Beauty, Deep Space and The Naked Eye:
The Paintings of Steven Heyman
by Kathleen Whitney
One of Steven Heyman's greatest artistic accomplishments is to allow his viewer a device for reflection, an entry point into an interior world which lends itself to reverie and contemplation in a way most other kinds of abstraction cancel out. Alternatively, Heyman also offers his viewer nothing less than the real. His subject matter is drawn from the world of everyday life and miniaturized or giganticized in a way that tests the relationships between materiality and meaning, fact and fiction. The experience offered by his paintings is linked to lived experience in the natural world. It has to do with
observational differences between proximity and distance. This is a consequence of the combination of the way these paintings are made and the nature of his subject matter: plants, trees, smoke rings, flowers, sky, stars, the pouring of molten steel. These are the things of daily experience, they can be seen with the naked eye. As Heyman says, "past exper- ience, associations, memory, and the passage of time alter our day to day experiences from the banal to the extraordinary."
The century's new technologies of observation have permanently changed our culture's concept of space. We can now both contemplate and imagine an enormous range of spatial experiences: vast areas that were unknown and invisible have been stripped of their camouflage and revealed in all their gigantic or minuscule nature. The entire process of observation has been changed as it now encompasses the expanding physical universe, the intimate territories of the unconscious mind and the incomprehensible area between atoms.
Steven Heyman's subject matter is a visible kind of space, although it is not the Euclidean space of traditional illusionistic painting. Neither is it the consequence of banal painterly tricks of perspective; horizon lines, atmospheric blur, parallels converging at a trumped-up vanishing point. Most crucially, it is not the historically limited space that bound painting, and the imagination of painters, to narrowly transcribed conventions of the observable world. Heyman's working space is not simply a void to be filled with objects and images, but something to be grasped, studied, shaped. His work ignores its own physical limits, the space it represents. The nearly invisible gestures that delineate it seem to extend in all directions, beyond the physical confines of its own edges.
The paintings are simple in conception, often consisting of a field of color surrounded by a border of very dark paint. Each painting features an obscured object, a smoke ring-like configuration seemingly unmoored within the picture plane. This bordering enclosure is out of focus, tremulous, but always conveys the impression of an architectural form, a door, window or tunnel. The color of this border encompasses a range of tonality; it is a sensation rather than a particular hue. The passages of color in the central areas, the variations in depth, drench the eye in light. This is not the kind of light the viewer is accustomed to, not sunlight; instead, it is the kind of light associated with unusual natural phenomenon: northern lights, ball lightning, the bright phosphenes perceived when the eyes are dazzled or tightly closed.
Chicago's urban environment has influenced the way Heyman perceives both the
natural and synthetic landscape. He often visits the Finkl steel manufacturing plant to watch the movement and pouring of molten steel. Living on a busy commercial avenue has illuminated most of his evenings with neon, incandescent, and florescent light. Light, whether natural or synthetic, becomes a metaphor and a vehicle of our perceptions, and acts as a perennial influence on Heyman's work.
Any painting is anti-technological in that it is linked to a process performed by hand. The very nature of painting declares its fundamental difference from the mass-produced and technological. It is the consequence of highly skilled labor. A painting is an object that embodies and customarily demonstrates, through the treatment of its surface, the labor needed to make it. In this way, painting is intimately linked to its producer.
The inflection of the canvas's surface by the tools used to make a painted surface is the usual clue as to how a painting was made. Typically there is the tangible evidence of the material that was used; differences in thickness of the paint layers from area to area, signs of the tools used to apply paint, brush-strokes, marks from palette knives and so forth. Because he leaves little evidence of his process on the surfaces of the canvas, Heyman seems to negate his own involvement in creating these surfaces. If it were possible to breathe, sweat or "calorify" a painting into existence, these theoretical paintings would look like Heyman's. It is not that he denies his presence in the work, he simply manifests it in a phenomenological fashion, a kind the viewer is not accustomed to seeing.
Heyman creates his surfaces by manipulating 15 to 20 distinct layers of transparent glaze over the white surface of the canvas. Each layer must be kept wet so that he can continually work the acrylic paint into the previous layer of paint. This dexterous accumulation of transparent paint, painstakingly applied, creates a heightened sense of luminosity. This becomes a means to the end of bringing the subject of the painting into intimate proximity with the viewer. The glazing also functions as a method of distancing the subject of the painting. The effect is eerie, theatrical, dreamlike; the glow of some unknown object or organism seen from a distance on a very dark night. The character of the paintings resides in this odd, obsessive technique of paint application. Within this sustained working process, Heyman is highly sensitive to contour, light and dark, contrast and color, and the single iconic shape. The play between these elements gives his ghostly shapes a distinctness that transforms them from reverie into reality, lends them a factuality as landscape or even still life.
