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Frame Play
Lindsey Scharold
The picture plane in frame play i is cleaved multiple times with a curious bowtie-shaped polygon. Its flexions give the impression of an interior vertex of a wall, or a convex corner of horizontal ground—the floor beneath the dog and chair, sure, but also multiple other spatial fields entirely. This is no ordinary place or time.
Charles Mayton’s work is as gorgeously painterly as it is conceptually rich. In frame play i, iii, and iv, the dog, chair, and still life rendered clearly in a few decisive brushstrokes are the marks of someone skilled in their craft. As are the harmonious color palettes of buttery yellows and dusty purples, gradients of magenta and indigo, and even the eccentric swatches of lavender, green, and peach are satisfying to the eye. Too many contemporary artists sacrifice form for content (and less often vice versa) but not Mayton.
The photograph in frame play i is a framing device—a set up. This scene is always contained within another other, always by some layer of remove. By painting a photograph of a still life, rather than painting a still life itself, Mayton layers mediation upon mediation, where the referent, phantom still life is always at a distance.
Mayton tends to satirize the image. Frame Play is no exception. The show is a series of paintings about images. Or perhaps, about looking—about the ways that images never arrive to us unmediated, always framed by layers of expression. If image-making aspires to mimesis, then Mayton’s interjections exploit its fiction. The paintings are imbued with Rosalind Krauss’s logic of “the index.” The still life is never itself. It is never truly represented but instead is always another version of itself, always at a remove, always contained within some other image, some other frame. The scene in which it lives is always a mere image (a photograph). According to Krauss, indexes are not symbols. Rather they are physical traces of their referents—like footprints and shadows—whose existence gestures to some other truth. Frame Play’s repeated motif functions not as a stable symbol, but as the residue of its former versions. In each recursive framing, the notion of any original image dissolves further, leaving only an echo.
Throughout the eleven serial paintings, the context in which this interior and its still life exist begins to shift. First slightly, then drastically. Yet, we remain tethered, however loosely, to the phantasmal still life. Montage-like, the “original” scene is dislocated from any semblance of rational context. Novel moods and filters are superimposed upon/around the dog, chair, and still life (not an unfamiliar occurrence in contemporary, digitally-mediated life). As if to say “This is an Image,” frame play iii seems flecked with film developer. Through Mayton’s manipulations of the recursive motif, you see his machinations at work—dog-, er, god-like. The indexical still life, many times removed, suggests not just the absence of any original image, but the construction of a separate image-world untethered from reality.
In interior drifts i-vii, the still life floats in the picture plane, unhinged from space and time, transposed in relation to the bow-tie shape, an interior of exaggerated depth, like a Photoshop layer. Each painting seems to suggest viewing the composite image through a different “lens”: a cracked screen, a glowing television.
Frame Play’s many acts of mediation amount to a kind of excess—and in that there is play. Through varied forms of interjection and containment, Mayton breaks the internal logic of the image and creates it anew (especially in interior drifts interior drifts i-vii). He chops and screws it. One of Frame Play’s accomplishments is its irreverence—especially stark against the often tiresome backdrop of postmodern critique. The figures in the image are dissociated from any true relations, and the familiar becomes unfamiliar by virtue of repetition and recursion—to the point of irrelevance (or maybe non-existence). Call it jamais vu. Interior drifts i bears little reference to “the original” motif and is mostly a void interior (within a void). Mayton liberates the scene from the weight of preconceived meaning. There is only index, there is only frame. In Mayton’s clever paintings, representation collapses in on itself. The images within are not reflections of the real. Instead, Frame Play generates a mirror-tunnel—a mise en abyme—where images don’t refer outward, but only, tautologically, to themselves.