A Note on The Stations of
the Cross by Gregory Botts
Carter Ratcliff
In 2011, Gregory Botts completed a group of fourteen paintings. Medium-size
and rendered in tones of black, white, and gray, these canvases can be seen as
abstractions — and dazzling despite their somber palette. Diagonals inflect right
angles, right angles modulate curves, curves enter into complex negotiations
with one another. We could stop here, with a contemplation of the power — and
the subtlety — of these forms considered purely as forms. This would be a bit
disingenuous, however, for Botts fills his paintings with recognizable things. There
are hieroglyphic indications of reeds and trees, intimations of mountains and cloudfilled
skies, and forms we decipher as parts of the human body: legs, a head covered
with a wide-brimmed hat, an entire torso. These fourteen paintings show a person
traversing a landscape.
I pointed to their strength as abstractions not only because this strength is formidable
but also because it is crucial to the artist’s purpose. Without their formal brilliance,
these paintings would have no hope of standing up under the pressures brought to
bear by interpretation. Entitling them Stations of the Cross, Botts challenges us to
understand them in three intertwined ways: as purely pictorial, as subtly referential,
and — the most demanding — as transcendently spiritual. Traversing a border region
between the abstract and the figurative, Botts’s Stations grapple with a theme
that has been central to the Western tradition since the late Middles Ages — the Via
Dolorosa or Way of Sorrows that brought Jesus to crucifixion and death. The somber
palette of Botts’s series deliberately recalls the Stations of the Cross that Barnett
Newman painted in 1958-66, using only black and white and the color of unprimed
canvas. For Newman and his generation, which included Jackson Pollock and Mark
Rothko, abstraction was something like a moral imperative. They dispensed with
narrative, as well. Newman said that the fourteen canvases comprising his Stations
did not represent a progression, as in traditional renderings, which begin with Jesus
condemned to death and end with him laid in the tomb. Rather, Newman intended
each canvas to evoke, in its own register, the moment when Jesus cried out, “Lema
Sabachthani?” “Oh, Lord, why have you forsaken me?”
In 1950, Henri Matisse painted a version of the Stations in a chapel in Vence, a
small town in the south of France. Though the fourteen stages of the Via Dolorosa
can be distinguished — in fact, they are numbered — Matisse clustered his images on
a large wall, producing a composition that encourages us to see it in full in a single
moment. Like Newman, Matisse worked against narrative. Their disinclination to
tell stories is nearly all these two artists have in common, yet it forms a strong bond.
For all their differences, Matisse and Newman shared the modernist tradition, which
emerged, in part, from a rejection of storytelling. A proper modernist painting inhabits
an absolute now, a moment of time outside of time.
Impatient with proprieties, Botts does not want to exclude anything from
painting — not the figure, not landscape, and certainly not narrative or the poetry
that gives us our most enduring stories, legends, and myths. In a statement
accompanying his Stations, Botts quotes a line from Walt Whitman’s “Song of
Myself”: “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.” Newman, too, invokes this man,
the one who asks God why, having created me, have you abandoned me to this
suffering? His Stations of the Cross are a tragic lament. Botts’s Stations invite
us to feel in concert with the individual struggling to traverse a landscape that is
formless, perhaps annihilating, until it is shaped by those very struggles. Though
Botts does not deny suffering, the mode of his art is less tragic than heroic. He
imagines Whitman’s man as “Achilles, Odysseus, maybe Aeneas, or Christ.” Or as
Whitman himself, the archetypal American pilgrim, whose pilgrimage is a life-long
act of creation.
An act that begins, for a painter, with a mark on a blank surface — a gesture in
a void — and continues until the successive marks, in their variety, arrive at
coherence. Intelligibility. Meaning. And yet, no matter how convincing any one
painting may be, its meaning is partial. There is more to be said or, better, more
to be done, and so the artist continues through the landscape of possibility, as
in Botts’s Station of the Cross.
In his first Station, a bar of dark blue runs along the left-hand edge of the canvas.
This blue geometry — the series’ only departure from the range of black, white,
and gray — reappears in some but not all of the other Stations. Its shape and
position changes, and then, in the last painting, this abstract shape settles along
the right-hand edge, as if it, too, has completed a pilgrimage. Reading a heroic
motive into this migrating shape, we achieve a full sense of these artworks, their
power to integrate form, image, and epic theme. Moreover, we arrive at a sense
our own imaginative powers. We share in the artist’s sense of transcendent
possibility. We become, if only temporarily, incarnations of his heroic protagonist.
