Barbara Rose Essay
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The placement of her figures within the picture plane reveals a connection to modern painting, that predates her recent involvement with Malevich — the inventor of non-objective art. This is also obvious in the way she works. The critic, Meyer Shapiro, noted thepriority of the image-frame relationship as a characteristic theme shared by both modern art and medieval painting. In addition, her debt to flatness, whether it be from the Italian primitives of the early Renaissance or folk artists, coincides with the flatness of modern art. Despite her rejection of abstraction, the work has a unique Janus-faced relationship to the past and the present. Indeed, her debt seems to belong to neither source, but rather to a special kind of mental space that her quirkiness creates.
The combination of innocence and sophistication in Speed's work has a compelling allure; her imagery is intense and vivid. The amount of detail she laboriously applies keeps the eye and the mind at work long after other art would become tedious. Speed has an extraordinary capacity to absorb and store experience as a permanent eidetic archive she may access at any time.
Speed has often been identified as a Surrealist. She rejects such a stylistic categorization, instead identifying her work as "pararealism", meaning it is an alternative to what we normally see. This seems to make sense in terms of its relationship to parapsychology, which is the field of mental telepathy and the perception of the paranormal. It was André Gide who defined artists as "the antenna of the race," referring to their ability to receive and transmit realities that are invisible to others. Certainly, Julie Speed is one such active antenna, constantly picking up signals.
There is a hallucinatory concreteness to her visions that brings to mind intense descriptions of saints in states of rapture and communication with a world beyond our own. It is therefore not surprising that Speed reads and writes poetry. The way she compresses and laminates images relates not to Stephane Mallarme's Symbolist correspondences but to the poetry of Amy Lowell and the New England Imagists. The poets' images do not depend on free association or cryptic references, but rather on the construction of a concrete and specific image that resembles an epiphany or vision.
The deliberate ambiguity of Speed's images resembles that of poetry, neither of which can be flattened into a single interpretation. Indeed, the critic William Empson identified seven types of poetic ambiguity. The painter must have at least ten. Her technique appears close to that of the early Netherlandish painters and she has referred to her admiration for Jan van Eyck, yet the meticulous detail in her work is not actually the same, nor is it used for the same purposes.
Her images, although not contrived to elicit emotion, do resonate. In response to her 1999 traveling exhibition, Queen of My Room, she received boxes of letters interpreting her paintings. Almost all the explanations were completely at odds with anything that had ever crossed her mind. She received a twelve page paper from a mathematician who explained why her paintings were related to his three dimensional mathematical theory. Other letters from physicists found that her work also corresponded with their theories. She found these responses mystifying, since she knows virtually nothing about math or physics. Several psychoanalysts were convinced that the paintings were a personal cry
for help. Evangelical Christians were sure her soul was on fire. There was even a letter that led to a visit from the bomb squad. She delights in the fact that while no two interpretations were the same, each viewer was certain that they had received the correct message.
She also rejects obvious symbolism, although she is aware that some images appear particularly loaded. Still Life with Suicide Bomber # 4 depicts an ear and sunflowers, but the connection to Vincent Van Gogh did not occur to her until someone pointed it out.