Currently on display at the Center of Contemporary Art in Santa Fe is the 30-year survey of Mark Spencer’s paintings. Entitled “Beings,” this is a rare and all too brief opportunity to experience an important artist.

Mark Spencer, Blue Streak, 2019

Some artists’ practice is to work slowly and deliberately. The measure of their oeuvre manifests over the full arc of a career when their work can be gathered and viewed as a whole. This is the case with Mark Spencer who has been working in Santa Fe, away from New York, Los Angeles, Europe, the art fairs and major galleries. But I feel that “Beings,” (which didn’t include his significant output of pencil drawings and monotypes) would successfully hold forth in an institution like UCLA’s Hammer Museum. I can think of several Los Angeles curators who would do justice to an exhibition of Spencer’s full body of work. In my opinion, a full retrospective exhibition would be equal to that of artists like Lari Pittman, Llyn Foulkes or Vija Celmins, who were presented so well at the Hammer. It is time Spencer was seen by the Los Angeles arts community and recognized by a major national institution.

Mark Spencer, Pygmalion, 2016

Spencer’s work takes on a great spiritual conundrum of our era, which he describes as the inherent conflict of Nature vs Human Nature and how it has become a threat to the planet and a block to the evolution of the species. His deep philosophical engagement with this question is accomplished through an examination of his unconscious processes, beginning with abstract sketches that evolve into highly polished oil paintings. The total output is a metaphorical representation of the world we live in and pass down to future generations.

Mark Spencer, Vernal Equinox, 2014

His oil paintings and monotype printing are currently some of the more remarkable hybrid representational-expressionistic productions I am aware of. 1984’s Heart of Darkness (72 x 58”) presages overarching concerns that will underline future allegorical works. Two central figures are wrapped in a cornucopia of tangled materials, capped by a wolf-like animal killing a white bird, anchoring the dramatic misc en scene. This metaphor of bound and confined is repeated throughout his imagery. Dangling from the hand of one of the figures is The New York Times, revealing the news of the day. The headlines announce, “Nuclear buildup threatens world peace; El Salvador at odds with death squads; South Africa in revolt; and Israeli jets bomb Palestinian’s in Lebanon.” Mixed in with these weighty world conflicts are more domestic bylines with an overtone of black humor, “Jealous husband has shootout with wife’s lover, 2 die; Giant carp kills 15; and, Spencer’s Heart of Darkness causes art-world stir.” There is something in the work that traverses the ridiculous and the sublime, giving us just enough air to breathe while looking at Spencer’s paintings, boiling over with psychodramas.

Mark Spencer, Beings, 2018

Twenty-five years later Spencer would make Beings (2018, 60 x 108”). He describes arriving at this work by “I gain awareness of what part of the conflict between Nature and human nature that I’m dealing with. The image then begins to evolve and take on a life of its own. It becomes a being.”

This articulation in oil paint lays the central conflict in his work at the feet of the male ego, driven to dominate nature through greed and power lust, to which both men and women can succumb. Pictorially the work is animated by what appears to be a struggle to find balance. The resulting art, Spencer says, is a “hybrid reality, a bridge between the world of personal experience and the collective spiritual dream.” A series of paintings in the exhibition, like Vernal Equinox (2014, 74 x 96”), Chaos (2016, 24 x 36”), Pygmalion (2016, 52 x 80”), or Blue Streak (2019 72 x 108”) exemplify this statement. The irony, of course, is that this exhibition is shuttered at CCA by the coronavirus pandemic, at the precise moment in time when Spencer’s overarching project is so profoundly in focus.