‘The Glass of Water’ - Charlotte Gould

“L'eau (qu'il contient) ne change presque rien au verre, et le verre (où elle est) ne change rien à l'eau…”

The water (which it contains) does almost nothing to the glass, and the glass (which contains it) does not alter the water.

Francis Ponge, “The Glass of Water” 1961

“To say a lemon is yellow is as strange as glass is transparent.”

Emmanuel Hocquard, L’Invention du verre, 2003
The Invention of Glass, 2012. Translation Rod Smith and Cole Swensen

Michelle Charles spent twenty years working in the United States. In the mid 1990s, her New York studio was one block away from the World Trade Center and every day, she would watch the constant flow of people rushing to work in the financial district.

At that time, she was also teaching at The New School For Social Research, and when its librarians decided to discard a batch of withdrawn books on economics, she had an inkling that it could be worth rescuing them.

For years, they just sat there in her studio, until she started painting medicine bottles on them, and, later on, bars of soaps. The works on books she is presenting at England & Co. are part of a series entitled “Milk on Economics Books” and feature an object which is part of the repertoire she has come to build over the years: the drinking glass.

In this series, the transparent glass is turned opaque up to the point where milk has been poured into it. The books, today mere discarded blocks of uniform colour filled with impenetrable economic theories, become the medium unto which a reflection on the different degrees of transparency takes place.

The books which have been saved from the pulp mill and pinned up to the walls should have served as guidebooks to contemporary life, instead they now bear Charles’s painterly endeavours to capture the fleeting moments when light traverses glass at a certain angle and is refracted by it.

Some of the glasses’ faceted surfaces are an aesthetic statement, a kind of cubism which adds to the fractured vision that glass and liquid already imply. The almost calligraphic style in which she allows their clarity to appear is so assured, it alleviates the fleetingness of time and the uncertainty of human vision.

The whiteness of the milk, its confident wholesomeness, provide a comforting answer to a question which has not been asked. When Charles moved back to London in 2001, the London School of Economics became a new provider of withdrawn books.

Michelle Charles’s use of brushstrokes is even more economical in the upturned glasses she paints on paper. This time, the glasses do not serve their function as receptacles. Now, they are vessels defined by the void they enclose. They are mundane, hollow, and piled up one on top of the other, therefore eminently breakable. And yet, it is light, rather than their precarious stacking, which makes them unstable objects of vision.

The simplicity and eloquence of their rendering on paper is not an attempt, however, to grasp a story, a narrative of time passing and of the successive lights of day. Charles is wary of the beautiful English picture. She works on series, not as attempts at grasping some unattainable truth or beauty, but because each picture in the series is an affirmation of presence.

Attention paid to the particulars of the object means it does not disappear behind its essence. By choosing to create such series, Charles denies the possibility for an authoritative voice to decide what the last word is on the object represented.

The crystal balls series, either on photograms or on paper, started in 2009. They are also glass receptacles, but not of liquids, of the future, or at least of images we would like to read as previsions. In the photograms, Charles paints them in light, in a dark room, from memory. They are almost abstract, allowing the viewer to project other images unto them.

Crucially, they respond to the context of the 2008 demise of Lehman Bros and the financial crisis which subsequently swept global financial markets. Their particular transparency this time hinting at uncertainty and the delusion of thinking one is able to predict what the future holds.

Clearly, not one of the myriad economics books coming on and off the shelves of university libraries had been able to foresee that the world economy was crumbling. While we would like to hold on to what is familiar and safe – the indisputability of market forces, a glass of milk – their fleetingness is actually what makes them part of human experience.

Michelle Charles’s different series of paintings or cameraless pictures adopt a parallel economy in which there is no entropy in repetition. When she comes back again and again to the same glass surfaces and empty or half-full vessels, she does not exhaust the possibilities for representing them.

Their interaction with light makes them unique each and every time. Her working economy is not that of the search for the “pretty picture”, an exclusive process which gets rid of trials and excess. None of her individual pictures is redundant.

The recurrence of the same subject does not exhaust possibilities: there is always a different glass and a different light, the world is rich, maybe not in the economic sense of the term, but because it is always renewed in life and in art.

