Capturing slippery spirits is the enterprise at the heart of Eric Finzi’s figurative resin-based paintings. Finzi’s artistic role is akin to amber apprehending a fugitive insect in its viscous golden fluid and then encasing and morphing it into both object and ancient memory. In a parallel process that dramatically compresses time, Finzi captures historic photographic images and translates these into singular presences. Evocative and strangely beautiful, his paintings negotiate the territories between actual moment and memory, revealing how history and memory have an innate fallible plasticity.
This body of work focuses on the well-documented photographs by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, universally known as Lewis Carroll, the noted logician and author of the famous “Alice in Wonderland” series. In a nod to the predominant pre-Raphaelite aestheticism of the late 19th century, Dodgson “Latinated” his name. The pseudonym was a play on his real name. Lewis being the anglicized form Ludovicus, which was Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll being an anglicized version of Carolus, the Latin for Charles.
In these theatrically staged photographs, Dodgson has his muse, Alice Liddell, and her Victorian-era friends dress up and play out roles that would influence Dodgson’s literary output. At times the intensity and extraordinary emotional weight of the children’s gazes discomforts the viewer. Simultaneously innocent yet mature, they project a provocative engagement and relationship with the photographer.
While Dodgson was deeply private and socially inhibited individual around adults, he felt extremely comfortable in the companionship of children, especially little girls. He was an advocate for the freedom of wisdomof childhood and wrote his books as pleasurable amusements for the children he associated with. After his death, the critical lens of psychiatric analysis let to accusations of pedophilia and inappropriate behavior (by 20th century social standards). These filled academic texts continue to influence how Dodgson is perceived today.
Finzi takes a sympathetic yet intriguingly amoral stance vis-a-vis his subjects. In his body of resin work, he includes self-portraits of the melancholy and gifted Dodgson. The subjects radiate mystery and an ineffable weirdness. Much of this strange allure is the result of the artist’s chosen medium and alchemical methods.
Through a per-formative process that relies as much on chaos as control, Finzi employs the demanding and toxic epoxy resin medium. He encloses himself in a specially designed and ventilated room in his studio and dresses in protective gear that resembles the protective suits that scientists wear while handling the Ebola virus. Rather than a traditional vertical easel or wall, Finzi needs to work looking down on a horizontal picture plane. The traditional artist’s brush is replaced by propane torches, syringes, and cut-through paper cups that allow the artist to feel the exothermic properties of the chemical reactions when he blends paints into the epoxy resins.
He needs to work quickly, as the medium can set up at varying speeds. But he also allows a push-pull relationship to develop between the artistry and the resin. To one degree, Finzi orchestrates the image, but he cedes much control to the chemical reactions of the medium as it continues to flow lava-like over time. Often when he returns the following day, he discovers that Brownian motion, the random movement of microscopic particles through a liquid, has resulted in ethereal lacy layers and shooting stars sprays that he could not have foreseen. Additionally, tiny pigment residues distill from the resin capriciously punctuating the picture plane. These “microscopic action paintings” enrich the translucency and layers of the final image. In Finzi’swords, “The paintings you see represent the summation of many layers of chemical reactions, all moving with their own velocity to a final polymerized end. ” In Finzi’s oeuvre scientific experimentation, theatrical direction and artistic surrender blend to create the final output.
Painting that incorporates issues in photography is hardly unique. Yet Finzi combines loaded imagery with the element of surprise that arises from his process, allowing new narratives to emerge. The piercing gaze of “Alice Liddell Dressed as a Beggar Maid” resembles an encounter with a cynical courtesan. “Ellen Watts” has a ghostly aspect that the image threatens to dematerialize into vibrational ethers, anchored only within the picture plane by her dark dress. One of the most enigmatic images is his depiction of Lewis Carroll’s self-portrait. Leaning melodramatically against his armchair, his hair radiates out wildly like thoughts emanating from his head, as though these could ride time waves across more than a century to reach our present.
Ultimately Eric Finziis in dialog with history and memory, transforming celebrated images into new entities. Just as history changes each generation through the unreliable filters of memory and constant revisionism, so Finzi challenges us to reconsider accepted truths and focus rather on the fundamental fugitive nature of reality. Artists may be able to pin down a visual moment in time, but time has a powerful way of altering perception. Finzi’s work allows for the poetic possibilities inherent within that rich transformation.
About the writer: Andrea Pollan is an independent curator and writer. She is the founder and director of the Curator’s Office, a micro-gallery space based in Washington, DC that invites curatorial input by other curators, artists, critics, collectors and gallerists.
