Dolores Greco Essay by Hugh Alcock

Walk into the room and Dolores Greco’s large abstract paintings are impossible to ignore. All paintings, of course, just sit there, inert objects frozen in time and silent. Beauty is perhaps the principal means for paintings advertise themselves. And Greco’s paintings are without doubt beautiful. In that sense they hang loud and proud.

Beauty, however, is a fragile almost chimerical quality. Often we are seduced by something seemingly beautiful only to find its grip quickly loosen. Its beauty turns out to be shallow – all shine and no substance. Substantive beauty reverberates. Still it is difficult to define the difference between shallow and substantive beauty. But the beauty of Greco’s paintings, I aver, is substantive. They sing.

Abstraction is both the easiest and the hardest genre to practise. It is easy enough to daub paint in a playful manner and end up with a pleasing result. But it is very difficult indeed to produce something that is more than merely an attractive surface – a display of painterly bravado – something instead that is deeper and more abiding. The fundamental difficulty with abstraction is that its content is not explicit since, of course, it is not representational. How to communicate something on the basis of marks and gestures alone? Abstract painting is always in danger of being empty, about nothing at all.

There was a moment in history when abstractionists embraced nothingness. Frank Stella, for instance, boasted that what you see when looking at his so-called black paintings is all there is – they are nothing other than sparely patterned flat colourless surfaces. But that was simply a strategic move by an avant-garde artist. Painters like Greco who choose abstraction do have something to say. But what Greco wants to say is nothing literal. Her approach rather is poetic.

Kiss the Rain, 2024

The poetic nature of her approach is evidenced, for instance, by the titles she gives to her works, e.g., ‘Kiss the Rain’ and ‘Against All Odds’. These, like titles of poems, indicate her intended mood or sentiment towards the painting in question. And for Greco these sentiments are not predetermined such that they guide her in the painting. Rather, as she puts it, the title of each piece ‘emerges’. As she works on a painting – an open-ended and intuitive process in itself – a sentiment coalesces. Curiously, she describes how the titles she ultimately chooses give each painting an historical context. What she means by this is crucial to understanding her work.

It is clear that for Greco history is personal – call it a ‘bottom-up conception of history’, meaning that she dwells on her own history and then places it in a larger historical context. We see this clearly happen, for instance, with her painting titled ‘It’s Never Black and White’. This work was inspired by her reminiscences about her father, who told her when she was a child how he had been sent to a Nazi work camp during WWII, as a young Italian. In this complex painting one can make out a chimney stack billowing smoke. That has sinister connotations given the Nazi death camps. The middle appears to depict the plan of some buildings, and at the bottom left one finds a bouquet of flowers. Here Greco is trying to make sense of her memories of a loving father juxtaposed with this dark and disturbing period in his life. The personal takes on a universal theme, as happens in all good art.

It’s Never Black and White, 2024

Now, having characterised her as an abstractionist, above I describe how her painting has representional elements to it. This is less self-contradictory when it is understood that very often representation creeps into abstraction. Think, for instance, of Willem’s de Kooning’s ‘abstact’ paintings that clearly feature figures, i.e., female nudes in particular. Likewise, one of Greco’s heroes, New York abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell, often saw her abstract paintings as landscapes à la Claude Monet – someone who had enormous influence on her work. Indeed, Mitchell eventually settled in France, close to Giverny where Monet painted many of his water-lily pond pictures in later life. At times his pond painting sit in that region which is neither wholly abstract nor primarily representational.

Painting for Greco is quintessentially ‘mark making’ as she puts it. It is this quality in Mitchell’s work that enthrals her. Marks are the application of paint on canvas in itself, as opposed to how these applications might be interpreted. And this primal love of the process of painting defines abstraction at its heart. Certainly for Greco the physical act of painting is reciprocal in the sense that the marks she makes communicate back to her, so that her thinking processes themselves extend to the surface of the canvas. Mitchell articulates this process as follows: “I paint a little, then sit and look at the painting, sometimes for hours. Eventually, the painting tells me what to do.”

Likewise, Greco sits on her chair in the middle of her studio facing the painting she is working on, and thus enters in conversation with it. This approach helps explain how the final painting can often be radically different from that at its initial stages, when she first puts down marks. These early marks are for her prompts, a way of starting the thinking process, and not marks aimed at expressing her preconceptions. The conceptions, thoughts, are not locked in her head, already worked out, and released by the painting process, rather her thinking inheres in this physical process. Painting in this sense is akin to dancing, as an essentially physical way of thinking. Too often we think of thinking as a mental inner process, whereas in fact it can be a very physical one.

