The painting of Monica Dixon: liminal spaces of reflection and research.
Andrea García Casal – Contemporary Art Platform  Magazine – May 2024

“The house is, even more than the landscape, a state of the soul. Even reproduced in its external appearance, it talks about intimacy''.
Gaston Bachelard. The poetics of space. 1957.

Within the broad and concrete analysis made by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard on space, the house and intimacy, it is positive to choose a synthetic but precise sentence from his work The Poetics of Space as the one that heads this critical text. There is no doubt that the concept of house is inherently associated with intimacy, whether one's own or that of others. Hence Bachelard also links the notion of house with a state of the soul, of the deepest part of the being, of the private sphere in which we are formed. It is a primordial space that we inhabit, in one way or another, throughout our lives.

In Monica Dixon’s work (New Jersey, 1971), the presence of the house is very frequent. Both in landscape and genre painting -also called intimist, in a nod to the term intimacy that is so important here-, the home is always present. It is worth adding, as it is not trivial, that the theorist Luis Puelles Romero points out the following: ''intimate is not intimist. The intimate alludes to a mode of stylistic characterization: the one we refer to when we qualify as "intimate" the painting of Bonnard, Vuillard or Matisse. While the intimate can perhaps be formulated as an aesthetic category, the intimate is a stylistic category. [...] The intimate may be understood as a morphology of the intimate: very often, the intimate will appear through the intimate'' (''Interiors of the Soul. The intimate as an aesthetic category'', in Thémata, Luis Puelles Romero, 1999). Therefore, when Dixon works, she does it from intimacy as a stylistic category through which she manifests -one face- of her intimate world.

When she cultivates the landscape, the house is the main protagonist. In this case, the painter often focuses on depicting backyards, always inspired by the large single-family homes characteristic of her homeland. Both memories and photographs serve our protagonist to create landscape compositions with usually isolated residences, located in simple panoramas; the deuteragonists are the sky and the ground. Life appears simplified, to such an extent that, at times, the paintings make us doubt if something is beating -metaphorically- in them or if everything is petrified. The space suggests being uninhabited by not showing people or animals swarming around; in fact, it is difficult to find a glimpse of life beyond the occasional presence of grass on the slopes. The houses may be occupied, but their residents never look out of the windows or walk near or away from the dwellings. These landscapes bear titles of authentic locations. However, the houses are invented by the artist. In fact, she even plays with the way they are represented, some being more realistic, others more geometric and synthetic, etc. A less usual branch of Dixon's painting is dedicated to recreate cosmic landscapes where houses float due to the -fictitious- absence of gravity. These stellar orchards are clearly reminiscent of oneirism. They are allegories of the planet Earth, the background being apparently inert because the stars have no manifest life -they are inorganic-. At the same time, they allude to a total solitude, to the immensity of the universe.

In any case, in Dixon's landscapes hermeticism is palpable, hence her plastic art transmits both tranquility and desolation, found in the mystery of the domestic architectures erected in almost infinite lands, fruit of her full imagination. In this regard, the concept of non-place is of great interest to our author, suggested by the anthropologist Marc Augé, which is well reflected in Dixon's painting. Augé stated that ''[i]f a place can be defined as a place of identity, relational and historical, a space that can be defined neither as a space of identity nor as relational nor as historical, will define a non-place. [...], a world thus promised to solitary individuality, to the provisional and the ephemeral, to the passage''.

It is interesting to analyze Dixon's non-places not as spaces of transit, characterized by their instability and transience, but rather as locations that, being invented by her, belong exclusively to her ''solitary individuality''; to her subjectivity, essence and self. To one side of her intimate world. Therefore, these private, conceptual-artistic places cannot be linked to real topos, but they are authentic spaces in Dixon's pictorial cosmos that can endure through technique and support; in the end, the works of art are tangible and attest to her abstract-intimate universe. Existence is ephemeral; these non-places live on in the artist, but are externalized by the creative process for the public to enjoy. An artistic non-place, enigmatic in nature.

On the other hand, her genre scenes, focused on interiors, also have an air of mystery and connect with the idea of non-place, since they do not correspond to authentic locations; they are private and imaginary. Some of them are fully figurative, with the usual elements being rooms consisting only of the walls and floor, in addition to the door that usually leads to a corridor. Undoubtedly, these scenes of empty rooms, although they are one more redoubt of the artist's intimacy, the truth is that they do not refer to anything that would give us clues about her life. Again, Dixon plays with a recondite painting; she assures us that these compositions subtly allude to an old apartment she once lived in, but it appears depersonalized, as she seeks to capture something more general for the viewer to observe. The public manages to integrate itself in unknown scenarios and carries out interpretations and reflections that are totally their own, never conditioned.

However, it is more accurate to link these works of empty rooms, reminiscent of the abandoned, with liminality. Liminal spaces are also places of transit; they are linked to Augé's non-places, but in Dixon's case, they are not ephemeral, but have lost their original function. The passage of time, the flourishing of overmodernity, has led them to stagnation and gradual oblivion. Undoubtedly, showing this kind of areas is something that attracts Dixon; it is her particular flood of ideas, opinions, feelings and emotions that manifests itself to us ambiguous and impenetrable. The empty houses inside inevitably provide a sense of confusion and even nostalgia. It is curious, but not unwise, to link this with the aesthetics of the picturesque and the cult of the ruins, for, although Dixon's spaces are not yet in this state, everything points to this being their future: ''It is said that the ragged figure of the beggar, with his dented hat and broken shoes, is picturesque [...]. For the same reasons there is a picturesque beauty of the ruins. The rigidity of the tectonic form has been broken, and as the walls crumble, as cracks and gaps form and bushes grow in them, a life emerges from the surface like a shudder, like a gleam. [...] An interior seems picturesque not when it is not the framework of roof and walls that attracts attention, but when darkness reigns in its corners and there is a multitude of furnishings in its nooks and crannies'' (Heinrich Wölfflin, Fundamental Concepts of Art History, 1915).

At the moment, the hidden and even somewhat disturbing thing about her interior paintings is precisely the absence of both architectural deterioration and the chaotic accumulation of useless objects, being in a pristine and seemingly everlasting state. However, her art requires the cleaning of artistic motifs, to reduce them to their minimum expression, because thanks to this she can study and express how light modulates space. This way of understanding her work shows how Dixon is interested in investigating such fundamental questions as the relationship between light and darkness in the plastic arts. Moreover, a more abstract aspect of her painting explores the relationship between architecture and the object with the purpose of experimenting with lighting and its modulation in the pictorial composition. The purification of forms derives in abstracting works, stripping away all the accessories. Suddenly, Bachelard's house, Puelles Romero's intimate and Augé's non-place disappear; the liminal spaces are also diluted and what remains is the purely intellectual reflection of the play of chiaroscuro; of formal research in pictorial art. The interiors fade away to become bodies -recreated in an illusory way- and geometric figures that interact with each other, showing us the changes of illumination and shadows.

https://www.plataformadeartecontemporaneo.com/pac/la-pintura-de-monica-dixon-espacios-liminales-de-reflexion-e-investigacion/