By focusing on the singular object and its elusive presence to the artist’s eye, Michelle Charles addresses the anxieties a world ruled by finance imposes on us. The economy of her strokes, the sustainability of her series, the quiet confidence of her vision, all are stances against entropy, exhaustion and redundancy.

This essay accompanied the exhibition Michelle Charles "Shape of Light" England & Co. London.

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‘Painting What Is Not There’ - Guy Brett

Michelle Charles has painted glasses or bottles countless times over the past twenty-one years. No, that is not the way to put it. It’s not about that. The words ‘glass’ and ‘bottle’ come out too strongly in their materiality and facticity, and the word ‘painted’ has no vitality, or suggests a rather mechanical activity. The two players in the equation are not related properly.

What actually happens is that the glasses or bottles become light-traps, or light-vessels. Michelle Charles has not yet finished exploring all the possible inflections and subtle nuances that a single, simple object can be invested with. Or, that could be put the other way round. She has shown and continues to show us the extraordinary freedom and inventiveness of the brush stroke that issues from and returns to a single form.

There could be a further way of describing it; her works conduct a dialogue between representation and the play of light, a phenomenon fluctuating and wandering, whose immateriality is gathered and condensed or contained in the vessel. The solid object is only held together by the brush strokes which themselves are equivalents for light.

Painting had a paradoxical birth. While its subject was often the fleeting, the changeability of things, its actual materials were developed over thousands of years to be lasting and not to fade. In Michelle Charles’ paintings of empty glasses there is a further refinement of this paradox.

To render the transparent she must make use of a material that is opaque. How the opaque is transformed into transparency is one of the sources of the magic in her art. The change is not in the material, which remains dense, but occurs in our understanding, our perception.

In its simplest form this is seen in her series of single glasses or tumblers painted in ink on paper, one to a sheet. The unmarked paper is clear or empty. It is only the interference in that clarity, the partial coverage of the paper, that produces the sensation of transparency of the glass. This is achieved differently in each painting and never becomes monotonous.

In fact the standardisation of industrial mass-production, responsible for producing the identical glasses in the first place, is turned on its head by Charles’ form of serial painting. Her images are ceaseless returns to a source, rather than repetitions.

In his painting A Bar at the Folies Bergère (1882), in the Courtauld Institute in London, Manet foregrounds on the bar top a small glass containing flowers. He gives this object a singular identity. It sings out in its clear transparency among the vari-coloured unopened bottles of beer, liquor and champagne, seeming to belong to another order of being. We can compare directly, in Manet’s handling, glass that retains its commonplace functionality and glass that becomes a vessel of light.

A somewhat similar experience is given by Michelle Charles’ paintings of single glasses and bottles directly on the covers of old books. There is a similar contrast between the dun colours of the book covers and the delicate transparency of the glassware, often marked by residues of milk or medicine. The first glass object to be painted on a book was a medicine bottle.

The books are faded testimonies of intellectual effort, with titles like ‘Studies in Social and Economic Process’, ‘General Science – Part I’, ‘The Nature of Price Theory’, psychoanalytic titles, and so on. Many are superannuated from libraries, retired from an active life, and Charles’ glasses and bottles, in the very freshness of their brushstrokes seem to re-nourish the dwindled intellectual energies.

She achieves a deftness – a light touch – which cannot be equated with slickness or virtuosity, which draws no attention to itself, which is close to life. These painting-objects are marvels of tenderness. When we speak of ‘seeing’ we often forget the time element involved, for example the difference between prolonged contemplation and the brief glimpse. There is the brilliant insect that is gone in a flash. We have only a second to admire it, and that perception is qualitatively different from having hours to study the same beetle stuck on a pin.

Michelle Charles’ paintings of glasses are conducive to meditation or contemplation, particularly the large series of paintings on board which solidify transitory effects of light as rich, substantial pictorial structures. Charles discovers powerful colours within emptiness. When she comes to paint house flies, in a recent series, everything is connected with the momentary, even extending to attempting to paint flies’ shadows. Her fragile ink-marks seem to correspond to the short lines of William Blake’s poem:

Little fly

“Thy summer’s play
my thoughtless hand
has brushed away”

Michelle Charles moved back to Britain seven years ago, having lived and worked in the United States for the previous two decades. New York and London still exert contradictory pulls upon her: ‘When I’m in one I want to be in the other’, she confides. Yet this dual allegiance appears to have been remarkably beneficial.

