Euan Uglow: An Art of Enduring Stillness 尤恩·烏格洛: 恆久靜謐的藝術

Euan Uglow might be seen as the finest exemplar of the tradition of Euston Road painting but then this places a limit on how he might be considered twenty-four years after his death. In his later years his somewhat spartan method of painting, was infused by a sensual use of colour that connects radiance to finest modulation of tonal control within post-second World War British painting. Alongside this, there is a deeply felt absorption of the principles of analytical philosophy that are to be discovered within his generation which served to infuse his strict method with a thinking process which is likewise compelling. And yet there is a further element which is furnished by the way he had progressively fashioned his eye looking at an art historical lineage that was largely of his own sensibility. Of course, Cezanne had provided the sensible anchorage for Euston Road painting, but Uglow extended further back in this lineage to the paintings of Piero Della Francesca whose employment of inner geometry was to provide him with a quality of mystery that transcended the learnings of his location as both a school within its setting. So, we have the combination of a tradition of painting, tonal mastery of colour, a grasp of the analytical tradition of thinking, sustained looking at artworks, and an almost mystical absorption of the workings of pictorial geometry all modulated with a devoted relationship to the actual energetics of a studio practice.

Often the idea of a ‘painter’s painter’ is evoked but there is a quality of a hushed singularity in relationship to his art as if entirely against the grain of his time. It was as though there might be something closer to an arrest of time within this practice or even a regression of modernism’s restless strife toward a flirtation with its own demise. If there was a quest that through which consciousness of time might be discovered, then it is in its very withdrawal. There is something in this of the art of Morandi, although not on the level of style or manner. His drawing practice was a model of schematic balance between the essential and the observed (never formulaic though), but strictly without the recourse to gestural release or posture. There is just enough of something to provide for a passage toward the act of painting. Again, there is no pursuit of a fashioned like look, or a Baroque excess leading towards painterly flourish or fullness. Only through a mediation on what was essential to the project remained, almost without content. Hence an endurance of time stripped of spontaneous becoming served as a template but as this, if there was any sense of religion, it was in stillness, and it is in this that we are left to discover an accord with Piero. This accord is not within technique, nor style or manner, but one of vision and ontological bearing. Here there is a singularity that resists temporal flux. In the twentieth century this is a rare quality that can be seen in the art of Giacometti, whose orientation was designated to be that of the Egyptian by the writer Jean Genet. Not that they might have found mutuality here, but there is a proximity to a form of temporal regression that is in common and with this a struggle with a single motif that was its own demand. Both artists showed only that which could be exhibited, but each sought a different grammar through which to do so. Giacometti in an art of endless commas, whereas Uglow was inclined to seek the limit of full stops. Both seemed to know what lay beyond grammar was unspeakable, hence pass through as silence because no discernible content lay there.

In conjunction to this, there is of course far more sceptical readings of this art as a machinic like depiction of the human form, into a serial like encounter with dots and dashes. Allied to this a sense of subjectivity being stripped away, leaving the tracing of the shell of human encounter in which the possibility of a spontaneous coming-to-be is withdrawn as the geometrical means of arresting the possibility of errancy. So, all of this might add up to the loss of the subject, and a corresponding elevation of objectification. The body is not only that of the female, but one that is rendered mute. This then is process of life drawing intrinsically on that is one based upon a dominant male visual code, and if so, is the abstractions invested within a certain process of objectification, acts as a partial corrective to this? Rather than the wild and free body as a release within imaginative projection, there was instead a disciplinary apparatus of the life room that served as a machinery of reduction. Thus, a model of almost extreme empirical encounter of the body was established as a counterpoint to a sense of an expressive conduit of motion (symptoms and passions) or of life’s theatre.

As a culture we require this process of reading and counter reading, of a crossing over the lines which might offer such a difference, for without such a mobility of critique, we are left only with a rhetoric of taste. Within this motion across contested lines of perception, we might add our own lines of a man looking at the grace of a Piero painting in the National Gallery, of someone making a small drawing of the philosopher Richard Wollheim as a testament to numerous discussions on the paintings of Poussin, of a six or seven-year passage painting a single canvas (The Diagonal, 1971-77) up to the point of it achieving rightness or limit. Alongside all of this, the lines that are drawn as visible trace, we might then add these other lines, for it is within the combination of such lines that an art emerges constituted by the measure provided by the tapestry of the real and the imaginary.

Euan Uglow, The Diagonal, 1971-77

As an artist who just saw the coming of a ne century he was curiously apart from all the noise of the second half of the century he had formed his practice within. His was an art that sought its own tribunal, a tribunal that demanded only a sense of the space of being-with this passage as a mode of occupancy. He was finally a painter of few words, who did not expect much by way of words in return. Little to be said, instead to be shown.

