Jake Aikman

Wildness, wild places and wild energies in Jake Aikman’s paintings
By Sean O’Toole

 The centrepiece of Jake Aikman’s exhibition at Arte Fiera Bologna is a newly painted diptych titled Janus (Atlantic), 2018, in which each panel depicts a generically identified mass of rippled water and is a mirror image of the other. The scene is rendered in a realist style using a reduced palette dominated by varying tones of blue, grey and green. Aikman’s realism is judicious, not maniacal. His seascapes share with French realist painter Gustave Courbet a loose fidelity to the coastal landscapes that inspired them – they are in other words translations, images “based on, but not subordinated to, objective observation of nature,” to quote art historian Linda Nochlin. Unlike Courbet, however, Aikman habitually shuns the solidity of a shoreline prospect, that quintessential terrestrial vantage of modernist maritime paintings, favouring instead an oblique view that fully immerses the viewer in water and wet.

Close-ups can be disorientating. Compositionally, Aikman’s marine study shares kinship with Latvian-American artist Vija Celmins’s photorealist graphite work, Untitled (Ocean), 1970, notably in the way he eliminates surplus and focuses on precisely rendering a salty water mass without invoking a horizon point. On one level, Janus (Atlantic) can be read as a formal exercise in colour and pattern; context and place are, it would seem, of secondary significance. And yet this work is irreducibly linked to place. Janus (Atlantic) traces its origins back to a 2014 painting residency at Centro Di Sarro, a cultural foundation in the small town of Trevignano Romano on the north shore of Lake Bracciano. Aikman’s stay at this large freshwater reservoir northwest of Rome was, in many respects, felicitous.

He met locals and had rich conversations about their environment. He successfully proposed marriage to his long-term partner. Importantly, he also made new paintings. His residency was bookended by a solo exhibition in Rome, Confini Velati (or ‘Veiled Boundaries’), which gathered a selection of his quietly precise and unpeopled studies of wild places. Painter Julia Teale, Aikman’s teacher when he was an undergraduate student at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town, described his new paintings of hazy littorals and bare oceanic expanses as “silently overwhelming and alarming” in their “quiescence”. Their austere elegance remains entrancing, humbling too in their evocation of the wild places Aikman is drawn to portraying.

The artist’s 2014 visit to Italy remains an important touchstone for his current working concerns, particularly in relation to his Janus series of diptychs. Painted in 2017, Janus (Lago di Bracciano) is a precursor to Janus (Atlantic); the mirrored diptych figures Lake Bracciano, at least parenthetically, in its bracketed title. The series title, Janus, invokes the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and transitions. Aikman recognised in this deity of past and future time a duality that, looking back, enabled him to think more expansively about his time at Lake Bracciano, in particular the distress that followed when his engagement unexpectedly ended.

Despite the break-up curdling fond memory of an Italian summer, the period around his 2014 residency was a formative period professionally. After nearly a decade of constantly working at his maritime paintings, in 2013 Aikman made a breakthrough with a series of works portraying densely thicketed coastal shorelines and volcanic clouds. The scenes were observed during a surfing trip to Nicaragua and El Salvador, some rendered from photographs, others from memory. Gathered on his 2013 exhibition At the Quiet Limit, the work heralded a maturing vision.

The human figure, long a point of strength for Aikman, but also a source of narrative distraction and identitarian complexities, slipped from view in his new paintings of Central America. As significant was his tonal austerity, Aikman’s colour palette now limited to French ultramarine, burnt sienna, sap green and very occasionally Prussian blue. His brushwork had also evolved. The wavy horizontal lines of blue used to render the sea in early serial paintings like Set Adrift I & II, both completed in 2007, yielded to a more delicate, gauzy technique. By 2013 his paintings evidenced a deeper interest in figuring sensate experiences, of light and haze and the insubstantiality of vision.

Aikman was beginning to explore a more abstracted way of representing the sea, one less indebted to the verity of photographs, or for that matter human presences and man-made things. It is a vision in which colour not only signified the sea and land but also became the framework and form of the things he was describing. “I lost almost all references to trees,” he told me. “They were just green, misty, dense forest images. I think that is when I told myself that it is okay to let go of the figure, to let go of references and just convey the feel or atmosphere of a scene. In those abstracted works I found a way to move past painting waves and ripples, but still convey the same feeling.”

Aikman has continued to explore ways of reducing and decomposing the familiar into painted images. Constant winnowing and refinement has led Aikman to jettison the ornamental and superfluous. His Arte Fiera Bologna exhibition includes canvases featuring thick, horizontal bands of colour. These works [TITLE] privilege tone and line; instinctual reasoning is all; gone is the precision of the hand labouring to reproduce a photograph. Aikman, however, remains a phlegmatic painter rather than ecstatic recorder of experience. Janus (Atlantic) with its sublimated meanings and cryptic references to past experiences is also genre study of a minute fraction of an immense ocean.