Her New York paintings have a decisive directness which it could have been hard to acquire in Britain: they are fuelled by the proximity of Abstract Expressionism, and the focus on commonplace, everyday objects associated with Pop.

At the same time, if one compares her series of glass paintings over the years, a certain American ruggedness and monumentality has ceded to a subtlety and ambiguity which perhaps can be attributed to English light and sensibility.

Her recent paintings induce an unmistakeable feeling of calm, they feed and calm us with an effect something like the milk or remedy whose traces remain in the glass. Yet at the same time, paradoxically, they re-vitalise the handling of paint to a degree that has become extremely rare in contemporary art.

They rekindle the active, reciprocal relationship between paint and the ‘thing’ painted – an extension, really, of the sense of touch – whose quality has been lost in the avalanche of photographic and digital imagery.

This essay was published at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge in conjunction with Solo show.

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‘Michelle Charles’ - Dore Ashton

“There are two ways of knowing a thing; the first turns around it, the second gets into it; the first type of knowledge is relative; the second absolute …”

Henri Bergson, Introduction à la Metaphysique

I suppose that objects are everything that are not us. We live amongst them in profusion – often in passive unawareness. Yet, they inhabit, even constitute the texture of our world. Michelle Charles has for years reminded us of their ubiquity, their strangeness, their power to be.

Most of her motifs concern inanimate things. But some, like her recent studies of flies, move stealthily into our ken; they, too, are things that are not us. Because Charles’ imagination is haunted by metaphor, her painted things are compelling and allusive. The whole world in a grain of sand; the natural and unnatural world as it impinges; sight and insight, all there. If she paints knitted things, they are like the sea, like the winds, like landscapes in which a knitting needle is horizon.

By the closest, most intense scrutiny, Charles not only inaugurates metaphors, she inaugurates form. It would not be too much to say that she ‘gets into’ her image, as Bergson noted, seeking an absolute like an unabashed metaphysician. (I stress the word seeking, with the knowledge I have of many painters who, like Penelope, weave and unravel, day and night, and are well aware that they will never finish with their quest.)

For a long time I have known that words are quite useless when it comes to painting. But sometimes the words of poets are analogous to the paint of painters, at least obliquely. If we find kinship, then we are one step closer to the painter’s motives.

When I think of Charles’ work, that I have watched for many years, I am often carried on her current to certain poets, above all Wallace Stevens, whose humour so often turns serious, as in ‘The Comedian As The Letter C’, an early poem with the line ‘Here was the veritable ding and sich, at last’. And his title of a late poem, ‘Not Ideas About the Thing, But the Thing Itself’.

But above all, one of his most discussed poems, ‘Anecdote of the Jar’.

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
There it was,
‘gray and bare’

…as the poet says, and centered as so many of Charles’ objects are:
‘It took dominion everywhere.’

Although Charles’ universe is composed of light and shadow, as all painting is, the thing itself that she depicts is often like Stevens’ Tennessee jar. It takes dominion everywhere. Charles is not alone in the history of art, using objects to talk about the things of this world, or that world, or the universe itself. Above all, to talk about how light enlightens. And how color colors. You only ever catch a glimpse, she says.

So often painters in history have labored to bid the glimpse to stay, and in the interest of clarity, have used objects that are, so to speak, still. Jars, glasses, urns, cloths, tables, windows, fruits, vegetables, chops, clusters, and all the spaces between.

The history of still-life goes back and back, and offers the painter a great treasury of images of how things appear (and disappear). There is not a memorable still-life in art history that cannot be seen as allegorical. The imagination takes care of that. ALLOS: other.

Despite the aplomb with which Charles’ objects stand before us, they initiate thoughts of other things, sometimes as obscure as a distant light, sometimes as clear as a glass of water.

