Stonehouse
Text by Sam Lincoln

The first few times I looked at the five drawings of A hundred years slipped by unnoticed (2024–25), I assumed that Sebastian Lloyd Rees had rubbed graphite over the paper and then added a layer of markings on top. This is not at all what happened, which you can see for yourself by leaning close and finding the decayed remnants of earlier series of movements just below the outermost layer. Lloyd Rees has built up and sanded back successive generations of markings until their faded blur covers the paper entirely; what might have been a unified visual field is thus separated into a background wash and a dark, crisp, fresh set of lines over it.

One way to read this effect is to repeat my initial mistake and imagine these all as a set of rubbings. Rubbings of what, exactly? If you brought a pencil into a cave where a bear has spent an afternoon sharpening its claws on the walls, could you produce a similar work? If you went out early on a January morning and lay an impossibly thin sheet of paper on a patch of frozen grass? A single mark, on the left edge of A hundred years slipped by unnoticed, 1, spoils this thought experiment: a particularly bold line that loops, down-up-down-up, like a fragment of misshapen handwriting—a faulty calligraphic W. Other, similarly looping lines begin appearing out of the haze. They repeat over and over and over until the surface of the paper undulates.

Not a rubbing at all, then. But rubbing involves a process of exchange, of transferral of mark from one medium to another, through contact—and this is a body of work expressly concerned with the possibilities of such contact. How do these marks change, as they interweave and layer onto themselves? How does their appearance, and their signification, shift as they begin to tesselate across the paper?

Cy Twombly is the elephant in the room. He appears every time an artist makes a graphite gesture within the treacherous middle region between mark-making and handwriting. Roland Barthes is here too, peeking down over Twombly’s left shoulder, patiently explaining how the broken scrawls of these lines, even if they don’t lead anywhere, could become so potent in their tangle as to reproduce the sensuous effect of the Mediterranean environment. To Barthes, Twombly’s paintings became “big Mediterranean rooms,” and the loopier lines of Movement isn’t right and stillness is wrong (2024) certainly call to mind Twombly’s many untitled works from Rome in the late 1950s—or their painted counterparts like Criticism and Academy (both 1955). But Twombly’s work from that period pulls the viewer in by tricking them into believing his writing might become legible; then wrong-footing them with a surprise blast of Abstract Expressionist opacity. Lloyd Rees stops short of such a feint. His marks, in both series on display, are more jagged or more staccato than Twombly’s. There are some looping lines, like that W, but most are like sharp hooks—the start of a motion, the beginning of a beginning, and no more.

Another important distinction: Twombly’s source material for most of his career, including the period when he was stationed in Rome making these similar works, was explicitly the Mediterranean, the fragments of classical antiquity he encountered on its shores, and the heavily romanticised neoclassicism of the American South. Although Lloyd Rees keeps his studio in Athens and works in dialogue with the Mediterranean in many of his paintings, the pieces in this exhibition draw their chief influence from a small collection of Chan (Zen) Buddhist poetry produced by the Chinese poet Shiwu, or Stonehouse (1272 – 1352). Both sets of works in this exhibition take their titles from the first lines of Stonehouse poems, as translated by the eminent Bill Porter (Red Pine)—the greatest advocate for Stonehouse’s ongoing relevance.

Lloyd Rees discovered Stonehouse after a winding period of research into Zen Buddhist philosophy, including the history of Zen’s reception by the vanguard of 20th century abstract artists—Ad Reinhardt, Agnes Martin, and Brice Marden among them—and the history of the secondary scholarship and translations that have brought Stonenouse’s poetry to an English-speaking audience. Lloyd Rees plotted out his rough trajectory for me, which began with the book Guide to Capturing a Plum Blossom (1238). The Guide is thought to be the first art book ever written, and Red Pine has published the definitive English translation; from a copy of this translation Lloyd Rees was introduced to the larger landscape of contemporary Zen translations for which Red Pine and his peers, including the poet-translator Gary Snyder, have been responsible. Like Red Pine, Snyder has taken particular interest in the poems composed by Buddhist monks living as hermits in mountain caves and monasteries.

There’s precedent for the reception of these mountain poems in abstract visual art: between 1988 and 1991, Brice Marden produced a major cycle of work inspired by the semi-mythical 9th-century poet Hanshan (Cold Mountain) and his surviving body of poetry, as translated by Gary Snyder. Snyder’s edition of the Cold Mountain poems included the original Chinese calligraphy alongside, and, in a talk at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Marden described how he could see a “structure” in the calligraphy. Standing in front of Cold Mountain 6 (Bridge), painted between 1989 and 1991, he added: 

I took that structure and used that as the basis for the paintings. You could probably go through this painting and distinguish each time it was painted on. In the beginning, they get very gestural; and then a lot of the additional drawing tends to slow down that gesture. I would erase, just by painting white over the existing black line. And these lines start becoming counter figures, or ghost figures.  

