Michael Taylor: Phantoms

Phantoms

The subjects in Michael Taylor’s work are beginning to disappear. While still distinguishable as the mannered people and palms that have become a shorthand for the artist, they are, increasingly, fleetingly articulated. Flat, lanky lines trip their way up towards a clutch of smudges to signal palm trees. The horizon is a few long, even strokes. Sections are scribbled over with paint, flattening the momentary illusion created by the soft fade of a sun rising or setting. A flurry of red and blue marks are the collar on a shirt made green by a loose, live mixing of pigment. A jawline is a single stripe. These quick, minimal gestures are characteristic of Taylor’s way of painting like drawing. They demonstrate a thoughtful and sure hand, but also reveal the intention to picture something unfixed. 

Phantoms is a collection of paired portraits and landscapes that describe ‘a condition of something being there, but not fully graspable’, in Taylor’s words. ‘I think of these portraits as partial views–not just of people, but of feeling, of memory, of encounter’, he writes. 

The portraits are composed like headshots of a cast of young men. Their characters are hinted at through a splodged eyebrow or a sloping shoulder, but eschew definition. Your Grace has excellent posture, an expensive education and possibly the same name as his father and grandfather. With his shifty, fragile outlines, The Colleague is everybody’s friend but nobody’s ally. Their features, modelled with great care and wit, float on a washy backdrop as if they could just as easily be replaced with another set of features. ‘Each portrait says something different about visibility, intimacy, and being looked at—but they all seem to hold a kind of phantom quality, a presence that might disappear if you blink’, according to Taylor.

His titles are tonal, without foreclosing meaning. Blissfully Unaware points to something outside of the frame, gaps in the story.  The Striped Fandango directs the eye to a palm where the paint has been dragged downwards in a moment of stripey melodrama. This interrups the reading of the work by offering a glimpse of its making. It has a similar effect to the patent 'erasures' in other landscapes. They are reminders that illusion is beside the point, or, maybe, of the storied constructions that shape the act of looking. Palms, shadows and reflections sit on top of the gradient of the sky much like the features in the portraits. The transient quality of a shadow or reflection on water, light touching a lower lip, are foremost in these works. they put forward 'a condition: of looking, remembering, sensing' says Taylor. The figurative rendering of a person or palm is a tool in service of this end, on the verge of becoming an afterthought.

Text courtesy: Chloë Reid