Rebecca Salter stopping at the still point

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;/
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,/
But neither arrest nor movement, And do not call it fixity"
[Dash] T.S. Eliot, Buirnt Norton

Rebecca Salter secures the still point.
She lays it on the canvas, or fits it into woven Japanese paper, and there it looks ancient and modern, embryonic and complete, frenetic and tranquil [Dash] and like nothing at all.
When we talk about the "presence of absence," we might be talking about British artist Rebecca Salter.
Salter, now having her first museum retrospective at the Yale Center for British Art, has been described as a "minimalist," which might be a better term than the one she prefers, which is "abstract artist." But it is the tension between those two poles [Dash] minimalism and abstraction [Dash] that give Salter's work its energy, its haunting, suggestive sense and its palpable friction. Salter's works may be the most vacant, and yet saturated the gallery has showcased in a long time.
Born in England in 1955, Salter won a scholarship to the Kyoto City University of the Arts in 1977, where she hoped to develop her skills as a ceramicist. She stayed in Japan for six years, imbibing its art, architecture and language, but finding that her artistic reach exceeded ceramic's technical grasp, she abandoned the medium in favor of drawings and woodblock prints using Japanese papers.
Some of those works are on display here, magnificent, deeply textured and largely monochromatic works that play with the idea of porous and defined spaces. Angles like that of a door frame cut into feathered gray swaths of light, which resolve into wide black horizontal frames. Two or three long, narrow black bands interrupt the landscape, ominous as obelisks on a field of wheat.
It's not surprising that Salter should call these works on Japanese paper "spaces and places." They look, more than anything, like the interior of a Japanese home divided by thin, pellucid screens. Like the screens, they control rather than divide. Their mottled, fringed, deeply worked surfaces combine to make the work look older, the print equivalent of distressed leather.
Salter says the aged look of her largely untitled works on paper are her own attempt to incarnate the Japanese concept of wabi, or the aesthetics of simplicity, modesty of the well-worn, well-loved object." In large works like "Untitled RR31," mixed media on linen, Saltzer creates a work that looks, in its muted, vaporous state, like the passage of time itself [Dash] color dematerializing in a gray miasma of nostalgia and anticipation.
Salter has been lionized as an artist who creates "voids," artistic black holes into which infinitude of energy has been dumped. She has said that although she is not troubled by the designation of her paintings as "empty," it's a description with which she disagrees.
"I like to think that my empty spaces are in fact animated with energy [Dash] barely perceptible but there all the same," she said once. "I often say that I paint in whispers. A lot of work now asks the viewer to experience it. I ask the viewer to reflect [Dash] a very different activity."
These muted, subtle works, are reflective and the more time one spends with them, the deeper the reward. What looks like a wash of Mark Rothko-like gray turns out to be alive with vibrant, but tiny, gestural glyphs. "If anything," writes Achim Borchardt-Hume in the exhibit catalog, "the surfaces of Salter's paintings act as visual metaphors for the balance between knowing and not knowing, between what can be controlled and what cannot."
In 1985, Salter returned to England and was drawn, not surprisingly, to the Lake District. Her works had always played with the idea of impermanence and subtlety and the void as being rich in potentiality.
In the Lake District, where it rains almost daily, the erratic weather lends itself to such notions and here, Salter's work took a different turn.
She began to draw in the soggy, erratic weather, the subject that seemed the most obvious: the weather itself. Salter's notebooks from those exploits [Dash] pages of scurrying, fleeting, fusing ink [Dash] may be her most revealing. When she returned from her plein air sketching, Salter began to make drawings, which she cut up and reorganized and then mounted on a backing sheet. "In the end I started to paint emotion and try to pick up on the speed of the weather." With those images in mind, she says, she began to reassemble her cut up squares, always working to retain the energy of the line, so that all the lines are interrupted constantly, like the weather itself.
The resulting works, like "Untitled D58," are marvelously musical and completely coherent works on paper that lurch, arch reach and coil in elegant but spare whooshes of lines. The process allowed Salter to plunge into the Japanese embrace of chance and control [Dash] a balancing act that she articulates with gymnastic delicacy.
She has described her work as being "involved with the attempt to capture stillness in movement, a stillness with potential, not a passive quiet."It is the kind of quiet Victor Hugo was likely thinking of when he said, "One is not idle because one is absorbed. There is both visible and invisible labor. To contemplate is to toil, to think is to do."
In 2003, Salter's work took a dramatic turn, when she spent three months at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation in Bethany. Although Salter had intended to use that time to riff off of Albers' infatuation with the square [Dash] which would have been entirely in keeping with the direction of her work [Dash] she found herself bewitched by the tranquil, wooded grounds and her works took on an electrifying new energy.
Her "Bethany Squares" are arguably more suggestive of landscape than any of her other work. Her surfaces are worked up, worked over and then scratched away to reveal woven screens of irregular lines, some of them skewered by slender, arthritic branch-like forms, others blending into opaque, wing-like silhouettes.
Unsurprisingly, for an artist who began as a ceramicist, all of Salter's work have a textural quality, but all, too, have a sense of reverence to them, a gentle insistence to contemplation, where what is on the canvas intends to mirror that tranquility within.
"I think that I really discovered, what I knew all along, was that I'm really about drawing," Salter said. "I think painting is the wrong word….In Japanese, draw and paint is the same word, which probably has its origins in the word to 'scratch.' Painting comes out of calligraphy because they both use the brush. It's in the language because it comes from writing. That's what I think I do. I draw pictures."
A companion exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery, "Rebecca Salter and Japan," will take Salter's work as a starting point for exploring the complex relationship between Japanese and Western practice. Two of Salter's key works are displayed with 15 paintings, drawings, and ceramics by Japanese and American artists drawn from the Art Gallery's holdings and private collections.
"into the light of things": Rebecca Salter, Works 1981-2010 continues at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel St., New Haven, through May 1. for information, visit yale.edu/ycba or call (203) 432-2800.