Big, beautiful, with ravishing color and seductive light, April Gornik’s paintings seem to recall the nineteenth-century romantic landscape. Charles Baudelaire described French romantic painting in similar terms. In “The Salon of 1846,” he reserved special praise for Eugène Delacroix’s “searching intimacy with his subject.” For Delacroix, he explained, nature “is a vast dictionary whose leaves he turns and consults with a sure and searching eye; and his painting which issues above all from the memory, speaks above all to the memory.”1 The same may be said for Gornik: nature (light, especially) is her artistic subject and memory is the condition from which her landscape arises.
Gornik’s works of art display her “searching intimacy” with her subject. She knows the sky and the earth—clouds, weather, light, land—inside out. She paints these not only as if she has seen them enough to be able to record them accurately, but also as if she has experienced them bodily. Yet, Gornik’s landscape is invention. Her paintings arise from conscious, and not yet conscious, memory. They depict the empirical world she has seen and experienced, and the psychological world—the world as it appears in memory and as it is intimated from beyond conscious memory. She is in her paintings and she is not. There is no telling the two apart, and no point in even trying. For rather than pointing back toward the artist and her personal, psychological world, Gornik’s landscape opens out onto psychological experience, broadly defined—the modern experience of loss without a lost object.2
Painted on linen, at human scale, Gornik’s landscapes present an aesthetic experience of intimate immensity. In nineteenth-century landscapes such as Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1809-10) and Thomas Cole’s Falls of Kaaterskill (1826) immensity, moody weather, and water serve an aesthetic experience of the sublime.3 As an aesthetic response, the sublime commences on a note of surprise or terror that robs the beholder of breath. The experience of intimate immensity begins, instead, with a sense of internal expansion. Gaston Bachelard characterizes intimate immensity as “consciousness of enlargement” or internal spaciousness.4 For Gornik, intimate immensity refers to the way a natural or invented landscape—at once human scale and vast—invites us to enter into it and to breathe, to expand our being in the aesthetic experience of that space.5 Perhaps this is why the artist eschews the use of the human figure in her landscapes. The human figure performs a necessary role in representations of the sublime in nature. The figure not only sets the scale of the landscape, thereby underlining the immensity of nature’s appearance, but it also stands apart from the scene of nature’s vastness or might, demonstrating that the sublime, as Immanuel Kant stressed, takes place from a position of security.6 In Gornik’s paintings, by contrast, we are drawn into the very heart of the landscape.
In the manner of Manifest Destiny, Cole’s landscapes challenge beholders to survive their representations of the sublime in nature, and they offer viewers a position of security from which to do so. Their “I dare you to experience” is met by our ability to experience. Gornik’s landscapes invite, rather than challenge. Her landscapes open toward the viewer. In Red Desert (2008) a play of color, light, and form invite me to move from the lower right corner to the low dunes at middle distance. In Storm Field (2008), undulating brushstrokes beckon me into the interior. The low dunes in Red Desert, like the trees in Storm Field and Dune Sky (2007), render the immensity of the landscape as if human in scale. These forms also lend my eye and body a hold in the midst of vastness.
A hold, but where, exactly? On the one hand, dunes and trees at the center of the paintings provide a resting place, and signal that a landscape has been arranged into a view. On the other hand, the eye and body hover, and the manner in which the depicted landscape is cut off at left and right indicates a world beyond the frame. The Horizon (2008) purports to provide landscape’s signal feature—a separation of earth and sky, and with it, an indication of where I stand in the landscape, visually and phenomenologically. Yet I hover at too far a distance to take in this view and the sky presses in much too closely from where I am suspended. The dark shapes on the crest of the hill stand out clearly, yet they are too insignificant in form and scale to remedy my suspension. In contrast to the rapturous physicality of the sky, the horizon is a flat line, not visible as such at first but insistently so, once I have made the necessary perceptual and bodily adjustments. I appear to be on the horizon of the nineteenth-century romantic landscape, separated from naturalism’s territory by a stroke.
Where landscape has traditionally been associated with the transformation of the canvas into a window onto a world made “real,” Gornik’s landscapes press into the service of painting a world that is simultaneously real and oneiric. The play between naturalism and abstraction, real and invented or dream-like, is subtle in the artist’s landscapes (a paint stroke here, a loosening of form there). It can also be uncanny. Dune Sky’s composition and naturalism seem straightforward until it dawns on me that the abstract shapes etched in the dunes by a punishing sun, though plausible in Namibia, are disturbing when viewed from the territory depicted in the painting’s lower register. The taut play between naturalism and invention in Gornik’s artwork lures us in like old-fashioned illusionism and subtly reminds us that this is a painted world, a representational space separate from our own.
