Sarah Walker, Painter, 2005 Rappaport Prizewinner

Sarah Walker is chief among a new generation of artists who just might rescue non-objective painting from an impending art historical obituary. These painters link their vision and practice with new and newly understood realities that will circumscribe life in the twenty-first century: genetic mapping and engineering, neurobiology, the new physics (including quantum mechanics, string theory, and chaos theory), fractal geometry, information theory, and the virtual realms of the computer and the Internet. These recent developments provide new lenses – indeed fresh eyes – with which to see the world.

Walker concerns herself primarily with intertwined and ever-collapsing new conceptions of physical space, mental space, and virtual space. The spaces that we perceive in the cosmos, through the computer, and within our own brains are of course projections of our own neurological hard-wiring. But we’ve accessed new files, so to speak, and our constructions of space now significantly transcended models based on the rigid mathematical grid or the unbridled outpourings of the subconscious. These new files are Walker’s territories.

Her paintings are at once compositionally clear and dazzlingly complex. Their grosser aspects, for the most part, consist of a central and vertical undulating feature set against broad modulated horizontal passages or against a single roughly monochrome ground. Shot through all of this are multiple arrays of smaller images, usually nested or linked sets of quasi-geometric nodes or shattered planar areas. The viewer seems confronted by a space, or a place, but one marked by a dizzying instability.

Walker employs a formidable arsenal of formal means to create visual metaphors for the contemporary complexities of spatial cognition. Scales shift and contradict, conventional depth clues based on position, color, and horizon turn position into a puzzle, point of view is ambiguous, linear networks violate rules of perspective, and the figure-ground relationship is gutted and turned inside-out. The objects (if indeed we can call them that) within the spaces are equally ambivalent. Are they flat or dimensional? Opaque or translucent? Whole or fractured? Solid, liquid, or gas? And, not only are they unfixed as states of matter, but they also seem to move, rapidly throbbing and bolting and fluttering every which way at once as active slices of much larger continua. The paintings are simultaneous constructions and deconstructions of space conceived, projected, and apprehended through neurological and technological systems. All is in flux, nothing is sure: Walker plays Heisenberg with the universe.

This spatial analysis of Walker’s paintings should not preclude other considerations. Formally, her work is beautiful. Her dexterity with pattern and line, and her fearless coloration reward prolonged and repeated viewing. Also, the paintings have an absorbing and incessant musicality of flow, theme, and variation, not unlike the Baroque, Minimalist, and ambient music that inspire the artist. But best of all, Walker’s images completely fulfill the most profound raison d’être for non-objective painting: the rich and transporting expression of ineffable emotion.