The Brooklyn Rail

“Abstract” marks, like sounds, act as fragments of signs. They signify by oblique reference. One way to describe this interesting perceptual phenomenon is pareidolia (from para-eidolon—alongside-image): the tendency to find meaning in nebulous stimuli, such as rabbits in clouds, battle scenes in wall texturing, or hidden messages in music played in reverse. Contrary to what one might expect, it is very difficult for human beings to perceive the world around them without deriving meaning from it. Many of these sorts of processes take place prior to our conscious recognition of them, always already there for us to find. The pareidolic impulse is alive in Michael Alexander Campbell’s paintings. He seems to be intently searching for something that might arise from fragmentary lines, blotches, and strokes of paint, and he prompts the viewer to do the same.

Of the paintings presented at Casa Del Popolo, Portrait of William Chester Minor (2023) best represents the kind of exercise Campbell undertakes across this body of work. Based on a photograph of the above-named man, the painting does not at first resemble anything in particular. But upon comparison with the original photograph, one suddenly sees the quite sinister hallucination pull itself together across the canvas, transforming the collection of tendons and black slime into a portrait. William Chester Minor, who was hospitalized for much of his life due to frequent and extreme delusions and paranoia, is best known for his work as the most significant contributor to the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. Secondarily, he is also known for murdering George Merrett, a man Minor believed to have robbed from him, and for performing an ultimately fatal autopenectomy (he removed his own penis) in order to thwart nightly assailants that he believed were stealing him away to Istanbul where he would be forced to have sex with children.

In the far corner of the gallery stands Golgotha (2023), a very tall painting. As a painting, Golgotha, like Portrait of William Chester Minor and Mrs Jones (2023) or How to Worship (1) (2023), is composed with heavy impasto laid strategically over a light wash. The contrast of bold oil, acrylic, and wax media on the ambient ground produces distinct shapes that suggest objects, bodies, substances that can be identified and picked apart. Golgotha ( a Greek name derived from the Hebrewword gulgoleth, or “skull,” meaning “place of the skull”), refers to the hill where Jesus Christ was crucified just outside the walls of Jerusalem. Campbell’s painting titled Golgotha does not depict the crucifixion but rather seems to play loosely with the meaning of the word in Hebrew. Now, there is no skull in the painting. There is no strong impression of a skull in the painting. But I don’t think this matters. The place of the skull on the human body is on the neck and shoulders, which are an extension of the torso, which connects to the limbs, and so on from top to bottom; these make up all the pieces of the body that are omitted, and where they seem present, disarticulated, in Campbell’s would-be portrait of the martyr and his agonies. Then let us not forget that the place of the skull is also the head with its crown of sensory organs. But of all the parts, the ankles and not the head are the painting’s focus. Shapes resembling ankles and feet in the lower right-hand corner of the canvas dangle over one another like Christ’s on the cross but appearing severed at the knees. The shape of the canvas, vertical and narrow, gives bodily presence to the pile of cascading bones and shredded sinews so carefully suspended in place of the absent body. In 1846, Wilhelm Ludwig Krafft proposed that Golgotha might instead originate from “Gol Goatha” (heap of death), being only mistakenly connected to the word for skull by folk etymologists, indicating just that the site was used for execution—though I think this was already framed more poetically by the original adaptation of the Hebrew word which suggests that the hill’s shape resembles a skull. Nevertheless, perhaps this “heap of death”, this “place of the skull,” signifies something far afield of the body of Christ. Perhaps it is between the place of the skull and the place of the body that the painting comes alive.

Campbell is wielding heavy themes and takes care not to mishandle them. The goal is boldness of form and subtlety, if not understatement, of concept. Hero/in Facing the Dragon (2023) stands out as a further example of this. It is a representation of Saint George slaughtering the dragon. Campbell covers the face of Saint George with a dripping black mark while his hand draws a line to the void-mouth of the dragon. The color palette is sickly—greens, purples, and smoggy grays all play dead together. The drips across the canvas reveal how the painting was turned onto different sides as it was being created. A grid-like or cross-like composition comes by necessity, since gravity always pulls the paint drops perpendicular to whatever side of the frame is parallel with the ground. But it seems that Saint George is losing, and I wonder how far the painting could have gone had Campbell not engaged in self-censorship and lopped off the hero’s head. The devil has taken the painting and turned the world within into rot. There is a certain danger inherent to signification; once a thing is made legible it takes on a life of its own.