Certainly this same spirit of counter-figuration is at play in Lloyd Rees’s Hundred years slipped by… pieces, with their ghostly marks underneath the surface (yes, you could go through them to find the traces of each mark, but then a hundred years really would slip by). But Marden’s mark, even when it is reduced to a trace, has a self-assurance in its arrangement around the canvas. It gives the viewer the impression that Marden had fully wrapped his head around Cold Mountain’s poetry, in order to extract from it the system of visual logic that he needed to power his monumental act of interpretation. This is a risk, especially for an artist without formal knowledge of Chinese ­calligraphy (past that which he had gained from examining its brushstrokes); the 19th and 20th centuries are fraught with American and European artists mining their own misunderstandings of East Asian visual and literary culture to find “fresh” inspiration for abstraction.

Better to make art that invites the viewer to share in the discomfort of not understanding. Especially so given how such discomfort is hardboiled into the Zen tradition that charges through the poems of Cold Mountain and Stonehouse. Both poets weave their verse out of koans, ambiguous phrases that the Buddhist scholar DT Suzuki—the man whose lectures introduced Agnes Martin and a significant portion of the New York scene to Zen Buddhism in the 1950s—explains as verbal “vines and wisterias” that entwine and entangle the more you try to pull them apart. Movement isn’t right, and yet stillness is wrong—and yet movement still isn’t right.

It’s a paradox, you’re ensnared the moment you read it out, but the feeling remains that there may be a great deal of meaning trapped somewhere inside: koans force us to confront our deep urge to make meaning out of everything by forcing us to follow the urge as it leads us nowhere. Here is DT Suzuki, quoting the Chinese poet Sotoba to explain what happens as one studies Zen:

Misty rain on Mount Lu,

And waves surging in Che-chiang;

When you have not yet been there,

Many a regret surely you have;

But once there and homeward you wend,

And how matter-of-fact things look!

Misty rain on Mount Lu,

And waves surging in Che-chiang.

Suzuki also quotes the Zen master Seigen Ishin, who offers a parallel explanation:

Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters.

This strikes me as an excellent metaphor for the process of developing a critical eye. Isn’t this more or less what happens before Twombly’s canvases, or Marden’s, or Lloyd Rees’s? Marks are marks—and then all of a sudden they aren’t, and they begin to signify, and we begin to read all sorts of things into the artwork—and then, the instant before any kind of representation is achieved, we blink and see the mark as mark once again. The jagged flecks of graphite that Lloyd Rees has deployed in these works have variously appeared as: the first pencil stroke of a letter, the first brush stroke of a character, the jagged hatch of an etching, the trace of a fish-hook, the transfer of some crumbling stone surface… all of the above, and then none of the above. The eye doesn’t settle, while viewing these works, any more than the mind can settle contemplating a phrase like “movement isn’t right, but stillness is wrong.”

One challenge of translating poetry is that the person attempting the task needs to be as much poet as translator. In the forward to a collection of Stonehouse’s Mountain Poems, Red Pine notes that, to translate a poem, the translator must “make a poem.” The poetry of the translator is its own art form. He continues:

I don’t know how others do it, but when I’ve tried to think of a metaphor for what I go through, I keep coming up with the image of a dance. I see the poet dancing, but dancing to music I can’t hear. Still, I’m sufficiently enthralled by the beauty of the dance that I want to join the poet. And so I try. And as I do, I try not to step on my partner’s feet (the so-called literal or accurate translation), but I also try not to dance across the room (the impressionistic translation or version—usually by someone who doesn’t know the poet’s language). I try to get close enough to feel the poet’s rhythm, not only the rhythm of the words but also the rhythm of the poet’s heart.

Paired with their poetic titles, Lloyd-Rees’s works represent a new attempt to find the rhythm that Stonehouse was dancing to. This can clearly be felt in the alternating panels of Movement isn’t right and stillness is wrong: if the mark is the product of movement or gesture, then the viewer feels both this presence of movement (or the recording of the presence of movement) and its total absence as they move between full and empty panels. This is a visual koan.

In her poem “Essay On What I Think About Most,” Anne Carson insists that “the chief aim of philology is to reduce all textual delight to an accident of history.” We might therefore say that the chief aim of semiotics—that deliciously tempting toolbox for interpretation—is to reduce all aesthetic delight to an accident of signification. What Lloyd Rees is celebrating is exactly this delight; he is celebrating the perpetual elasticity of mark in itself. These drawings are dance floors. There may be plenty of meaning behind that, but there may be nothing else to it.