Exhibition Essay

Through the Looking Glass

Dr. David Anfam

“Time goes, you say? Ah, no! Alas, Time stays, we go.”

—Henry Austin Dobson

At face value, Jimmy O’Neal’s art explores transparency, opacity, reflectance and gesture. Yet of course these characteristics are its means, not ends. No observer should mistake O’Neal’s media for his messages, hypnotic though the former’s effects may be. The paintings seem to say “I’ll be your mirror” – with a nod more to The Velvet Underground’s song lyrics (1967) than to their record producer Andy Warhol’s deadpan, passive-aggressive persona – even as their membranes entice and elude the enquiring gaze. Anyway, the essential point is that mirrors, from at least the ancient Greek times of the Narcissus myth onward, have conveyed extremely mixed messages. As a historian of the subject remarks, “Mirrors are meaningless unless someone looks into them. Thus, a history of the mirror is really the history of looking, and what we perceive in these magical surfaces can tell us a great deal about ourselves – whence we have come, what we imagine, how we think, and what we yearn for. The mirror appears throughout the human drama as a means of self-knowledge or self-delusion. We have used the reflective surface both to reveal and to hide reality”. These words might as well apply to O’Neal. A veritable mirror-meister, he refreshes a trope almost as old and as laden with fertile contradictions as humankind itself, not least because mirroring involves the human body and its neurological system.

To be sure, O’Neal ensures that his technical bag of tricks is up-to-the-minute. Early on, in the mid-1990s, he employed electronic “pouncers” – modern devices descended from the Renaissance method to translate drawings to much larger surfaces such as murals. Typically, though, O’Neal connected a wire to his toe that placed him within the electric current between the stiletto and the steel easel. Whenever the pouncer’s stiletto made a mark he got a shock. This was only one among the instances when O’Neal initiated an ongoing paradigm. Namely, setups where the self interacts with technology and/or the forces underlying far broader natural energies, especially electricity. From then until now, virtual ghosts or comparable simulacra inhabit O’Neal’s proverbial machines. (In a 1967 book about philosophical psychology, The Ghost in the Machine, novelist Arthur Koestler coined the titular phrase to describe and unify the material agency of the mind in the body). Mind and matter remain the two axes of O’Neal’s theory and practice as he melds space and the psyche. Quite often, electricity is the literal and metaphorical conductor joining the two. Remember. electricity coursing through the neural circuitry is the first thing to stop when we die.

The mirrored paintings at the crux of this show present a painterly cornucopia. Excess is the name of the game. How? The answer lies in not just the sheer exuberance of O’Neal’s mark-making, but also in its immersive potential. Lens allow vision to come into and out of focus. Hence they presuppose a human subject that incorporates transition and, ergo, temporality. However, it is precisely the latter that has become “ephemeralized” – a favorite term in O’Neal’s vocabulary – in our age prone to virtual vibes and the metaverse. Accordingly, the artist theorizes his strategies with an impressive roster of philosophers, scientists, and their ilk, ranging from Jean Baudrillard to Jacques Derrida and Rizwan Virk. (In this respect, his 2016 M.A. thesis is something of a conceptual tour-de-force). All, albeit from disparate standpoints, postulate the evanescence of a narcissistic subjectivity into nothing less than cyberspace’s immaterial aether – as it were, a universal solvent. Upholding this premise, O’Neal delves post-modernism’s warped spaces and startling temporalities. No wonder Virk’s The Simulation Hypothesis counts among his favorite books. Its two epigraphs encapsulate the author’s thesis. Firstly in Albert Einstein’s words, “Reality is merely an illusion”. Secondly, Buddha:

“Know that all phenomena

Are like reflections appearing

In a very clear mirror;

Devoid of inherent existence.”

