Reflections on Tom Relth’s exhibition - by Norddine Zouitni
Heaven & Earth, Passion and Penchant.
Norddine Zouitni
Moroccan Writer and Poet
The Ageless Beloved
Meeting Tom has always been a special event. Any one who knows him will confirm this. Any one who has been long enough around real artists knows the reason. Tom always succeeds in engaging attention, creating in the mind a substantive amount of activity, intellectual, artistic, existential, cultural, pedagogical etc... That is very common with artists! But there is more to that: a real artist is never dissociated from his craft. The traditional theoretical binary categories such as ‘the man and his work’, ‘art and reality’, etc... do not really apply here. So, meeting Tom or viewing his work release the same challenging experience of being taken beyond the borders of the ordinary, the stale, and the ‘automized’... An experience that simply forces the mind into awareness of new and refreshing dimensions of being.
I have been familiar with Tom’s work since 2009, a period which surely coincides with the stage of gestation that gave birth to most of the works exhibited here. This might be why viewing the Genesis Works today conjures up for me that whole period, an effect which is somehow similar to Marcel Proust’s taste of the madeleine biscuit which suddenly conjured up his past before him. But beyond this personal subjective statement, one can really say that the Genesis Works re-enact in one a metaphysics of remembrance of what I would call ‘Primeval Experience’, whether on the personal level (a primeval moment in depth from one’s personal buried past) or universal (eg. The biblical account of creation) or other.
The Genesis Works are in this respect an invitation to reconsider one’s relationship with the universe and the essence of things around us, and so re-connect with the spirit of primeval nature and being. In other words, an invitation to recover our sense of the spiritual, the immediate and spontaneous …the experience best summed up in the very simple Genesis command ‘Let there be light’ or the Qur’anic equivalent ‘Kun Fa Ya Kun’(كن فيكون). Indeed Tom’s dismissal of any pre-arranged plan or form in the Genesis Works, together with his commitment to be as straight to the canvas as possible is a kind of mimesis of that divine gesture of creation. This is perhaps why the viewer of these works is so much aware of space and motion, but not at all of time. Motion shows forth so terrifically, immediately engaging the viewer without leaving him or her time to step back to any of the ego familiar conventional cultural categories that blur the blissful memory of that primeval essence which the 13th century Sufi poet Rumi celebrates as the ageless beloved:
When your chest is free from your limiting ego,
Then you will see your ageless Beloved
The Nudes on the other hand tell a different story. The female figures point to femininity in its universal life-giving power, fertility, transformation etc, aspects which are especially clear in the Large Nude painting. The Nudes are also here a celebration of the Feminine in its artistic usage away from the uncomfortable overtones associated with nakedness, for ‘nude’ is very different from ‘naked’ as Tom himself warns in his interview. ‘The Nude’ here represents the esthetics of the feminine in its universal dimensions much celebrated in mystical literature and great sacred texts. The female bodies in the paintings are not huddled, defenseless, embarrassing or vulnerable as is the case with conventional nudes. Nor are they objects of pleasure. On the contrary they undermine the notion of pleasure itself and sit defiant to the conventional viewer who fails to outgrow the phallocentric modes of seeing. Matisse, Manet, Picasso…all pushed through in this direction.
The Irish writer James Joyce once distinguished between Proper and Improper art. He defined Improper Art as kinetic, by which he meant any artistic expression that inspires desire in the observer to possess the object (pornographic), or any artistic expression that creates fear or loathing in the observer and pushes him or her away from the object being observed (didactic). As for Proper Art, he defined as static, by which he meant any artistic expression that induces esthetic arrest, and engages the mind into the esthetic image itself. Tom’s work by virtue of leading the viewer back to the Great Esthetic Ground of Being falls no doubt within the latter category.
Norddine Zouitni
Moroccan Writer and Poet
The Ageless Beloved
Meeting Tom has always been a special event. Any one who knows him will confirm this. Any one who has been long enough around real artists knows the reason. Tom always succeeds in engaging attention, creating in the mind a substantive amount of activity, intellectual, artistic, existential, cultural, pedagogical etc... That is very common with artists! But there is more to that: a real artist is never dissociated from his craft. The traditional theoretical binary categories such as ‘the man and his work’, ‘art and reality’, etc... do not really apply here. So, meeting Tom or viewing his work release the same challenging experience of being taken beyond the borders of the ordinary, the stale, and the ‘automized’... An experience that simply forces the mind into awareness of new and refreshing dimensions of being.
I have been familiar with Tom’s work since 2009, a period which surely coincides with the stage of gestation that gave birth to most of the works exhibited here. This might be why viewing the Genesis Works today conjures up for me that whole period, an effect which is somehow similar to Marcel Proust’s taste of the madeleine biscuit which suddenly conjured up his past before him. But beyond this personal subjective statement, one can really say that the Genesis Works re-enact in one a metaphysics of remembrance of what I would call ‘Primeval Experience’, whether on the personal level (a primeval moment in depth from one’s personal buried past) or universal (eg. The biblical account of creation) or other.
The Genesis Works are in this respect an invitation to reconsider one’s relationship with the universe and the essence of things around us, and so re-connect with the spirit of primeval nature and being. In other words, an invitation to recover our sense of the spiritual, the immediate and spontaneous …the experience best summed up in the very simple Genesis command ‘Let there be light’ or the Qur’anic equivalent ‘Kun Fa Ya Kun’(كن فيكون). Indeed Tom’s dismissal of any pre-arranged plan or form in the Genesis Works, together with his commitment to be as straight to the canvas as possible is a kind of mimesis of that divine gesture of creation. This is perhaps why the viewer of these works is so much aware of space and motion, but not at all of time. Motion shows forth so terrifically, immediately engaging the viewer without leaving him or her time to step back to any of the ego familiar conventional cultural categories that blur the blissful memory of that primeval essence which the 13th century Sufi poet Rumi celebrates as the ageless beloved:
When your chest is free from your limiting ego,
Then you will see your ageless Beloved
The Nudes on the other hand tell a different story. The female figures point to femininity in its universal life-giving power, fertility, transformation etc, aspects which are especially clear in the Large Nude painting. The Nudes are also here a celebration of the Feminine in its artistic usage away from the uncomfortable overtones associated with nakedness, for ‘nude’ is very different from ‘naked’ as Tom himself warns in his interview. ‘The Nude’ here represents the esthetics of the feminine in its universal dimensions much celebrated in mystical literature and great sacred texts. The female bodies in the paintings are not huddled, defenseless, embarrassing or vulnerable as is the case with conventional nudes. Nor are they objects of pleasure. On the contrary they undermine the notion of pleasure itself and sit defiant to the conventional viewer who fails to outgrow the phallocentric modes of seeing. Matisse, Manet, Picasso…all pushed through in this direction.
The Irish writer James Joyce once distinguished between Proper and Improper art. He defined Improper Art as kinetic, by which he meant any artistic expression that inspires desire in the observer to possess the object (pornographic), or any artistic expression that creates fear or loathing in the observer and pushes him or her away from the object being observed (didactic). As for Proper Art, he defined as static, by which he meant any artistic expression that induces esthetic arrest, and engages the mind into the esthetic image itself. Tom’s work by virtue of leading the viewer back to the Great Esthetic Ground of Being falls no doubt within the latter category.