Criticism and Media
Mark Travers: A New Land
Mark Travers: Now Showing at Houska Gallery
Mark Travers: Metropolis at Bruno David
Essay: Entering Metropolis
“Art is revelation instead of information, expression instead of description, creation instead of imitation or repetition.” ~ Josef Albers
It feels appropriate to begin an essay on Mark Travers’s Metropolis paintings with a quote from Josef Albers – not because Travers himself has cited Albers as an influence (to my knowledge he has not), but because in viewing these paintings, one is instantly reminded of the lessons Albers transmitted to subsequent generations of artists on the inherent nature of color and color’s essential relativism, its ability to affect viewers differently depending on the context in which it is seen.
In the spirit of Albers’s concern with feeling over content, the architectural forms with which the Metropolis series is nominally concerned are hardly recognizable in paintings such as “Power Grid” and “Transit Hub”— rather, it is the feeling such forms suggest, the cognitive sparks that cross over from the subconscious to the conscious that each piece captures. Any sense of recognition one experiences in matching each work to its title is thus purely emotional; it is not the form of a power station that the brain registers, but the feeling one experiences when it is conjured in the mind’s eye.
There is a deceptive simplicity to these paintings that works in tension with their abstractness, a “what you see is what you get” quality that conflicts with questions about the interaction of vision, feeling and memory, and the chasm that separates human experience from understanding. Their radical flatness forces the viewer’s attention on the rhythmic interplay between color and line. Within these visual pulsations lies Metropolis’s urbanity – though its austere right angles could not appear more different from, say, Stuart Davis’s jagged shapes and frenetic squiggles, the series reflects the pace and movement of urban spaces, of street lights flashing as light bounces between plate glass buildings and off cars speeding by.
This sensitivity to the unique, affective qualities of built environments finds its origins in the artist’s childhood experience. “In my youth,” Travers explains, “I was very invested in Catholicism and became an altar boy at the age of 12. I loved the ritual of it all. We lived about two blocks from church and I remember getting up at dawn on the days I was scheduled, riding my bike down the alley – even on cold winter mornings – in order to serve the early morning Mass.” The responsibility and discipline required of his position, combined with the ceremony and mystery of the religious service (then still performed in Latin), impacted the young Travers strongly and gave those early morning experiences profound meaning. During this time, he became attuned to more subtle visual and aural aspects of the environment. “Light pouring in from high windows and the quiet hum of penitents’ prayers would fill the church,” says Travers. “I gradually became aware of a metaphysical effect that refracted light and repetitive prayer had on me.”
That experience replicated itself several times over. One summer’s day in particular, when Travers was fourteen, he speaks of an experience when he was contemplating the origins of God. “I fell into what I now would characterize as a meditative trance. For a nanosecond, I felt as if a door had opened to an other-worldly dimension and the mysteries of God and the sublime had been revealed to me – but just as I became conscious of what was happening, that door closed and I could not remember a single thing about what I had just witnessed.”
Though he no longer practices any form of organized religion, painting serves as a means for him to try and replicate these profound physical and spiritual sensations – including the barrier which he describes as a “layer of occlusion” that dropped within his consciousness, denying him access to understanding or memory of what he experienced that summer day.
Travers uses an airbrush and paints on wood panel. He may use from sixty to 100 distinct colors in each work. “I don’t have a plan when I begin a new painting; I let each one grow organically, building it layer by layer, adding different tints, tones and shades of color to create order, structure and mystery.” This layering technique of opaque color creates the illusion of translucency and transparency, generating an optical effect that forces the eye to refocus as it navigates around each work. In the end, each painting reminds Travers of those experiences from his youth, “…when doorways would open to other dimensions – prompting a reflexive refocusing on being and purpose, on material versus mystical.”
This application of meticulously layered paint also allows for investigation of the visual challenges of perspective and of depicting space two-dimensionally. The reverberations of different colors vibrating against one another create an allusion to space, “but in this case, spatial depth is minute – measured in micrometers – rather than the traditional art-history notion of linear perspective.” Similarly, the artist’s use of strong lines and colors that wrap around the sides of each painting, playing with their edges rather than concealing them, makes each piece an experiment in structure. This is not structure as bounded by physics, but structure that is “more representative of a feeling, rather than a reality or any kind of recognizable imagery.” As each layer of paint is applied, “the subdivisions of structure throughout each painting create wonderful and unplanned intersections of color” that lend the works in Metropolis their energetic quality.
Through the dynamic interplay of all these elements, Travers’s Metropolis series lays claim to that place where the precision of the physical meets the ethereal of the spiritual.
— Elizabeth Wolfson
Elizabeth Wolfson holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Brown University, where her research focused on photography and visual studies. She is co-director of Flood Plain, a non-profit exhibition and performance space in St. Louis’s Gravois Park neighborhood. Her writings on art and culture have been published in the Journal of Visual Culture, Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture, Art:21 Magazine, and St. Louis Magazine, among other publications.
