John Finneran, “Seated Figure,” 2009-2015. Plaster, brass, oil and wax. All images courtesy of Hannah Hoffman Gallery.
“Sleeping less than seven hours per night on a regular basis is associated with adverse health outcomes, including weight gain and obesity, diabetes . . .” I saw this text printed on the screen of another writer’s computer at this café where I was sitting, looking at his screen instead of my own while thinking about John Finneran’s show at Hannah Hoffman Gallery, which is called Dreamers at the Gates of Where Dreamers Are. I wondered if, based on his artwork, John Finneran was the soundest of sleepers. I made this judgment to myself, silently, basing it entirely on the dream-like state of his artwork. At this spacious gallery, the artist’s paintings and one brass-and-plaster sculpture offer something of a Picasso-meets-Brancusi, harkening back to a retro Modernist style of painting, which is a nice break from the often times hyper-conceptual or mostly theory-driven yet visually dull artwork that is so common these days, which it would be great to just attribute to artists not getting enough sleep at night.
To sleep is to dream. This summer I saw a show called Psyche, Symbol, and Trauma: The Art of Lilli Gettinger (1920-1999) at the Center for Modern Psychoanalytic Studies in New York City. The lucid paintings were often times described as “psychological self portraits,” a nod to the idea that the selfie or self-portrait could be about one’s psyche and state-of-being rather than an image that needs to include the face or the body at all. Gettinger escaped the Holocaust, leaving Germany in 1938 and making it to U.S. soil by 1941. She created not paintings but something she invented — sculptural medium, a combination of paper mâché and resin — which in turn offered a three-dimensionality to scenes that were often times harrowing: families and animals gathered together on the deck of a ship as in Ship of Fools (1969), and other renderings of dream states, a journey into the unconscious.
This show made me recall a recurring dream that I had about an actress I loved as a teenager, a dream in which she smashed the TV screen while the movie I knew her from played over and over again. She watched the screen crack and fall while she cried, for she knew that the illusion she had of herself was over, that this dream had ended. It was not a dream I wanted to keep having but we don’t have control over that part of our psyche, or at least a Jungian analyst would have us believe as much.
If one is interested in dream-like states such as those mentioned above, go to Finneran’s show. It is a gentle guide through the realms of the subconscious. Seated Figure (2009-2015) apparently took six years to complete, and it’s important to appreciate that slowness, a passage of time that may mean nothing more than the fact that it takes a while to make good work. The figure is composed of pink legs and the bottom half of a torso, planted on top of a blue bed, like a blanket, like a half-formed form that lost its upper half, rather than losing his legs. The two pieces Weary Spirits (2015) and Spirits in the Cold Night (2015) both contain three female forms, slotted together and layered on top of their own silhouettes, resting comfortably somewhere between floating and drifting. These three appear again in Jetty (2015) along with a yellow ball that could be the sun, or just a circle of yellow. The distant human forms lead me to think about the ethereal, electric female bodies present in Arrington de Dionysio’s beautiful drawings. There’s far less spark to the images present in Finneran’s show, but at least they guarantee sleep.
John Finneran, “Dream of the Spirits with Mountains” (2015). Oil on linen
John Finneran’s paintings are dreamy, bringing viewers to what feels like a state of REM sleep when dreams can truly occur. It is a pleasant journey that offers no guarantees to return, but no real reason to leave. There is no message or concept to indulge in, to consume, to learn from or towards; there is only this sleep which may be a bit boring but, at the very least, undeniably necessary for proper day-to-day functioning.
