Paintings often don’t take you where the artist intends. The domestic interiors of Philip Geiger take me to Olean, New York, a small city tucked into the westernmost corner of the state. They take me to a house I knew as a child. The destination of family road trips. A house luxuriant with space and light, with less than what you would expect as a minimum of furniture and decoration, with nothing on the walls but light coming all ninety three million miles through open winows to put on its brakes on pale painted surfaces. A generous roofed porch wrapped halfway around, everything was big, generous, muscular, big-beamed, and free.
Me and my brother Bobby met Larry, Craig and Shelly, even smaller than us, and each of us kids enveloped by sunlight and space. No coziness, only freedom. Parents hardly remembered, hardly seen, hardly around, except for sitting at a big solid table with whatever big unceremonious meal was about to happen, us in bathing suits mostly, it being summer, everything big, bright and simple. Space enough to run or twist all through the house without collisions.
Space and light were so dominant as to obstruct time. As though time had never been invited into the house. Houses outside were equally big, equally timeless. The parents were friends of the parents, from the war, American men both, with war brides both, one a blonde force of nature, like sunshine itself, the other inward, moody, but for a bright passing smile. Shelly did cartwheels in what would have been a living room had it a carpet or couch.
Geiger’s paintings take me back there, the kids in the paintings are so much like the kids I remember in Olean. Taking up so little space in a careless space, the indoor architecture is something like the wild, both in his paintings and in that house in which locks and closed windows were unthinkable. The family meets like drifters on the plains.
Vermeer, Sargent, Velasquez, Koch, Morandi, Bonnard; I could argue for each of them. Domestic interactions, sometimes disagreements or confidences that often do not include children. A shaking free of edges.
Is it expressionist, the subtle deliberate drag of a brush that contradicts the finicky fussy containments that stifle so many contemporary realist or representational paintings submerging the subjectivity of figures within objectivities of line, edge and anatomy, where their neglected expressions and souls give way to ego and easy-to-follow execution. These figures, Phil Geiger’s figures, have voices as well as limbs, faces and torsos. They have will, and there is often a good-hearted contest of wills at work in the paintings. Isolation is overcome or eliminated. There is wistfulness but not permanent melancholy. No one in these paintings will forever be alone.
A household interior of thresholds, hallways and intersecting rooms, large spaces high on light, that has become a theater of relationships. Families and extended families, as brother and sister visit, or friends. It is the supremacy of the young family, the family in the finding itself in the full of life, in the course of the robust current of well-being, that, unlike the novel, the painting ( and the painting’s narrative) does just fine without trouble or stress, here there is not added sweetness, no proclamation, the goodness and warmth and life is not self-conscious, and clearly, we are moving through life. Time, finally appearing, is admittedly fleeting, in its flight captured, its instants cannot be comprehended and structured, they are fragmentary moments only, not narratives with beginnings and ends, and the commitment to life includes. These paintings are not about analysis but experience, the experience of life, evidence of the wisdom of the song that sings “how little it matters how little we know.” The impossibility of comprehensive knowledge is not only forgiven, it is a liberating pleasure, as in its forgiveness we are free to be alive in whatever arriving and vanishing present the painter awards us.
Every trace of life is holographic, the all is in everything, every chuckle, glance and gesture, every choice, never chaos but flow, never digital but analog, The sympathetic look of the artist is included: it is a starker version, more American in its culturally sparse setting, but fresh, forever new, and as deeply true as any other embodiment of the joy of life in art.
