Let’s begin by clearing up one fact: Jeffrey Simmons’s
paintings are, in fact, paintings made by Jeffrey Simmons. This is
true in the most traditional possible sense. He uses paintbrushes, on
canvas. Laboriously, he layers acrylic paint on and sands it down.
That’s how they’re made.
It’s necessary to make this point because people endlessly mistake
these paintings for photographs. People also mistake them for images
powered by electric light, plugged in, lit from behind, illuminated by
some secret source besides paint. The people making these mistakes are
only getting halfway there. The paintings do look like
photographs in light boxes at first; it’s the fact that they’re
not that sends the mind spinning. In order to get the full
cognitive dissonance, you need the mistake and the fact, the illusion
and the truth.
Simmons is a Seattle artist whose name you ought to know; he has
been making interesting paintings since 1996. Right now he’s having his
fifth solo show at Greg Kucera Gallery, and it’s called
Nebulae, referring to the dust clouds that form stars and
planets. The word nebula, nicely, is the root for nebulous, meaning
fuzzy and indistinct. The things you see in Simmons’s new
paintings—brightly colored shapes that look like nebulae,
supernovas, and other galactic objects, glowing on solid black
backgrounds—do fuzz and vibrate a little at their edges. They’re
groovy and trippy, like op art, but they also, like the work of Gerhard
Richter, play with the interdisciplinary blurriness inherent in all
looking.
When Simmons first appeared on the scene, he was making turntable
paintings. He used a rotating easel to make targetlike images of
hard-edged concentric circles—the canvas moved instead of the
artist, in what was, as Kucera says, essentially the opposite of action
painting. Between the perfect, mechanistic lines, in well-defined
areas, was drippy evidence of the accidental. For these he won a
special recognition award from the Betty Bowen Award committee in 1996.
Later, for his first show at Kucera in 1999, he built a machine that
would rotate the canvas while orbiting a fixed point, creating lines
that crossed back over themselves like children’s Spirographs.
In 2000, he showed sharp watercolors that were made by elaborate
overlaps of transparent colors. He’s still doing these (a handful were
shown at the Lee Center earlier this year), and they’re almost
unsettlingly masterful. There’s a superhumanness to Simmons’s control
of paint, and in a 2005 show, he turned up the god-or-machine factor
with imagery that looked like it came from aerial photography of cities
at night or from computer screens. For the first time, the layered
surfaces of his paintings were sanded perfectly smooth, like
lenses.
The surfaces of the Nebulae paintings are smooth, too.
Their imagery is taken from photographs of astronomical phenomena (and
some of them mimic, in minimalist fashion, the grid arrangement of
science textbooks). Behind the smooth surfaces are receding layers of
depth. Shining out from the deepest point is the most vibrant color, as
though it’s been branded into the canvas and is still glowing. The
other layers are full of hints that these are paintings about looking.
Light appears to spill out from behind black shapes, as though
something were curtained over or redacted; in other images, rows of
black stripes over colored areas look like window blinds. One painting
bears what look like the frame marks of a digital camera. Considered
differently, these shapes and stripes are simple, basic, monochrome
forms asserting their flatness in an environment preoccupied with
depth.
These paintings also travel in time, like the stars they reference.
Just as it’s possible, because of the great distance, to see stars in
the night sky that have actually, in real time, gone dead, so these
paintings seem both products of a single, captured moment, and the
accumulated results of an extended travel time over the duration of the
artist’s process. They record incidents and the residue of incidents;
they’re time-lapse paintings.
Which is true? What’s truth in a painting, anyway? Simmons’s works
are down in the trenches of theories about painting here. Modernists
called faithful imitation the greatest lie of all, and abstractionists
of all stripes have claimed their works to be truer than mimetic
scenes, more objective. In abstract expressionism, a true painting was
one that was true to the emotional moment in which it was made, forging
a link between painting and time that was more like the conventional
link between photography and time—that photographs are made in a
“decisive moment,” as Henri Cartier-Bresson called it, when you snapped
the great shot, kidnapped a part of the world before it disappeared
from space-
time forever.
When you put it that way, it’s surprising that there aren’t more
great conceptual outer-space paintings out there. (I can’t think of a
single outer-space painting better than Simmons’s.) Stars and night
skies lend themselves more often to drawings, as by Sol LeWitt and Vija
Celmins, which is understandable. Like drawings, with their eternal
possibility of becoming something else (a painting, a sculpture),
astronomical objects are contingent. We perceive them dimly. They are
photographed but not seen with the naked eye, known about but not
touched, and pleasantly beyond the scope of regular quantifiability or
conquest. Paintings like that—like Simmons’s—are fun as
hell. 