In a nutshell, the foregoing could be O’Neal’s credo, albeit updated for the twenty-first century’s technological know-how and gizmos. Surely Pollock would have approved, given his remark in the same note:

“Technic is the result of a need—

new needs demand new technics—”

O’Neal’s dynamic is nothing if not about “making it new” (to recall the poet Ezra Pound’s slogan) so that – as this show’s title has it – whatever he does is “about now” and, to cite another painting’s title, “optimizing the moment”. The equation with Pollock can go further. For example, Pollock had incorporated heterodox materials into his pigment skeins, including nails, string, a key and sand. O’Neal goes one step further, adding flies, bees, snake skin, goat fur, a butterfly, leaves and, in Fetch, peacock feathers. “Organic intensity” indeed. Furthermore, this heterotopia – to borrow a notion from the French post-structuralist philosopher Michel Foucault – plays upon memory, even melancholia. To quote O’Neal, “I have a fantasy of mixing peoples’ ashes, the ashes of a loved one in the clear pigment and doing the person’s portrait so all can see themselves within the rendering of the person.” In a similar vein, he explains that “of course all of the elements that are mixed in the paint are just for remembrance of a fading natural/physical world. They float amongst the reflections.” If one world fades, another brightens. To wit, our finale: O’Neal’s recent output. In my reckoning it often trumps or crowns his earlier work. Let us consider this heterotopia.

Fragments or ruins populate the mirror paintings. Before them, during the 1990s the motifs were sometimes near-identifiable: an eye, a clock or watch face (nota bene the coupling of human identity, the “face”, with supra-human time), chimeras, light bulbs, a shoe – shades of the late Philip Guston. Now, metamorphosis is everything. Like water that eddies, quivers, reflects and engulfs, the fields flow with the pulsing flux of consciousness, whether human or morphed into simulacra.

The “sea” is self-explanatory in its fluidity. As for the “dolphin”, it reflects Yeats’s studies in Neo-Platonism, according to which the aquatic mammal was thought to accompany the souls of the dead into the after-life. I am tempted to also suggest that the “gong” unknowingly anticipates O’Neal’s synesthetic involvement with cymatics, the study of sound and vibration made visible (as in the radiating circular geometries that inform 7lbs of Light in a 5lb Render.) From sound waves to light waves is but a short step. Whatever, intriguingly, not only do Yeats’ sentiments chime with O’Neal’s aforementioned allusions to transience or mortality, they also connect the poet with the artist by an alternative route.

In a nutshell, this show is an “introspective”. Notwithstanding its spectacular array, the core impulse still looks within rather than merely backward. Aptly, O’Neal has on occasions used EEG headgear to transform his electrical brain activity into traces. Interiority rendered optical. In any event, Yeats knew Gnostic philosophy, which has much in common with Neo-Platonism. “Gnosis” denotes inner knowledge. Doubtless, O’Neal prizes this quality. As he explained about the passing insect that serendipitously intersected with his graphic delineation of brain waves during an earlier project: “So, in essence, my moth-in-the-brain-waves breakthrough – to look inside for a suggested transcendental center [my italics] – came… like a rock through a sacred rosary.” The mirrored paintings may play tricks with the eyes and, consequently, the mind. However, they never come across as tricksy. Instead, they amount to a theater of the mind, a latter-day reinvention of the Renaissance’s theatrum mundi or “theater of the world”. That omniscient perspective sees little and large, past, present and future, from an encompassing perspective. William Shakespeare voiced it in a passage too well-known to need quoting when he wrote that “All the world’s a stage…” O’Neal has transformed this ancient stage into a contemporary memory theater. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, he transports the viewer through the looking glass: “Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow… Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, its turning into a sort of mist now, I declare!.... And certainly, the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright, silvery mist”. Subtract the child’s play-acting from this fantastical realm, make it visual and you have… O’Neal’s vivid, if fleeting, mindscapes. Their marks-cum-lenses twist, turn, intertwine, disperse, wane cloudy, or wax transparent, reflect our presence and dissolve their own. Always they dance to the music of time, appearing to our vision and imaginations as through a glass, brightly.

© Art Ex Ltd 2022