'Spectre-Bark' : visions and visitations of disaster

Abstract

Accursedness is not a word one looks to call upon frequently. Our rational times take a robust view on execration. They seek to account for those states that scarcely admit the possibility of relief or redemption through explanations that indulge neither superstition nor fatalism. Nevertheless, there is a depth of negative experience in which awareness of having been overcome by disaster is so oppressive and penetrating that imputing its cause to the 'motiveless malignity' of a force greater than oneself appears to be the only way of rationalising adversity. To consider oneself cursed, or at any rate ill-destined, may therefore carry some consolation in the midst of the visitation of disaster. What it does not do is to dispel the sense of profound affliction. The distress that comes from incomprehension of the worst mischance is not easy to depict, but if we look closely this is what we shall see Anthony Catania's latest exhibition, 'Spectre-Bark', exploring. It is as well to agree from the outset, therefore, that the works in 'Spectre-Bark', exhilarating though they are in the intensities of their inspiration and the assuredness of their technique, are not uplifting in terms of their theme or focus. What they depict is the penumbra I space of hopelessness, where the prolongation of a sense of a disaster that is somehow both imminent but also recently visited upon those on whom it breaks is communicated, in a paradox that also carries great psychological realism, through a stilling of time-so that what we witness is the uncomfortable present continuous of monotonous doom. If the art is relentless in its insistence on the defiguration of prospect and hope, even repetitious in how it figures calamity, it is precisely because it is the stasis of accursedness, the unrelieved effects of disaster and the remoteness of any possibility of salvific transfiguration that shape its concerns.