尤恩·烏格洛可能被視為尤斯頓路畫派傳統的最佳代表，但這種評價在他去世二十四年後顯得有些局限。在他晚年時期，雖然他的繪畫方法略顯簡樸，卻融入了一種感性的色彩運用，將光輝與戰後英國繪畫中最精細的色調控制聯繫在一起。此外，他的創作深受他那一代人所發現的分析哲學原則的影響，這使得他嚴謹的方法帶有一種同樣引人入勝的思維過程。然而，還有一個更深層的原因，那就是他不斷發展的審美眼光，這主要基於他自身感性的藝術史脈絡。當然，塞尚為尤斯頓路畫派提供了理性的基礎，但烏格洛更進一步追溯到了皮耶羅·德拉·弗朗切斯卡的畫作，他的內在幾何運用為烏格洛提供了一種超越其學派知識的神秘品質。因此，我們看到的是繪畫傳統、色彩的精妙掌控、對分析思維的深刻理解、對藝術作品的持續審視以及對畫面幾何運作幾乎神秘的吸收，這一切都與他對工作室實踐的專注關係完美結合。

尤恩·烏格洛經常被稱為「畫家的畫家」，但他的藝術有一種靜謐的獨特性，彷彿完全違背了他所處時代的潮流。在烏格洛的藝術作品中，時間似乎被靜止了，或者說，他的藝術風格讓現代主義那種不斷追求變化的特質變得更像是在自我反省和自我否定。如果有一種探索可以讓人們意識到時間的存在，那麼這種意識是在時間似乎靜止或退隱的時候才能感受到。這一點與莫蘭迪的藝術有些相似，儘管不是在風格或方式上。烏格洛的素描在捕捉事物本質和觀察細節之間達到了一個理想的平衡，但這種平衡不是通過固定的公式來實現的，同時他的素描也不依賴於隨意的手勢或姿態。他的素描中有恰到好處的某種元素，這些元素為最終的繪畫行為開闢了一條路徑，起到了引導和過渡的作用。再者，烏格洛沒有追求某種刻意的外觀，也沒有巴洛克式的過度裝飾，導致畫面顯得過於華麗或豐滿。通過對創作本質的深入思考和沈思，烏格洛最終保留了那些最核心、最重要的元素，這些元素雖然非常簡潔，幾乎沒有具體的內容，但卻是創作的精髓所在。因此，烏格洛的藝術有一種經過深思熟慮和控制的時間耐力，而這種耐力成為了一種範式。這種方式如果有任何宗教意義，那便體現在靜止和平靜之中。正是在這種靜止中，我們發現了烏格洛的創作與皮耶羅的藝術達成了一種共鳴。這種藝術契合點不在於繪畫的技術、風格或方法，而在於他們在藝術視野和存在哲學上的共鳴。烏格洛的藝術作品具有一種抵抗時間流逝的獨特性，這在二十世紀是非常罕見的。這種特質也可以在賈科梅蒂的藝術中看到，作家讓·熱內曾將賈科梅蒂的藝術風格比作埃及風格，強調其永恆性和超越時間的特質。儘管烏格洛和賈科梅蒂的藝術風格不同，他們並沒有在所有方面找到共同點，但他們在藝術作品中表現時間回歸這一特質上有相似之處。在這種時間回歸的形式中，兩位藝術家都與一個單一的主題進行了深入的探討和鬥爭，這個主題本身對他們來說是一種內在的需求。賈科梅蒂的藝術風格像是無盡的逗號，總是留有延續和變化的餘地，而烏格洛則像是在尋找句號的極限，追求明確和完整。儘管他們的藝術表達方式不同，但兩者都明白，某些超越語法的東西是無法用語言描述的，因此只能通過沈默來表達，因為這些內容本質上是無法辨識的。

Euan Uglow, The Blue Towel, 1982

與此相對應的是對烏格洛藝術的批判性解讀，烏格洛將人體描繪得如機器般冷漠，像是由點和划線構成的系列化表現。這種解讀認為他的作品剝離了主觀性，僅剩下人類形象的表面特徵，通過幾何手段來遏制任何偏差的可能性，從而消除了自發性的生成。因此，這一切可能導致主體的喪失，並相應地提升了物化的程度。畫中的身體不僅是女性的身體，而且是被表現得啞然無聲的身體。這種生命繪畫的過程本質上是受到男性視覺的影響，如果是這樣，這種抽象的物化過程是否在一定程度上對這一現象進行了糾正呢？而不是通過想象投射中的釋放來表現狂野和自由的身體，取而代之的是生命畫室中的紀律裝置，作為一種簡化的機器。烏格洛的作品確立了一種幾乎極端的、經驗性的身體表現方式，與那些更注重情感和戲劇性表達的藝術形式形成了對立。

作為一種文化，我們需要這種閱讀和反閱讀的過程，需要跨越界線的能力，因為沒有這種批評的流動性，我們只能剩下品味的修辭。在這種跨越爭議感知界線的過程中，我們可以加入自己的視角：一個人在國家美術館凝視皮耶羅畫作的優雅，有人畫了一張哲學家理查德·沃爾海姆的小素描，作為對無數關於普桑畫作討論的見證，或是花費六七年時間創作一幅畫作（《對角線》，1971-1977），直到它達到完美或極限。除了所有這些可見的線條之外，我們還可以加入其他線條，因為正是這些線條的結合，使藝術在現實與想象交織的背景下得以產生。