Gravity and Grace
When I first saw Danielle Lawrence’s paintings for Gravity and Grace, I laughed. The butts and thighs that once inhabited the black jeans she skillfully sews into fractal shapes on her canvases had evaporated and flattened, becoming bouquets of petrified stone. The worn jeans, now compressed into minimalist canvas planes, seemed somehow sexier, sweatier, more alive. I could see them wriggling in the world of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. I surveyed the ripped jeans, shards of canvas, and splinters of ceramics organized into whirlpools and grids; in Danielle’s hands, materials are swept up in waves, grated over sand and shell, and flung into a sea that blurs forms. Danielle de-creates dimensions, stripping both the work and the viewer from their assumed shape and function so that everything folds inward and blooms outward in one frame.
Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic whose writing gives Danielle’s show its title, posited the concept of "decreation," the act of evacuating the “self” to make space for the divine. Simone Weil's theory of “decreation” proposes that through acts of self-emptying, we can find liberation from the constraints of individualism and materialism, opening ourselves to the quantum array of possibilities within the unformed. Danielle’s Gravity and Grace is as much about dissociation, dematerialization, and negation as it is about intimacy, love, and flesh. In Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, she writes, “To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.” In Danielle Lawrence’s Gravity and Grace, that distance caves in so that the truth of our messy inter-being becomes unavoidable.
I called Danielle and asked about the dematerialization happening in her new work: “Oh yeah, I was collapsing time with these paintings. I wanted to grab the people who inspire me and flatten any distance of time and space to bring them here. I’m thinking about mapping my inheritances and connections as an artist.” I asked about my favorite painting, a black spiral of shredded denim. “That’s Death of a Hippie for Paul Thek.” Death of a Hippie is another name for Thek’s installation The Tomb, made in 1967, where Thek made an effigy of himself dead with his right hand severed inside a pale pink sepulcher. Danielle’s painting brings Thek into the room with us as he decreates himself so that we dissolve with him - I was startled by the intense intimacy of this idea.
In Danielle’s hands, ripped jeans become portals to alternate dimensions, windows into the past, present, and future simultaneously. Paul Thek once wrote to Eva Hesse, “The whole fall season seems to have been beautifully psychic, the same inner things happening to many people far apart. I think now perhaps we’re all part of one big creature, like coral, separate consciousnesses, parts of a great big one.” "I was thinking as much about those I love as those I have beef with, like Courbet," Danielle told me. In her painting, The Rose/ L’Origin du monde, Jay DeFeo's The Rose is summoned into strips of lightweight raw canvas arranged in the same starburst formation as DeFeo's monumental one-ton painting. Courbet’s L’Origin du monde, a painting of a vulva, is also invoked here, with the opening of his model’s vagina sitting at the center of his painting as a site of creation. DeFeo’s The Rose gives us creation as primordial swirls where stars ignite in heaven while petals spiral open in answer to the sun here on Earth. In Courbet’s L’Origin du monde, he chose to cut his model’s head off and reduce his idea of creation down to impersonal human birthing anatomy, flattening and depersonalizing the mysteries of the body and putting his misogyny on display. The juxtaposition between the scope of the two artists' notions of creativity is both nauseating and exhilarating: the radial burst of life both in flesh and in light is reduced to the same spiral lines on Danielle’s canvas.
Danielle and I met almost twenty years ago at the San Francisco Art Institute, where Jay DeFeo’s The Rose was entombed from 1969 until 1995, sealed behind the wall of a conference room until the Whitney Museum unearthed and restored the work. The Rose was gone by the time Danielle and I got there, but the legend of the one-ton star that had to be cut and fork-lifted out of DeFeo’s studio stained our days, soaking us in the promise of the wild experimentation and radical kinship of the San Francisco of the 1960s. In addition to the wild innovations that erupted between us as students at SFAI, we were also burdened by lingering 19th-century European art academy values that rank, exclude, and individuate according to the values of Courbet’s art world and the cis white men who continue to claim supremacy in it.
In Danielle’s work, the problematic and the sublime are chopped and stirred together as equals in our inheritance as artists. Our rebuttals, refusals, and rebellions link us as tightly to one another as our venerations and embraces. “The world is the closed door,” Simone Weil tells us in Gravity and Grace, “It is a barrier. And at the same time, it is the way through. Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. … Every separation is a link.”
Text by Eliza Swann
Eliza Swann, an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator, holds a BA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Central St. Martins, London. They have contributed writing to BOMB, Arthur, Contemporary Art Review LA, Momus, and Perfect Wave. Their book "The Anatomy of the Aura" was published by St. Martin’s Press. Eliza founded The Golden Dome School and currently teaches alchemy at Pratt Institute. Eliza Swann's website