Perfectly Ordinary

David Anfam

At a certain stage in Western art painters began to realise that nothing can be more extraordinary than the ordinary. Crudely stated, this perception matched a burgeoning secularisation of human thought and culture. A poet who wrote such tellingly titled pieces as 'A Holiday in Reality' and 'An Ordinary Evening in New Haven' succinctly described the transformation: 'In an age of disbelief, when the gods have come to an end, when we think of them as the aesthetic projections of a time that has passed, men turn to a fundamental glory of their own and from that create a style of bearing themselves in reality.' To echo Wallace Stevens's words, from Vermeer and Chardin to Magritte, Hopper and Morandi, painting has affirmed that, after the passing of the great sacred images of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was eminently capable of finding almost supernatural beauty, mystery or aura in everyday life and things.

Closer to the present, the modernist epoch was likewise full of commonplace epiphanies, often condensed into the most quotidian objects: think of Monet's wheat stacks, Proust's madeleine or Charles Foster Kane's 'Rosebud'. Yet just as art might re-enchant reality, latterly it could also foreground ordinariness and its capacity for estrangement–witness, say, instances as disparate as the films of Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard, Harold Pinter's plays, Warhol's soup cans and the Beatles' 'Penny Lane', its lyrics stressing the 'very strange' in the English street. Enter Humphrey Ocean.

Of course, Ocean enters here not merely for having played in a pop band in the early 1970s (about which, more later), but because his art delves the singularity of the utterly, drably familiar. 'One of the biggest differences between myself and the Old Masters,' remarks Ocean, 'is that my life has been seen through a windscreen.' In other words, Alberti's venerable notion of the picture as a window has ceded to a viewpoint behind a steering wheel. A means for the individual to navigate their surroundings more easily than ever, automobiles also separate us from external reality with even greater decisiveness. Whether it is the opening scene of Fellini's 81/2 equating a character's nervous breakdown with a traffic jam or Los Angeles's notorious autopia, the car has become par excellence the modern site of estrangement. Perhaps only television or cyberspace rival its power to both engage and distance. Turning to an iMac in his studio,

Ocean selects a jpeg. It is a dim, blurry photograph of little except sea and sky through a rain swept windscreen. His paintings and works on paper possess a similar ambiguity, sidling between the quickly recognizable and obscurity, precision and murk. Ocean's recent suite of twelve etchings is a microcosm of his pictorial mise- en-scène. Some bear highly legible motifs, such as Mobil's Pegasus logo (which is nevertheless twice removed from reality, an imaginary creature and an artificial 2sign); equally clear-cut, a dog and a comb wax cryptic due to their neat isolation; still others prove at once concrete and abstract because they depict words; and a few almost defy decipherment, only eventually materialising as a manhole cover gleaming in sunlight, a tiny paint pot, a house number plaque and perhaps an evocation of New York's Plaza Hotel. Together, these etchings resemble the clues in some detective story. Ocean loves Raymond Chandler's novels.

In the same breath, the way the etchings magick verisimilitude from ultra- economical black strokes recalls another painter, Philip Guston, who compared art's dexterity to a crime's wiles. Like Guston's small panels of 1968-70 (his so-called 'new alphabet') in which a rudimentary rectangle morphs into a book, a window frame, a car and so forth, Ocean's From This We Can Tell etchings explore the slipperiness of signification, the arbitrariness (as a century of semiotics attests) with which words and marks come to denote things. Scant wonder the artist explains his title 'is what an archaeologist often says when emerging from a dig, holding something not yet quite intelligible.' Enisled in luminous white paper, Ocean's minuscule ideograms cluster tantalising nuggets of darkness.

Archaeologists and detectives share the ambition to bring what is dark to light. To dispel any doubt about this wisdom, we may summon Edgar Allan Poe's prototypical detective, C. Auguste Dupin. In Poe's short story The Purloined Letter, Dupin utters the memorable line, 'If there is any point requiring reflection, we shall examine it to better purpose in the dark.'

Ocean's chairs expand this play of light and dark. Their fixity, patterning and repetitions sound a certain obsessive note, reminiscent of how in moments of heightened awareness – boredom, anger, anxiety – we sometimes fasten upon trivial details around us. Aptly enough, Ocean first noticed his motif while sitting in a Scunthorpe hospital awaiting news about a friend there. Superficially as bland as a homespun readymade or furniture from a Patrick Caulfield interior, these chairs hint at the ambivalent familiarity in which Freud famously discerned its opposite, the uncanny. If Matisse had dreamt of an art that would be 'something like a good armchair,' it was Chandler's Philip Marlowe (in The Little Sister) who once found himself 'talking to the office equipment, the three green filing cases, the threadbare piece of carpet, chairs across from me....' Ocean takes this lonely dialogue an optical step further. How serendipitous that the Chicago-born Chandler studied
at Dulwich College, a short distance from the artist's studio!

Still, Ocean's south-east London habitat lends his voice a Martin Parr-like native whimsy, which warns against getting too solemn or portentous. 'The quirks and behaviours of England,' adds Ocean, 'are my natural territory'. The human fauna peopling his portraits seem congruent with the dun flora of his outdoor settings. Brake lights fitfully flare through the latter; a red skirt, orange drainpipe jeans and emerald-edged trainers enliven the former. Maybe L.S. Lowry's quirky people lurk somewhere in the geneology of these relatively upbeat sitters. However, Ocean replaces Lowry's tight, angst-laden calligraphy with a romance with his medium's fluidity. The portraits offer modest marvels of lambent brushwork becoming likenesses.

By turns pensive and wry, trendy and sloppy, Ocean's sitters indelibly signal a period and a place, the cool Britannia of early twenty-first century England. So does his participation in the pop group Kilburn and the Highroads – London of the swinging sixties and seventies. To savour this milieu to the full, it helped if you were an artist or a foreigner (or both).

Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) foretold Ocean's atmospherics. Its Carnaby Street hippies were the precursors of his bohemian posers. Crucially, it took an Italian to notice the disquiet at the heart of a perfectly ordinary south-east London neighbourhood. In a park in Charlton, Antonioni captured the stimmung of London's northern light casting a penumbral silence over foliage and buildings. Ocean's roads, houses and fences project a comparable mood. This is the elusiveness epitomising the everyday, a phenomenon present everywhere while nonetheless invisible. For who can see 'the everyday'? The French philosopher Maurice Blanchot knew its truth: 'Whatever its other aspects, the everyday has this essential trait: it allows no hold. It escapes.... Nothing happens; this is the everyday.... Boredom is the everyday become manifest.' Ocean paints it. His compositions walk a pictorial tightrope, as if abstraction might covertly flow from sustained observation, the facades and trees modulating in a trice to loose pigment washes and precise architectonic planes (the artist, who particularly admires Josef Albers, reached maturity when abstract expressionism and color-field painting enjoyed their heyday in Britain). The paint retreats from the canvases' peripheries, suggesting the glimpse might go at the blink of an eyelid or a windscreen wiper's swish. Some event or action feels hidden in plain sight. Akin to the enigmatic detail in the park bushes around which Blow-Up pivoted, Ocean sets car lights, a road sign and a barely readable plant near the centres of the compositions. Mostly the rest is silence, blankness and slow time. One of Ocean's earlier sitters, Philip Larkin, had found this hypnotic, lifeless ennui on his own suburban English doorstep:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.