Mark Forth’s paintings describe odd little vignettes of despair. They are rich with a sense of resigned and inevitable trauma, and their characters seem propelled toward simultaneous and interchangeable states of revelation and misery. Nothing specific ever really happens in these pictures; rather, they become the posed settings for numbing rituals of perpetuity, strange glimpses into individual and interpersonal relationships that we suspect to be both sinister and true. That palpability, the slight but definable sense of secret rhythms laid bare, gives Forth’s paintings their brooding quality and their aura of charged imminence.
Each tableau is set in a large but sparsely furnished room in an older house; the expansive kitchens, bedrooms, and bathrooms are marked by an air of personal history Within these comfy but redolent spaces men and women move about, sometimes singly, but most often in pairs, the private and mysterious data of their lives exposed for the viewer. We witness moments of temporary respite, curious lulls in lives so poignant with possibilities and rocked by undercurrents as to be painful to watch. As in many of the works of Balthus, or in the more intimate paintings of Edward Hopper, we are made privy to dreary dilemmas.
In Milk, 1989, Forth illustrates a fragment culled from some domestic drama. A nude woman, her body bathed in the soft illumination of refrigerator light, gulps milk from a carton while in the foreground a man is disconsolately slumped over a kitchen table. The gulf that separates them is beyond measure. Forth dramatizes this gulf by introducing an element of fantasy in the form of a black bird staring at the brick to which it is tied. The bird both invites and obfuscates speculation about a resolution to this scene. The pictorial elements here are purposefully, subtly disjointed. Some of the furniture is rendered oversized, and the color and lighting scheme suggest the scene is being viewed through a mist or veil of memory.
In Two Sounds, 1989, a woman lies on a bed playing a clarinet, and a man stands by the side of the bed holding a large shell to his ear. On a nearby oversized chest of drawers, flowers in a vase shed some petals. This is the stuff of bittersweet melancholy, a rendition of disconnectedness no less dissonant because it is so thunderously quiet. The moments that Forth evokes rest more in the area of poetic intimation than prosaic description, as evidenced by the rather amorphous and blank figure style he employs. Despite the general air of crisis that pervades these works, the figures move through their world dreamily, as if they were sleepwalking. These are characters in search of a release they are unlikely to discover. In a curious but striking way, Forth’s paintings end up functioning like predellas for a misplaced faith, stray offerings at an altar of union never to be reached.
—James Yood
