of plastic elements is employed in their execution. Phonemes are excavated to forge architectonic planes and lightfast strata that mutate and merge to produce hybrid variants across an expanding visual dialectic. In this manner, these works transcend the purely linguistic parameters ordinarily imposed by discourse and are similarly divorced from the constraints of representational analogues to which painting is often beholden.
Just as Yaeger’s aircraft would break the sound barrier, effectively shattering the dynamic of previously established relations, Eisler’s paintings comprise their own event horizon by redeploying a plastic scaffolding that is dismantled, reconfigured, and rebuilt simultaneously. Thought, it would appear, unlike the definitive sound barrier, spawns an ever-evolving linguistic vista that is continuously re-envisioned.