In Payen’s paintings, the horses appear to be the only living creatures that are ‘free’. Perhaps they are
symbolic of freedom, the only living creatures in the work not trapped by either the strange cages of
incarceration that imprison many of the figures, or by the grid itself, that under-girds each painting (the
scores of cross-hatched lines erupting through the layers of paint to various degrees of visibility). We find
a little runaway horse about to break free from the left-hand side of the canvas in: The Falling (2008). In
Sendings (2007), the animal is rearing up and trampling a crouching figure under foot. One wonders
whether
in this case, the horse might even be a metaphor for the free spirit? The human, earth-bound and
beaten-down
is left cowering, while the spirit, released by the power of the imagination, can run wild.
Foucault has clearly left his mark on Payen. The strange cages or prisons repeated throughout paintings
are
open, as if made of glass, with only the frames outlined and visible. In his seminal work: Discipline and
Punish,
Foucault argues that when it comes to incarcerating a prisoner, it is visibility that is the most
effective tool in
trapping the offender and the best facilitator of power. Foucault cites Jeremy Bentham’s
Panopticon as an
example, where the warder is stationed at the centre of a building from which it is
possible for him to see all
the prisoners in their surrounding cells, yet impossible for them to see him, or to
make contact with their fellow
prisoners. The prisoner knows he is open to a constant observation, but
never sees the person observing him.
He is dominated and controlled through architecture and the
knowledge he is always the subject of the gaze.
Payen translates this argument into her paintings. In The Falling, there is a standing figure, trapped in a
cell at
the top right of the painting, another figure attempting to crawl around his cage in the bottom
right corner, and
still another smaller cell, mid-way up the painting on the left-hand side, this time
weighted down on all sides by a
thick blanket of white like a dense, oppressive fog. Payen puts us, the
viewer in the position of power, making her
figures subject to our gaze. This notion is reinforced by the
fact that her figures are always blank silhouettes –
there are no eyes to meet ours, no ears to hear us
whispering, simply the ghostly outline of the forms.
Not all of Payen’s figures are solitary though. The Smallest Share (2007) depicts a row of seven standing
figures
outlined in pale blue against an uncharacteristically glaring area of red. Each figure has his hand on
his breast, as
if swearing an oath, and indeed Payen used found images of presidents of America being
sworn into office for the
stencils she created to make these figures. By lining them up together and
‘trapping’ them all in a red square, it is
as if the tables are turned and the ‘presidents’ are no longer in
their former positions of power, but held under
scrutiny, bunched together so they lose their individual
status and become instead a line-up of men about to be
tried – powerless, under scrutiny and very much
beholden to the law.
The practise of role-reversing occurs throughout Payen’s work. In Boot Camp (2008), the soldiers
marching across
the snowy white ground delineated by row upon row of thin blue lines, appear not the
aggressors of war, but the
hunted. They run from some unseen force but never manage to escape. Indeed
the field (and in this case the ground
is a ‘colour field’ interrupted by horizontal scoring) is peppered with
obvious and barely-discernible outlines of cages
that wait to trap the men into a never-ending cycle of war
from which they cannot be freed. Judging from the figure
lying supine on the ground in the bottom
left-hand corner, the only possibility of liberty from this incessant marching
is to be picked off by a sniper
and shot. And if the soldiers are turned from the aggressors of war into the victims of
an inescapable fate,
then so too is their sexuality called into question – the idea of the soldiers as predominantly
heterosexual
and homophobic, up-ended by the clear evidence of their arousal disturbing their silhouettes.
The content of Payen’s work is challenging. She allows us to take nothing for granted, questioning
our received notions
of stereotype, and the executors and instruments of society’s systems of power. The
concepts behind Payen’s work
are supported by the techniques she employs. The surface of her works
appear to be collaged, yet this is deliberately
deceptive, for as we draw nearer to their surfaces we see
that they are in fact paintings that feature some drawn elements
- a combination of pencil, oil and enamel
(the last element used for the stencilling of the figures) – and not collaged at all.
In terms of Payen’s mark-making and ‘style’, links can be made between some of her works and the
painting of Peter Doig
– particularly in the treatment of the figure against a strongly under-painted area of
white’ (as we find in Doig’s 1993 work,
Blotter). But the artist whose work Payen’s seems to share most in
common with is Cy Twombly. Like Payen, his practice
blurs the line between drawing and painting and
works such as Untitled (1967), that features the stark image of an
underscored white rectangle against
a deep violet blue (its surface activated by rubbed out patches of white, as if there
was once much more
going on), suggest that what we are seeing is perhaps a last trace, the end of something which was
once
much more but has been erased – rubbed at, scored and scratched away.
This is the overriding feeling we take away with us when we leave Payen’s work; that we are looking at the
bones of a
troubling deep and underlying structure. This is the primitive response to life that is locked
into all of us - kept down and
suppressed by the opinions of others - opinions that serve as the eyes and the
ears our society needs to keep us in line.
But at night when we dream, our cages fly open, the laws are
unbinding and our wild horses can run.
Jane Neal