Trevor Winkfield

Asked once if his poems contained hidden meanings, John Ashbery said they didn’t for the simple reason that “somebody might find out what they were and then the poems would no longer be mysterious.” It’s easy to believe that Trevor Winkfield’s paintings, bristling with precisely rendered, deeply enigmatic visual detritus, are riddled with hidden meanings. Like ancient hieroglyphs or comic book rebuses or tarot cards, Winkfield’s paintings cry out for deciphering. This exhibition of paintings from 1991–2001 offered viewers countless opportunities to spelunk themselves into the artist’s distinctive, phantasmagoric iconography, while also inviting us to ponder some fundamental questions about painting.

Most of the work in the show belongs to two series, one depicting exemplars of various vocations, another titled “Voyage.” Also included is a painting titled Self Portrait (2001). Oddly (dare I say, mysteriously), the exhibition’s title, The Mermaid’s Revenge, derives its name from a 1993 painting not on view. The protagonist in The Student (1999) is, as Winkfield’s figures nearly always are, an amalgam of human and non-human attributes. This one sports a recognizable head, hands, and feet (in disparate colors and scales), while strange geometric objects serve as the torso and legs. The result is a kind of heraldic cyborg. Surrounding the student figure are several lightbulbs, a wooden chair, a yellow lyre, some chain-linked poles, and an alpine scene framed in a window. The background consists of interlocking, solid-color rectangles, which could be read as some kind of modernist interior but, more plausibly, as geometric abstraction. As always, the paint has been applied in the flattest, most neutral manner. At first glance, Winkfield’s imagery also reads as flat, but quickly one begins to notice the nods to illusionistic space: judicious use of shadows and, in the lightbulbs, the reflections of windows which introduce three-dimensionality into the picture. However, the overall sense of the composition as totally flat still lingers. The fact that the artist begins with a collage is probably a factor in this effect, but it’s also because Winkfield avails himself within each painting of various styles of illusionism. No single light source is implied. Each depicted object follows its own rules of representation. Winkfield also seems to delight in having his motifs interfere with one another. Notice, in this canvas, how the mountain view cuts off one of the lightbulbs in contradiction of any spatial logic. Something similar happens with the poles and the stylized waves in the painting’s lower left corner. Clearly, the disparate imagery and decisive slicing owe much to a collage aesthetic. It comes as no great surprise to learn that Winkfield admires Kurt Schwitters, and that a visit to Schwitters’s Merz Barn in England’s Lake District as a teenager was crucial for him.

The English-born Trevor Winkfield has taken a unique path that has yet to be fully recognized for its unlikeliness, depth, and breadth. After attending art school in Leeds and getting his master’s degree from the Royal College of Art in 1967, he moved to New York in 1969, where he continued to publish a poetry magazine, Juillard (1968–72), and made a name for himself among a group of writers and artists known as the New York School. He worked for Arthur Cohen, who sold books and ephemera on 20th-century Modern Art movements such as Dada and Surrealism and made entries to Cohen’s encyclopedic catalogs. These were informative, succinct, and witty. He was a polymath whose knowledge of minor artists and writers, such as Gerald Murphy and Ronald Firbank, was unmatched.

In 1976, Winkfield began painting again, made book covers, and collaborated with poets such as John Ashbery, Charles North, Ron Padgett, and Harry Matthews. He had his New York debut exhibition in 1977, and published his translation of Raymond Roussel’s How I Wrote Certain of My Books. Roussel, who is widely considered the most eccentric writer of the 20th century, wrote according to linguistic rules based on homophones, words that sound similar but have different meanings. As one might expect, in the years since, critics have tried to connect Winkfield’s collage-like paintings of artificial worlds with Roussel’s wildly improbable novels, but have never discovered the key, which I feel was never there. As literary as Winkfield is, he is equally a visual person. This complete duality is what makes him inimitable.

The octogenarian artist Trevor Winkfield has earned a following by making sui generis paintings that look like they could be Pop Art but have nothing to do with mass culture. In fact, many of Winkfield’s inspirations come from the heraldry and architecture of his native England, as well as ancient and medieval imagery, but he paints in a flat, blocky, polychromatic style.

The resulting works feature objects like fish, fruit and playing cards balanced on or floating alongside mechanistic constructions. They have a totemic air that dips into absurdity, not least because of their candy-colored palette.

Winkfield has worked mostly on a small scale, but the paintings in this exhibition, “The Mermaid’s Revenge,” were made when he had access to a larger studio, in the 1990s. They are big and dizzyingly complex. “Voyage I,” which stretches six feet wide, stars a creature with a mask-like human head, camel legs and rows of flowers for a body. It moves through a space that resembles a riotous nursery. “The Student” also appears to be on a journey, using a pot to catch ideas that fall like snowflakes from lightbulbs.

What does it all mean? There are hints of narrative threads, but ultimately Winkfield’s images are symbolic, sort of like tarot cards. That’s part of what makes them so compelling: They’re rigorously ordered by a logic we can’t understand. JILLIAN STEINHAUER