Dubuffet told us that his love for common things in his art was an ‘attempt to bring disparaged values’ into the light. ‘I cannot get over the feeling that the things closest to us, most constantly in sight, have also always been the least noticed, that they remain the least known, and, that if one is searching for the key to things, one has the best chance of finding them in the things which are most copiously repeated.’

Charles’ work has sometimes been seen as obsessive, and sometimes as serial in intent. But I see it as her passionate attempt to gauge the place – literally – of objects in our lives. Her focus is on how we arrange memory, or as she sometimes calls it, the ‘residue’ of memory.

Each shimmering glass of milk or water is an autonomous reminder of how volatile our memory can be. And how, inevitably, our regard slips off into reverie. Her means: viscous paint, thin washes, impastos. Materials that respond to her impulse to establish the character of what she sees.

If she wishes to seize the character of yarn, she wields her fluent paint, with all its richness of half-tones, to tell of meshing, woveness and enwoveness. If she becomes entranced with the shape of things, as she does in her witty evaluations of the common hotwater bottle, her brush can move from dense matter to the thinnest of washes, and her imagination moves from the thing itself to its metamorphosis into a pure shape.

The transmogrification into an ominous black (fish? kite?) or into a fragile ancient glass vial, is quite marvellous, in the way that the poet André Breton enshrined that word. The same can be said of her airy renditions of the common pan scrub.

Although Charles has said more than once that her work is about paint, I take it that it is shorthand for saying that it is about how paint can translate the universe – always a mysterious business about which words are hard to summon. About light and shadow: Charles has experimented with photograms. This is the ultimate act of disembarrassing oneself of obstacles.

The photogrammist, as Man Ray demonstrated, gets straight to the point, and in the course of things, proves that there cannot be a straight-to-the-point attitude since even the absence of the machine – the camera – does not guarantee a pure image, only myriad degrees of lights and shadows, and the delightful surprises of emergence.

Photograms are essentially about things as transformed by light into mirages, hallucinations, estranged from the customary. But so are paintings. In many of her recent studies of the common household fly, Charles deliberates on the fragile, translucent lights of the wings, and the density of the bodies.

For me, her renditions of the fly are not exactly natural history, but also not exactly unnatural. When I conjure up a fly, I always see it on a windowpane, and am hypnotized by its meandering course. In that irregular journey, the wings reflect glass reflections. For all their wonderful simplicity, Charles’ images of a fly invariably suggest that strange trajectory in light and shadow.

Here she uses all her painterly resources to tell us how very complicated this painterly vision can become, sometimes in sequences of tones and half¬tones, sometimes accented, as when she economically introduces color to tell of the burning ember of the fly’s head.

Who but the ancient Chinese and Japanese brush painters would have thought of inspecting so closely the mysterious life of a fly? Or for that matter the quality of a plastic shopping bag? Whether a fly in transit or a glass resting uneasily on the shifting facets of a plastic shopping bag, Charles’ objects, or shall we say subjects, often become phantoms. They haunt.

For a very long time I have listened respectfully to the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, so wise in the things of the world. He understood that for a poet or a painter, ‘the world is not so much a noun as an adjective’, quoting the poet Milosz.

If I try to locate the most appropriate adjective for Charles’ oeuvre, I come up with the word iridescent, like drinking glasses, flies wings, bottles. I could easily transliterate Bachelard’s observations concerning the poet’s imagery into the paintings of Charles: The poetic image is an emergence from language; it is always a little above the language of signification.

Yes, that can be said of Charles’ paintings. There is a language of painting, and when used poetically, as Charles uses it, it does always arise a little above the depiction of the objects she scrutinizes.

Finally, Charles’ long experience with her painter’s language is expressed in terms that suggest spontaneity; a rush of exceptional enthusiasm. (Her voice, in person, when she speaks, is also modulated by a rush of words.) It requires great skill, great craft, to reduce an object to its essence in just a few swift strokes of the brush. Charles succeeds – again and again and again and again.

This catalogue essay was published by Kettle's Yard in conjunction with “Michelle Charles Kettle’s Yard”, in 2008.

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‘Secret Remedies’ - Steve Edwards

For this exhibition at the Museum of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society artist Michelle Charles presents a range of her images of ordinary things. The assembled art works are divided into two groups.

