Surrealism has always seemed to me to be a peculiarly timebound, extremely European phenomenon. Watches melted off the edges of tables, little children were menaced by nightingales, and easelled paintings disappeared into window views of the same scene, all in the wake of a world war that had left Europe devastated, in the psychic grips of another, oncoming war, and very much in the thrall of its own "collective unconscious."
America, on the other hand, has never had a truly Surrealist movement along these devastated, continental lines. Perhaps it's because the modern American scene and experience are intrinsically surreal, without much need of adaptation from dreams or the subconscious to bring on a sense of wonder.
This is at least some of the import of David Palmer's paintings of the past decade or so. In them, the strangest things happen: a cringing boy handles an endless snake, a woman fends off something terrible with a raised metal rake, and Sisyphus himself -- in jeans and tee-shirt -- pushes his car up a hill.
Surreal? Yes and no. Palmer certainly doesn't find his work senseless. A woman digging a hole in the ground is "a literal childhood memory, digging caves and caverns. But at the same time you wonder, is the woman burying something, or is she digging it up? Is this a psychological metaphor for digging deeper into some part of herself, or is she trying to hide something?"
Palmer encourages such textual ambiguity in reading his work, that it may fulfill the ends of his painting: not the sur- or the un-real, but the extraordinary in the everyday, the supernal in the psychological. And what more candid way to present this than head-on? If Palmer's figurative style is more-than-slightly virtuosic, and his hues often a kind of mellowed-out Technicolor, still, a strong sense of the reportorial abides.
And, it has to for us to fully see that his on-canvas images -- culled from dreams, and from subjects that pop into his head, and from things he's read about, and from numerous photo setups -- are rife with their own reality. The attitude -- like that of a newspaper -- is almost fabulously factual. Women fly; boys and men dowse in the middle of lakes. And a little-girl Atlas holds up the world -- a yellow-and-white-striped beach ball!
"I love the absurdity of it all," Palmer says, "but of course it also says something about the way we live our lives." Perhaps the most personally -- and, thus, publicly -- revealing of all these works is a truly wicked series of self-portraits with a big, black raven who seems to have obstreperously stolen into the painting like some escapee from a road show of Hitchcock's "The Birds."
In the 20 by 30 inch Self-Portrait with Raven, the two subjects are -- bird on human's head, against a mustardy ground -- co-equal in their sense of portraiture. In Burdened, however, with a bright red background , the raven, on Palmer's shoulder, seems to be getting ornery. In Influence, the bird seems to have won out -- Palmer now has a black beak himself, and the bird's claws have sunk into his shoulder.
"Besides the actual animal, the bird can be an inner thing, the dark side of your personality, some kind of archetypal influence." No need, though, really, to explain. David Palmer's paintings are psychically self-explanatory. They are miracles of the mundane, paragons of the everyday, quicker than the eye, indeed, but never quicker than the mind's -- and the soul's -- inner sight.
Gerritt Henry
Gerrit Henry was a contributing editor for Art News and wrote monthly for Art in America.
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