A MATTER OF TIME

Defacement.

Effacement.

Aftermath.

These are the words that lined up in my mind when my vision first brushed across the surface of these paintings. At first sight, the order of the words above seems chronological, but they conflate, in fact, within a single space of meaning. This space of meaning already has echoes within that final word – aftermath.

The paintings by Willy Tay also inscribe this space. Within it, or exposed through delicate cracks and smeared revelations along the skin of the artwork, ideas of defacement and effacement interplay. Perhaps, there is more effacement than defacement at work here – it would depend on the way one’s perspective skates across the painting’s surface and how we choose to be transformed by the artwork.

The choice is often involuntary to begin with. There is a sense of mystery in the paintings that the effect a marred blanket of paint on a canvas produces can only be described as subliminal. At first sight, a white, gently ripped shroud of emptiness overwhelms the viewer.

I am reminded of Immanuel Kant’s category of “free beauty” – that which presupposes no concept of what the object of beauty ought to be – that seems to be at work here. Free beauty is that which has “purposiveness without purpose”. The source of beauty pleases without any retreat to notions of utility or morality. This “purposiveness” is, of course, linked inexorably to the sublime – an unspeakable and paradoxical place of meaning meant to deliver us, the artist and the viewer, out of ourselves, even enlarging what we know of selfhood, such that we are sewn into a larger fabric of ideas.

This notion of “free beauty” is particularly interesting when juxtaposed with oppressive ideologies of certainty permeating our current social landscape here in Singapore; where nothing that is free can be considered essential to life, unless it is faith or religion (even then you might be asked to make a donation or pay a tithe).

Defacement-effacement-aftermath.

There, I have chain-linked the words into a single idea. The paintings, when chain-linked within a single viewing, tend to serve up this one idea. Time is an overarching notion; as in, the paintings seem to say, Look at what time has done. Inside the fissures of the paintings’ topsoil, you may glimpse an underlying topography that is itself already in the process of being cancelled out. (We must not forget that we can also be the ones guilty of this defacement/effacement, through our persistent vandalism of the natural world by acts of pollution, for example.)

These moments of breakages in the flow of the paint surprise like haikus that fail to arrive at their moments of revelation. These unfinished illuminations even leak from the raw openings in the whitened floor of paint above them, but ultimately they reveal nothing; the paint smears and hardens imprecisely over them like the surface of ice on a lake in winter.

“Wintry” is another word I would use to describe these paintings. Veils of snow covering a shattered, sorrow-blue world, covering it in munificent layers of loss upon loss. This is the aftermath I am speaking of; this vista of oblivion that comes after time has pulled off its final magic act – making everything disappear.

The marks we hope to leave behind on the world’s face are themselves defaced, then effaced by the passing of time. It is an old idea, as well as a familiarly Buddhistic one. There is definitely something spiritual going on when the artist himself marks out his own purpose as one of reviving our instinctive connection to a core “nature”; an aspect of ourselves we have forgotten or lost as we are easily caught up in the utilitarian diversions of the everyday.

But everything will be lost, according to these paintings; everything of ourselves that we hope to leave behind when we are gone – our legacies, our names. It is only a matter of time. But like tips of Atlantis pushing out from under a crushing weight of sea, Tay’s paintings hint at such traces of a previous life that has now been concluded.

Or to use another analogy, even the vast tarpaulin of time fails to obscure everything. The traces of a world long departed are poignantly meagre, even unbearably so. As we interrogate these paintings with our eyes, we secretly wish to see what the tarpaulin of whiteness fiercely hides. In refusing our sight, we are free to fill the gap under the paint with our own imaginings. This is another symptom of loss, as when, for one terrifying moment, we cannot remember the faces of the ones that have passed away. When the paintings presently invoke this freedom to re-imagine what we can lose in our own lives, it should give us neither joy nor peace.

As troubled as our relationship to these paintings can become, we must not forget the beauty that is also evoked as a result of those significant traces. The beauty calls us into the sublime. This is achieved when we become larger than ourselves from entering a temporary space of meaning usually beyond imagining; a space that connects all of us at a level we are seldom aware of within our own clockwork lives. It is an ineffable space, but when we gain brief entry, we begin to understand ourselves and see into a common human condition; its transience, its fragility, but also an empowering sense of acceptance of the things we cannot change, the losses that we must bear together or alone.

To stay in this transcendental space is an impossibility, although there have been rumours that a few have succeeded in doing so (examples of Hindu gurus, Saints or Bodhisattvas come to mind; that is, if you believe in that kind of thing).

Aftermath. This is the word I am left with at the end of engaging with these paintings. Whether the artwork conveys this idea of aftermath as a pure fact of beauty or stunning tragedy is ultimately left to the viewer to decide. I, for one, sense my own mortality in these paintings, and the mortality that connects us all.

Published in Willy Tay's exhibition catalogue in 2007.