Phosphorecent Fine Artist S. P. Harper Painting Los Angeles, CA

Oracles of Effulgence

Cubism, the great dismantler of common vision, shivered the seen world into myriad facets and shards. Tilting planes against one another, expressing volume through contours and edges that are not truly there, the cubist phenomenon shattered, in many ways literally, the conventions of aesthetic, even cultural form particular to Western art. A century or so later, with the cubist spirit so thoroughly inculcated into our apprehension of the world – indeed, of the universe – it is at once quaint and subversive to behold an artist who would reassemble the fractures of cubist regard as conjurations of gemstones. It seems at first a visual pun, re-embodying the girls of Avignon as a girl’s best friend, reconfiguring the bottle of Suze, prompting the nude to ascend the staircase; but S. P. Harper’s extended homage to the diamond – not to the flat rhomboid silhouette but to the jewel itself – witty as it may be, honors a symbol of aspiration and purity, a different level of artistic craft and value (or, if you would, evaluation) than the painting she employs (and Picasso and Braque employed). Harper’s grandfather was a diamantaire in prewar Antwerp, and she brings his métier forward in hers, by inference equalizing and celebrating both. The dedication to diamondhood that pervades Harper’s recent oeuvre honors her artistic heritage and her bloodlines both.

The diamond, then, is not simply a formal foil for Harper; it is a subject in its own right, a signifier rich in connotation steeped in cultural (and political, and religious) history, a marker at once so exalted – by assessment -- and so trivialized – by association – that its classic forms have come to represent both its ancient power and its modern ubiquity. This is arguably true of all faceted gems, but the diamond is (still) considered the rarest, the apex gemstone, valued the highest and imbued with the most extra-mineral associations. Diamonds represent luxury, a social value, but actually present elegance, an aesthetic measure. In her most recent series, the Oracles of Effulgence, Harper drives home this bifurcation/resolution of image and object by endowing her paintings, objects, and painted objects with phosphorescence. Yes, the Oracles glow in the dark – an effect, a sensation at once conceptually ludicrous and perceptually glorious. Such luminescence fools no one in the age of the digital spectacle; but its last-century magic suffuses throughout its seductive glow, not simply radiating a flamboyant allure, but inspiring a pervasive nostalgia.

-Peter Frank