'The Falling'
Jane Neal

‘The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.’ (Virginia Woolf, ‘An Unwritten Novel’ 1921)

Virgina Woolf’s words could have been written for Sally Payen’s new paintings. The large-scale canvases that initially appear to belong to the categories of colour-field painting or geometric abstraction (such is the deliberate flatness of their surfaces and the recurring motif of the grid), refuse to yield all life to the void and instead throw up a strange melange of barely perceptible silhouettes of soldiers, suited figures, wild horses and the delicate traces of skeletal cages. There is no Euclidian geometry or perspective in Payen’s work to anchor these troubling forms and yet, as with a dream when we know instinctively what is up, and what is down, there is a logic to Payen’s work that goes beyond the learned formulae of western art and looks instead to a language of forms and symbols that predates the so-called ‘cradle of civilisation’(such as can be found in cave painting from the Upper Palaeolithic period); a language that we understand and relate to in both our conscious state, and in our dreams.

Standing in front of Payen’s paintings, with their predominantly cool palettes of blues and whites (only interrupted by the occasional swathes of bleached-out reds), we could be confronting a dream, or at least witnessing the visual account of one. Perhaps it is the strange combination of stencilled shapes that persist in our minds long after we have finished looking that point to this conclusion; most likely it is something to do with the forms themselves. Take the horses for example; what do they mean? In Celtic mythology, horses were regarded as the companions of the gods, creatures prized for their vitality and fertility. The animals were linked to the night, and to mystery and magic; indeed the word ‘nightmare’ is derived from the word for a female horse, and the Celts believed that strange dreams were brought by a visiting horse from Epona or Mare.

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