One might suppose, however, that Greco must approach her paintings empty-headed. If, after all, her thinking process occurs out there on the canvas, then there seems little room for her to have ideas beforehand that she wants to express. Everything she expresses in paint is worked out in real time, that is, while she is painting. Here I think it is useful to compare her painting to composing music, to understand better her approach in this respect.

We are tempted to think that any painting has a specific interpretation. Apocryphally at least, the viewer asks: What does the painting mean? Here the viewer assumes that there is a correct interpretation of a painting, one that is intended by the artist. I have already mentioned that often Greco’s paintings are driven by a narrative or a mood, and this fact suggests that the viewer ought to see her paintings accordingly. This is inherently difficult to do in general with abstract paintings, though again, as noted, Greco’s abstractions do contain representational elements that assist in this regard. Consider another of her paintings titled ‘Against All Odds’. In this painting a broken dash of yellow spans the horizontal canvas three quarters of the way down. The lighter paint below it seems to read like stormy water, and above is reminiscent of a dark foreboding sky. And indeed the painting was inspired by her witnessing a frightening violent storm, with lightning flashing across the sky. It is this experience that she wished to relate to the viewer.

Against All Odds, 2020

But Greco was not interested in depicting the lightning storm in a topographically faithful manner. Rather, her intention was to relate to the viewer the feeling, the sense of the immense power of natural forces that she experienced. So again, it is sentiment that drives her to paint. Painting, as a wordless medium, is comparable to music in this way. A musical instrumental composition like Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, for instance, is necessarily abstract. All the same the first four notes of this famous composition are said to represent fate knocking on the door – a motif that appears at other points in it. Just as we do not imagine that a composer starts his composition empty-headed, we do not assume that an abstractionist like Greco does so. Like a composer, she uses her painting method to express her emotion. The wordless nature of the feelings she wants to express, however, require her to get physical, to pick up the brush and work things out.

Now, when I asked Greco about her palette, while looking over the tubes of paint she had ready at hand in her studio, she surprised me by saying that she simply uses the colours that happen to be around. Such improvisation, i.e., lack of planning, at first seemed to me problematic. How, I thought, can she control how her paintings will turn out if something as basic as the choice of colours is so accidental? Reflecting on it, however, I began to realise that her approach is wholly consistent with her working method. Let me explain.

One of the many challenges of abstraction is deciding when a painting is finished. Unless the artist has a precise conceptual approach that effectively determines how the painting should look in the end, she would seem to be at sea. She has no land to navigate towards, to continue the metaphor. A piece of music, by contrast, being episodic in nature has a definite length, at least to the extent that an audience is only going to listen to a piece of music for so long. No such circumscription exists for the abstract painter. It is open-ended, one might say. She could carry on indefinitely. Indeed, the abstractionist Howard Hodgkin, for instance, sometimes worked on his compositions for years. Still, he insisted, he knew when they were finished. Greco likewise knows when a painting is finished. But to the observer there is no obvious evolution towards an end, so how does she decide this? It is not a matter of exhaustion, since one painting she showed me – titled ‘Ten’ – she had only been working on for a while, on which there was bare canvas. Yet, she told me, it was finished.

Ten, 2024

Greco embraces the open-endedness of abstraction. The improvisory nature of her painting process tells us, not only that she is confident that she can pull the painting off, but also that she works intuitively. A painting is finished when it feels right. This reflects how its content is largely emotional. There is no overarching concept that drives a painting, or her work generally, that might delineate some endpoint. But there is an overarching narrative or mood that she strives for and which informs her determination that it is done.

The fact that she provides titles for her paintings is telling in this respect. As one critic discussing Hodgkin in particular notes: “His titles by themselves create a mood, and suggest an interpretation, perhaps more so than what the colors and markings themselves do.” (Richard Shiff, Artforum, January 1996) The same is true for Greco. It is a common strategy among abstractionists. A title hints at an intended narrative of the painting, thus encouraging the viewer to interpret it in some way. Think, for instance, of the titles of some of Robert Motherwell’s abstractions, e.g., ‘Elegy to the Spanish Civil War’ or ‘Mallarme’s Swan’. For that reason titles play an important role, as Greco puts it. It gives the viewer a hook, however tenuous, to help interpret a painting.

In sum, the formal choices she makes, indeed the marks she makes at each point, are informed by the narrative or mood she wants to capture. It is these choices that bring about the beauty evident in her works. A painting is beautiful in this sense when its formal qualities add up to something over and above the marks themselves. The marks are not made as ends in themselves, that is, as decoration. Rather the marks she makes transcend themselves. Beauty is a transcendent quality in this way. Thus, Greco’s paintings are beautiful in the substantive sense that they emgage us. They are both revealing and enigmatic. And while the titles she gives them suggest a narrative, that is often supported by subtle representational elements, something is held back, forcing the viewer to interpret them from a personal perspective. Art can do no better than this.