In defiance of tidy, generic artistic categories, Baudelaire defined romanticism as a “modern art.” Just as one country’s romanticism was not another’s, so was romanticism itself a fluid term—“a mode of feeling,” the outcome of the individual artist’s temperament, memory, and time.7 Baudelaire’s time was “modernity,” an epoch and an experience too new, too near to hand, to have been released from its scare quotes. Reinhart Koselleck observes that modernity designates a break between one chronological period and another, as well as a qualitative transformation in the sense of time itself.8 As a chronological marker and a signature of experience, the concept of modernity thus marks the difference between the character of its own time and the time that preceded it. Moreover, since modernity opens out onto an open-ended future, it carries within itself its own past and present: the coinage, at the end of the eighteenth century, of the phrase “newest time” attests to a separating out of the newest time—the contemporary—within the time and experience of modernity.
In 1863, Baudelaire situated the experience of modernity along a fault line between past and present, tradition and the new: “By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, and contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”9Even as Baudelaire’s knowledge of what constitutes modernity is recent enough to require scare quotes, his definition makes clear that modernity entails a break between past and present and an uncoupling from tradition—precisely the features that make modernity “new.” Baudelaire’s “modernity” might comprise the contingent and the immutable in equal measure. Yet by the time the experience of modernity is established enough to lose its scare quotes, Baudelaire’s balance between past and present is upset in favor of the “newest time,” and with it, of the ephemeral, the contingent, the “new” in art. Tradition, the inheritance the past offers the present, cannot be inherited. Failure to inherit is, then, not simply an “identity-establishing” feature of the modern but its very condition. “[We] stand within—we are—the discontinuity in question,” Gregg Horowitz declares. “It is our knowledge of what we cannot remember that shapes our identity.”10 Writing from within this condition of discontinuity, Yve-Alain Bois demonstrates why modernist painting bears the task of an inescapable mourning.11
In Gornik’s paintings, the nineteenth-century romantic landscape is that non-living past. In the manner of a not yet conscious memory, her landscapes intimate that past and so they stir a sense of the past in us. For all its presence, however, here the past is past and so we sense its passing even as it appears to be there before us. Loss without a lost object. As an aesthetic experience of intimate immensity draws us into the artist’s paintings, to breathe, to rest, their subtle games of depiction announce our separation—from them, from the landscape, from tradition and the past. Gornik’s landscape is a modern art.
For Roland Barthes, “to be modern is to know that which is not possible anymore.”12 Rich in connotation, Barthes’s phrase registers a condition of ineluctable separation between the subject and actual, mental, spiritual, or imagined objects—what I behold in my hand is not me; the nation or the author is not me; nor is God or my lover—a condition of disrepair that “myth today” endeavors to paper over, or at least assuage.13 Baudelaire’s poetry captures the nuances of this modern condition. Where “Correspondences” tells of the poetic reverie inspired by experiences of interconnection, in “The Taste for the Void” Baudelaire indicates that it is the melancholy poet who contemplates the earth as an object of reflection separate from him:
I contemplate, from on high, the globe in its roundness,
And no longer look there for the shelter of a hut.14
Even “in the country of last things,” landscape may show signs of its former guise. “What strikes me as odd,” Paul Auster’s protagonist exclaims from that territory of the end, “is not that everything is falling apart, but that so much continues to be there. It takes a long time for a world to vanish, much longer than you think.”15 If the romantic landscape has not vanished, Gornik ushers us into romantic landscape painting’s territory to pull us up short. Like Baudelaire’s poet, in her landscape we contemplate, from on high, painterly tradition at the same time as tradition offers us no place of rest. Her way of alluding to tradition only subtly to undermine it renders us self-conscious—of our desire for continuity, full presence, and experience; of our race to place artworks in those tidy, generic categories that Baudelaire wrote against in the mid-nineteenth century; of our penchant to equate innovation with the outsize gesture. Artistic innovation may be subtle. Seeing a work of art may require a long time. Much may continue to be present, even in the country of last things.
Karen Lang is associate professor of art history at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. A recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, she is the author of Chaos and Cosmos: On the Image in Aesthetics and Art History (Cornell University Press, 2006).