Large masses of water have been the source of rich impression for artists. They are savagely bountiful spaces. But human fascination with the sea is not reducible to a single cause, although British writer Robert MacFarlane, writing in The Wild Places, 2007, hints at a credible version of unified theory when he describes wildness, which the oceans and large water masses unavoidably are, “as process, something continually at work in the world, something tumultuous … joyous”. This joy – like the flighty theory I am improvising – is provisional, at best contingent. Writing in his 1915 epic poem, Maritime Ode, modernist Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa describes the sea as a place that encompasses “crimes, horrors, ships, people, sea, sky, clouds, winds, latitude and longitude, outcries –.”

The sea is a plurality. As a terrain of human encounter, the sea is near and distant, knowable in its immediacy yet also receding, an infinite horizon, an “abstract distance” as Pessoa put it. Maritime museums and bric-a-brac shops are filled with hoary paintings that reduce this abstract distance to a layer-cake confection of land, sea and sky. Although prompted to start painting maritime scenes after he posed his father for a photograph in a tidal pool on the False Bay coastline for an undergraduate painting project, by the time of his 2009 exhibition Echoes Aikman had forsaken the shoreline as a reliable vantage on the sea.

Aikman’s interest in maritime painting was prompted, in part, by an encounter with seeing Peter Doig’s Canoe-Lake, 1997, on the Triumph of Painting 1, 2005, at Saatchi Gallery, London. “I was blown away.” His postgraduate studies at Michaelis (2007-08) enabled him to revisit this awe. His studies focussed on ideas of repetition, appropriation and copying as potential levers for energising his photorealist technique. His archive from this period is replete with serial images, notably of young men in life rafts, as well as works that record the breakdown of copying and doubling in painting.

His 2009 exhibition Echoes included a quivering seascape titled Sea-Sea after Richter, 2007; the purposefully incomplete work was copy of Gerhard Richter’s Seascape (Sea-Sea), 1970. In a further rehearsal of his conceptual interests at the time, Aikman also reworked Richter’s seascape to include Peter Doig’s Island Painting, 2000-01. Aikman’s work Canoe Sea (Doig vs Richter) is cute in an over-anxious sort of way, when influence and awe prompts “self-saving caricature of distortion” and “perverse, wilful revisionism,” to quote Harold Bloom. Aikman has long since worked through his anxiety of influence.

He has also moved on in other ways. In a 2004 interview, photographer Allan Sekula described the sea as “absolutely a space of contemporaneity”. Rather than being an unadulterated, primordial space, a place devoid of cargo ships and tons of plastic waste, Sekula regarded the sea as lived in space, a mapped world of transnational trade and military economies, in effect a social geography. Aikman’s oeuvre includes studies of military submarines (for example, Where I End and You Begin, 2008) and beached ships ready for shipbreaking in places such as Chittagong, Bangladesh. But his mature work eschews presenting the sea as a trafficked space of wilful plunder and careless ruin. Instead, and by slow increments, he has allowed the mythic to triumph.

Aikman is well aware of the sea’s literal complexity and metaphorical plenitude. A keen surfer since his teens, Aikman frequently speaks about the sea’s “atavistic” qualities when relating his concerns as a painter. “The sea always seemed to be like a veil, concealing everything underneath. This is particularly the feeling you get if you are sitting on it bobbing – you can’t see what it is below it.” Aikman’s paintings aim to convey his sense of vulnerability and awe in the face of the sea’s overwhelming scale and delicate mystery. “The sea reminds us that we are not in control of the forces of nature, and linked to that reminder are the trials and tribulations of the individual’s (viewer) life.”

Aikman’s implication of the viewer here is important. His ambitions as a painter are principally focussed on evoking visceral psychological responses in his viewers. “My goal is to get under the skin or behind the veil of the purely visual experience of the image. Ultimately, my wish is for the viewer to engage with what lies beneath the surface within themselves.” Aikman’s stay at Lake Bracciano reinforced his sense of humankind’s primal sensibilities and psychological responses towards wild places, especially those adjacent large bodies of water. “The lake’s weather can change drastically, and it can, in turn, change the mood of the people,” Aikman recalled after his visit. “The locals often spoke to me about how that body of water affected their emotions.”

Aikman’s interest in evoking strong emotional responses to his work locates him in a woke romantic tradition that is too easily dismissed as “namby-pamby” – Byron’s response to Wordsworth’s ecstatic poetry of wild places. His affective paintings restate the irrepressible nature of the sublime. If that is too bold a claim, better to say they aspire to acknowledge the existence of wildness, wild places and wild energies on a planet increasingly being refashioned to be manmade. 

Sean O’Toole is a writer and editor living in Cape Town