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By Trevor Winkfield An excerpt from the critical essay by Jed Perl There have always been artists who dreamed of reviving the elaborate costumes and stylized affections of the Middle Ages, and Trevor Winkfield, whose paintings are packed with absurdist heraldic devices, is one of the dreamers. Winkfield, who was born in Leeds in 1944, brings toughmindedness to his whirling arabesques, and there's something ineffably English about the resulting combination of fantasy and precision; I find distant echoes of the delicate Lady Chapel in the fourteenth-century Ely Cathedral and the labyrinthine work of the nineteenth-century painter Richard Dadd. Using flat, crisply modern shapes, Winkfield imagines scenes from some zany toy theater and fills them with the elegantly florid patterns of a chivalric age. He's written that he still has vivid memories of 1953, the year of Elizabeth II's coronation; nine at the time, he was struck by all the "ceremony and religious ritual (particularly the handing over of regalia from archbishop to sovereign, and the hierarchical poses adopted by the sovereign when weighted down by this regalia)." The boy saw a modern princess transformed into a gothic heroine, and he probably saw it all filtered through the newsreel footage and crude tabloid images that were available in a provincial English town. It must have seemed as if medieval manners were zooming straight into the pop present, and that's exactly where Winkfield takes up the story. Winkfield fills his paintings with court jesters, tournament props, and monkish hoods, yet this is also unmistakably the work of a modern man, who sees abstraction as a fact of life‹a visual equivalent of a more general cultural disarray. He's basically attracted to medieval pageantry because it's an idealized order, and if his own post-abstract sense of structure leaves lots of room for upheaval and confusion, that's his way of measuring the distance that we've travelled from the time of The Romance of the Rose. What Winkfield understands is that the pomp and circumstance that may have been a medieval reality have become a modern fantasy, and because he has such an intuitive feeling for that never-never land, his paintings, although chock-a-block with off-beat pedantry, aren't overly self-conscious. His exuberant color and get-the-job-done painthandling lend even the most labyrinthine imaginings a streamlined ease. We're able to glance easily over mysteriously antiquarian encounters. In Winkfield's paintings bizarre juxtapositions are everyday occurances. He's telling us that modern life is a crazy pageant. Like much strong painting that's produced today, Winkfield's work suggest an ambiguous universe where naturalistic forms are reshaped by abstract forces. In his canvases the clash of apparently irreconcilable traditions has an underlying biographical meaning, because the artist, although born and educated in England, has pretty much become a New Yorker since moving here at the end of the 1960s, when he was still in his twenties. Thus while the nautical doodads and general air of Edwardian nursery room humor say "English"-and say it even to those who don't know Winkfield's story-the hard-edged, joyfully strident look of the paintings could be stamped "Made in USA." In Winkfield's canvases the old English eccentricity is reconsidered from the vantage point of mad Manhattan, and if his best paintings summon up a feeling of cheerful panic, how could it be otherwise? Winkfield is living in New York and contemplating somewhere-or something-else, which is a fairly common situation. This is an art of cool surfaces and madcap subjects. Frequently, the central attraction is a figure, and there's something both touching and troubling about personages that are such odd amalgams of household objects and hardware and old-fashioned costumes. Winkfield's jerry-built humanoids call to mind eighteenth-century automata or avant-garde marionettes. They're ghosts who've ransacked the flea market for an identity, and the loopiness of the outfits is obviously a burden, a freakishly jolly carapace that must be carried everywhere. Winkfield's weirdos, in spite of their up-for-anything smiles, are ambivalent about the roles they play; it's overwhelming to be centerstage, or to bump into the strangest props when you make the slightest move. |
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