BY ROBERT MAHONEY
Suzanne McClelland is a young painter who I believe is one of the clearest practitioners of a type of abstract painting which deals with Nomos. Her work in some ways picks up on a fork of the road that Cy Twombly briefly went down, then let go. He went on to a more scriptive type of work which dealt with textual and graphic aspects of language art, although I lend more credence at present to the graffiti discourse into which his work was set in the Hi-Low show at MoMA last year than I did then. McClelland picks up on the road that Twombly did NOT take, and she unifies stroke an ergonomic stroke that encompasses the entire canvas -- and lettering, and this union of stroke and letter form recapitulates in the figure-ground construct the rawness of Nomos that you find in nature, where raw word and nature are somehow one. This produces on canvas a kind of ugliness that bespeaks the Nomos. A lot of McClelland's work has been done on boards, and the paint is smeared, it feels like a raw smear, any figure-ground relation is wiped away, gone: that, too, recreates the groundlessness of Nomos. In THEM she uses a word that is very charged in terms of Nomos, a word of paranoia, anger, alienation from the group, or from the ruling discourse. For me it also relates to THEM!, the 1953 atom-bomb-scare sci-fi movie about giant ants invading the sewers of LA, so again it's an alien force pushing its materialization. Her work also bounces off kitsch moments in horror films where the possession of a body by the devil or a dark force is conveyed by a message weltering upon the victims skin: the message really does come from a force field where you feel like there is something down there that cannot be articulated and has been forced to the surface in a painful way.