Photograms of glass bottles are mounted in sequences on the walls, and old books, emblazoned with a painted motif, are exhibited in the glass display cases. In both instances the items selected - bottles and books - come from another time. Charles' objects recall the past through it's worn out residues and traces.

Charles' work seems to revolve around questions of health and hygiene, absence and presence. Many of her paintings and drawings that are not included in this exhibition depict the objects of domestic cleaning such as a dustpan and brush, or items of personal hygiene in the form of soaps and hand-soap dispensers. She has produced paintings of household cures such as Calamine Lotion or Milk of Magnesia, and an endless series of glasses of milk.

In addition, there are her ubiquitous images of medicine bottles of the type once familiar. These bottles contained patent medicines or ‘cure alls’, these were often dubious substances sold to treat a variety of ailments. The title of this exhibition - Secret Remedies - is taken from a book of that name published in 1909, which records many of these medicines.

These work always seems to posit an absent body. It is this body, and the viewer can't help but imagine it as their own, that swallows the milk or medicine, which handles the dustpan and books, or applies the soaps to it's skin. All of these are objects to be picked up and handled, and they suppose closeness to the material body. In some way her selected subjects all imply a body faced with contamination; it is to be cleansed, cured and built up.

Charles’ works can be seen, in this light, as images of human frailty and finality. These themes are echoed in the present exhibition where images of medicine bottles and soaps appear repeatedly. The books themselves seem to suggest associations of death and decay, in the way that dusty old second-hand bookshops often do. The books Charles works with are all old economics texts, dead theories that once prophesised a land of milk and honey. Painted onto their boards are surrogate images of human presence - soap or cure all bottles. The closeness and contact leads the viewer to a chain of connections between the self and decay.

The photogram is suited to this theme of intimacy and infection. Photograms are images produced by projecting light through an object that has been placed in direct contact with photochemical paper. When this light-sensitive paper is developed the light that has passed through transparent, or translucent, surfaces produces an image on the same scale as the object in question. The photogram makes an image from the shadow of its subject, drawing up as close to the literal object depicted as any picture can get.

They attribute a palpable presence to things Camera-less photographs like this were often the subjects of the earliest experiments with the medium. The eighteenth-century experiments of Thomas Wedgewood and Sir Humphrey Davy were of this type. While W.H.F. Talbot, Sir John Herschel and Anna Atkins often made pictures in the 1840s by placing flat, diaphanousand transparentobjects such as leaves, lace, or a butterfly's wing directly onto sensitised paper.

These experimentalists could not help feeling that the objects uncannily reproduced themselves. Some of the first experiments with photography in modern art also took the form of photograms. These pictures made in the 1920s by Lazlo Moholy Nagy and others emerged out of a fascination with the scientific dimensions of photography.

Technical processes such as the X-ray that made the human body transparent to medical inspection fascinated these artists, who associated the scientific image technologies with a new, rational and progressive world.

The photograms made by Michelle Charles are much less utopian. Even more than her paintings on books, these images draw on themes of closeness, proximity and touch. Her works seem to be driven by an attempt to close the gap between the thing represented and the thing itself. The photograms, without even mediating negatives, seem to make the bottles immediately present to the viewer's hand.

All of Charles’ work plays off this proximity to the body, and I take it that this contact between the object depicted and the photographic paper provides a vivid metaphor for this odd intimacy. We feel the proximity of the object and the sensitive paper as if it were a visceral contact. Here light and glass fuse, producing an image that is at once a body and a substance to be internalised by that body.

But we know that these medicines ultimately failed their users. These doubtful fluids could not halt the ravages of ageing and illness. They will serve us no better. Charles’ images stand, in this setting, as monuments to inadequate knowledge, mourning and loss. They point to our desire for the universal cure, and the inability of modern society to deliver one.

The bottles are now empty, their weird and wonderful contents consumed long ago. The chemical concoctions that remain belong to that other modern 'cure all' the photographic image. It ought to be apparent from these artworks that utopia will not take the form of pills or pictures.

This essay was published by The Museum of The Royal Pharmaceutical Society: Michelle Charles “Secret Remedies”, London, 2001.

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