These paintings appropriate the surfaces of photographs; they are markless, the labor demanded to make them submerged beneath their seamless appearance. They look as if they have arrived at their surfaces in an instant, the way a photograph appears all at once in its pool of developer. Like photography, his paintings have no surface of any particular sort; the viewer looks through the surface, as if through a sheet of glass, at the image. Although uninflected by gesture, they are not quite mechanical in appearance. The surfaces vary from painting to painting depending on the layers of paint and the nature of the glazing medium. Some of the paintings have matte surfaces, others are shiny and reflective; this choice influences the image in different ways, magnifying or obscuring it. In this way, Heyman controls the physical pictorial distance between viewer and subject matter.
Because Heyman's process leaves little or no evidence of his handwork, the paintings evoke the technological and at the same time deny it. Heyman's paintings mimic the continuous tone of photography or the smooth flow of electronic signals in order to physically embed their subject matter in the paint. The necessity to conceal the labor of creation from the viewer, to give the illusion of effortlessness, is a characteristic associated with ballet dancers and musicians. In these fields no trace of the physical effort necessary to dance or make music is allowed to enter the performance. In the same way, Heyman's painstaking technique l eaves no sense of effort or the physical nature of the material he uses. Even though this labor is concealed, the viewer gets an impression of the gestures that generated the image, a sense of motion, an action that occurred over the course of time. This creates a mysterious interplay between abstraction and objectivity: it also lets Heyman overcome the inertia of the static image.
In his 'sky fragment' paintings, Heyman uses a device as old as the history of easel painting to concentrate and focus the viewer's gaze: a wide, black wooden frame. The frames are a reference to the architecture that 'frames' and sets off Chicago's remarkable skyline. These 'sky fragment' paintings result from Heyman's observations of the sky at particular times; they make use of the colors actually perceived.
These paintings are also condensed versions of the enormous scenic sky-backdrops used for movie making that Heyman saw while growing up in Los Angeles.
The frames have a number of functions that make them an essential part of these paintings and also make them unlike traditional framing devices. No mere decorative element meant to add substance, these frames act as a dramatic boundary separating the painting from the wall, emphasizing its window imagery. Because the viewer has to peer through it, the painting is transformed into a view. The image / view becomes something to be watched rather than something to be passively glanced at. The frame is a device for engaging the viewer in a way that demands a different type of attention and a different visual relationship than is customary.
The most obvious characteristic of Heyman's work is its seductive, undeniable beauty. The 17th century mathematician Blaise Pascal spoke of intuition as a quality that emerges when logic has reached its limits, provided that the mind is alert to that moment. The recognition of beauty is a similar intuitive structure. Beauty is a concept entirely dependent on the way it is received; it is an elusive condition as far as the artist's purpose is concerned because it is a consequence of perception more than intention. Beauty is less a condition of something than it is an effect; a subjective response that lingers in memory long after the work has been seen.
Beauty is a tough commodity to deal with at century's end; it is freighted with a meaning that oscillates between positive and negative moral poles. Until the 20th century, it was the business of painting to be beautiful. With the advent of the mass media and photography, beauty has become confused with glamour, a whimsical and commercially driven enterprise. The importance of beauty, its moral weight, has been surrendered to the marketplace.
The last quarter century has seen the era of painting as didactic demonstration, a denial of the senses and a rejection of the notion of beauty. The didactic painting lets its viewers know it's worthwhile by not ever being beautiful.
In contrast, Heyman's work is non-didactic. It fosters non-linear thought, contemplation and reflection. Because the difference between commercial and aesthetic beauty has become so confused, the beauty of Heyman's work necessitates that distinctions be made between it and other kinds of appearances. It necessitates that a distinction be made between an art in which the viewer looks at something and an art that is concerned with the act of looking. His work is about an imaginative process that distinguishes between the merely visual and that which must be visualized. Act, process, and time are all essential visible operations that make themselves concrete in the 'beauty' evoked by Heyman's work.
Though Heyman is clearly indebted to the great Twentieth century abstractionists Mark Rothko, Clifford Still and Morris Louis, the conceptual basis of his work owes a great deal to Romantic painting. The landscape painters J.M.W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich are notable for their attempts to create the feeling of limitless space. The traces of these painters are present in Heyman's use of extremes of color which give each painting a  solemn brooding quality, a moody inwardness. What pre- serves the clarity of the paintings is the simplicity of his process. His approach is curious, persistent: for him, all choices are acts of submission to the logic of the painting. The choices are the means to arrive in a realm that combines precision with total dissolution. These paintings confront their viewers with a highly artic- ulated record of nameless states and elusive but insistent color. They are direct and unfussy, fields of luminous activity, presences agitated and activated by light.
The basic elements in Heyman's work are engagingly quirky. There is an indeterminate edge to some of the shapes. His forms are pared down. Oddball biomorphic readings keep cropping up through the atmospheric haze. He leaves the viewer with a sense of having been in the presence of an accomplished, knowledgeable artist. Unlike the work of many of his contemporaries, his paintings own the wall; you don't forget them after you see them.
By Kathleen Whitney, a critic and sculptor living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has been writing for the past ten years for both local and national publications.
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