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On the work of Jake Celeste Paltenghi

"How can one tell the difference between an image and an act of the will?"
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

From contemplation of life in many and varied atmospheres, from the border of Wales to the Australian Outback via Provencal France, colour breathes in the fine architecture of Paltenghi's visions.
In a violently disputed world Paltenghi prefers to focus his study on the nature of being as it relates to colour and dance, unassuming expressions of beauty in an oasis luminous with calm.
From crisis an inspired grace emerges. Not the inane charm of an escapist aesthetic (an amnesiac Cy Twombly retrospective for instance, paintings, drawings, sculpture−emergency∼exits to dimensions of mislaid innocence), but images which delicate, elusive, minimalist, are intensely present, burning with the germ of life.
Dance, drama, passion, the velocity of stillness, sculptural musculature and colour the vehicles of a theme consistently implicit. Flowers float flattened and winding, cerulean silhouettes of cathedrals on ancient silvery canals, the electric phraseology of dance in diffracted tropisms of then mind: exquisitely abstracted atmospheres of powdered azure, lavender, an imperial midnight warmth kneeling into mediterranean blue, the refracted dust of golden Provencal sunsets, colbolt Les Baux afternoons: explorations of beauty which carry, in the light itself, the inelucyable, poignant presence of death, decay-"the knowledge of suffering that informs vision"

The potential for an ambiguous authority in the subtlety of these works is surpassed. Self-assured, the artist investigates Space and Time with a sympathy and charisma crucial to each movment. Bbreathing it, he maintains a reserve, an aesthetic distance from the chaos, the controlled emergency which symbolizes art and life.
The vivid, vital equilibrium of these canvasses is juxtaposed against the violent, pessimistically punctuated ethos of the systematically disfigured, post-war works of such artists as Francis Bacon, Jackson Pllock, the unlovable nudes of Lucian Freud, all of whom approached the issue of tragedy and disillusionment from Existentialist perspective, an influential philosophy with powerful echoes of defeat.
How might light escape the black-hole of universal anxiety? Yet it has, and the syntax, potentially pessimistic, of form in Paltenghi's work functions as signifier of conversation, not for once, of reversal, of disparagement, but a burning ffirmation of continuity. An evolving ['alchemicsl'] permanence, a creative correspondance which includes and transcends being.

The human mind, fatigued by the banality of horror, is liberated in the work of artists like Paltenghi. Free to collaborate with fresh possibilities , appointments with grace, dance and colour in a sanctuary of calm, even song (since indeed some paintings sing: a case in point being the ravishing visions of the great Australian painter Brett Whitely, whose work Paltenghi studied during his HUNTER/OBSERVER Travel Prize to that country in 1993).

While but clues traces, surreal ciphers, key-hole perspectives on parallel dimensions, all that precedes and transcends trauma is glimpsed in these paintings by an eye so exhausted by banality and outrage, intelligence so demoralized by duplicity, it is as though a small miracle has occured.< br/> Aspiring to truth, art is a determinant of consciousness. "It is not the eye alone, it is the mind which the painter means to address. It is that one objective which ranks it as a sister of poetry."
The modesty of scale in these arrangements (canvasses as compact as they are radiant) encourage an intuitive and dynamic complicity, a correspondence which involves and transcends self. By virute of this approach the eye gradually cultivates a sense of ease in space, free of the perplexities which typically interrogate the viewer of post-modern art.

While not technically an Expressionist, given the perfect flatness of each image, there is an Expressionistic vigour in the electric effect of colour, an uncomplicated vision charged with understatement. Upon repeated viewing, the paintings do not equivocate depending on light, an inherent luminosity, in conjunction with thew smoothness of each image, places them beyond the idiosyncrasies of ambience. They appear to be the source of their own radiance. There is a suggestion that even in the dark they would shine.
In terms of supreme accomplishments of colour one thinks of Bonnard, Matisse, Klimpt, Rothko (when upbeat). Vincent always.
While beautiful, there is nothing superfluous or ornate. Unencumbered by metaphorical complications, they muse on the threshold of beauty, expressions of affirmation in being.
I do not refer simply to surreal images of beauty or the experience of physical beauty, but forms that burn like incense with an almost unreal subtlety, that "infinitely frail, infinitely delicate thing" of Elliot, outstaring the outraged eye of ancient corruption, false seduction: the wholly venal, materialistic eye. The mortal eye of every damaged age.
This in part explains the power of Paltenghi's opus: while beautiful, it is haunted. Decay and death are also signatures of beauty- however exquisitely immortalized in colour. With this in mind emerges another quality, one which challenges Time: that of sculptural permanence. Fluency of form contained in a measureless spectrum of moods, tropisms toward and away from light, subjective revelations of change; echoes of choreography traced in part to the life and death of the artist's father, David Paltenghi, a dancer with the royal ballet.

There is an unspoken sorrow in the poignancy of these paintings, a sense of loss in their very largess.
Violence sublimated, elegance calculated, movement measured in an allegorical context, is the genius of dance. Paltenchi's sculptures are reflections on the nature of dance. Vitality arrested in minute bronzes, paintings born of light transfigured: inspirational compositions, a tribute to the legend of the artist's father.

The paintings glow and drift in fields of corn-flower blue, imbedded in glooms and caves of veined gold, landscapes of interiors where bridges float bright with hoar, ancient architecture dishevelled on silvery canals, 'unique forms of continuity in space,' small masterpieces.
Tropisms of ancient souls the attraction of opposites: the experience of the observer is subjective, unconditional, complete.
There is in consequence no need of narrative, the burden of a story to tell. The legend of the image is implicit in its entirety.

Posessed of these values, a high seriousness pervades each work. The potential for triviality is entirely absent, in the lucidity of its presence a Paltenghi still-life is as potent and exacting as its visual anti-thesis: Bacon's Man at a wash-basin- vomiting his life 'into the vortex of our banal universe'.
With Paltenghi, one is moved more to communicate here concerns a search for a 'way through', as opposed to a 'looking at', or indeed, 'a recoiling from'. This in part constitutes the power of paintings. They remain in the mind more than something remembered: an enduring emotion, an echo of revelaion, qualities eluding a name. They are true to Nietzsche's admonition that art must make contact with the depth of being"; an egoless transcendence. The 'I' is not that of the actual conscious man, but the "I dwelling truly and eternally in th ground of being." iIn the absence of a narrqative, significance is subjectively intuited, and all who look will depart with an experience unique to them alone.

Satre once said: "The real is a flash of lightning." That sounds close to sartori, the Japanese word for sudden illumination; literally 'a kick in the eye'. It can occur in an instant of unutterable calm, in the back of a cab, on a surf board, terrifying high-tension caves...

Or simply in front of a Paltenghi painting.

Vivian Whiteley Hopkirk, October 2007