RESTRICT TO REFINE
Mark and Hannah Hayes-Westall have been working in the contemporary art world for close to 20 years. Each month, they introduce an artist who should appear on your agenda
THIS MONTH: PAUL FEILER
Feiler only felt that he came close to achieving the kind of perceptual expressionism he was seeking once he installed a series of rigorous restrictions on himself clockWise froM above Square Relief XIII, 2009, gold and silver leaf, gouache, perspex on perspex, 41 x 41 cm; Janicon XCV, 2005, silver and gold leaf, gessoed board on canvas, 66 x 66 cm; Zenicon XV, 2006, gold and silver leaf, gessoed board on canvas, 122 x 122 cm; Square Relief LXI, 2012, silver and gold leaf, gouache, perspex on perspex, 36 x 36 cm
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THE CITY MAGAZINE | December 2016
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hat’s so interesting? On the morning of Sunday 3 May 1953, at 11am exactly, the novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley took precisely four-tenths of a gram of the psychoactive drug mescaline. Writing about the way his experience of the world around him changed over the course of the afternoon that followed and theorising as to what and how these experiences changed him in the long term, Huxley inadvertently created one of the most influential books of the countercultural movement, The Doors of Perception. His view of the effect of the drug on his conscious mind was that it had somehow enabled him to achieve a state of spiritual transcendence; an understanding of the reality at the heart of existence that he took back
with him to everyday life. It is this type of memory, the memory of perceiving a transcendental experience that, without the inclusion of psychoactive substances, lies at the heart of the work of Germanborn painter Paul Feiler. The critic John Steer described Feiler’s work as “rooted in the detailed analysis of his perceptual experience”, but more than that, there is a warmth in the artist’s work, and particularly in his later works, that comes from his desire to share this experience with the viewer. Speaking with an art critic in 2002 Feiler, who died in 2013 aged 95, explained that what was important to him was that by looking at his work – the translation of his own visual experience – each individual should make new connections with the world around, and that in this way, “the looking would be associated with feeling, and the artist’s connection with the onlooker would be complete”. The rigorous adherence to a set of combinations of straight lines and circles in much of Feiler’s work might at first seem to place it within the abstract art movement – indeed he became friendly with Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko when the New Yorker visited St Ives where he then lived – but there is a very British sort of ‘associative abstraction’ at play. Obsessed with architecture and music, one critic described looking at his work as “an experience of someone within the space of a Gothic cathedral or classical temple, or listening to the progression of sound in a symphony” and it may not come as a surprise to learn that he named many of his works after temenos (the secret, closed off areas found in ancient Greek temples). In what seems unlikely to be a coincidence, the concept of the temenos was also employed by the early psychologist Carl Jung to describe the place where the conscious mind can safely meet its unconscious counterpart. Feiler only felt that he came close to achieving the kind of perceptual expressionism he was seeking once he installed a series of rigorous restrictions
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