Before the Black Mirror


All access to nature is mediated – there is no virginal, idyllic, pre-cultural state to be sallied through. The ‘natural’, the ‘beautiful’, the ‘sublime’ and the ‘picturesque’ are Enlightenment constructions that post-Enlightenment artists and philosophers lock-off and make safe by the use of quotation marks and parenthesis. This does not reduce the power of art to gesture towards these Universals – that is all it can do – and the paintings of Gareth Reid act as signifiers of this impossible urge to access this lyrical, bucolic beyond.

The Black Mirror that the title of the show refers to starts off an eternal chain of correspondences and references: the obsidian mirror of the Aztecs, the scryer’s pool of black ink, the spirit mirror of the Goetia, the black chamber of the eye that reflects light back into the universe, and the apparatus used by artists to gauge the tonal qualities of a landscape. The artist’s black mirror was popular with a host of landscape painters and their followers from the 17th century onwards, who, in holding the mirror up to a landscape would find what they believed to be a more picturesque, a more beautiful and natural version of the scene reflected in the glass. This need to record and reflect a scene or an event unfolding before them symbolises the way all viewing subjects mediate their experience of the Real within the psyche. Art acts as that screen.

Art becomes a black mirror in Reid’s hands, where the artificiality of nature is subtly enforced. The paintings act as screens between self and other, culture and nature, Man and nature – illusory binaries that fight it out on the excavated surface of his work. The expanding haze of coloured light, the pool of shadow and the almost intangible edge of a plane are kept in place with his deft pencil stroke, line and form keeping each other in check. The paintings move between three shifting and overlapping concerns: the portrait, the landscape and the interior as subject matter. Reid creates narratives by hanging examples of these genres together; meaning emerges through the fecund juxtapositions that his diptychs and triptychs create. In ‘The Sea’ and ‘Family I’, for example, the viewer is forced to create a relationship between a seascape and a portrait of a young girl. The meaning that is generated appears only in the viewers mind, as a third conceptual art object, as the missing third part of an imaginary triptych. This is a simple yet sophisticated device on Reid’s part: not only does he demonstrate that the meaning we find in his objects is a meaning we bring, but that essentially ‘reality’ as we know it is mediated, is ‘artifice’, that there is nothing before the black mirror.

Dr Alexander Kennedy
Art historian and critic