THERE IS NO REASON WHY IT HAS NOT ALWAYS EXISTED: RACHEL HOWARD'S PAINTINGS OF VIOLENCE BY LOUISA ELDERTON

Walking around the studio, she is calculatingly slow and steady. Imagine her, blood-red paint in one hand, a cross in the other, surveying a scene of canvases lined up like bodies. Count them: one to ten. Perfectly positioned, one after another. Each square reproduces her own physical dimensions; Rachel Howard, legs spread, toes pointed, arms stretched, draw a line to connect the dots at each corner. She is splayed, wall-mounted, reproduced again and again. Or perhaps she lies flat upon the floor first, waiting to be painted, coming into being by playing dead.

The process starts with a pink so luminous that it might burn itself into your retina. Look away and there it is, still. Cones in the eye that process frequencies of light are set ablaze, fuschia on acid, beaming with a hallucinatory hue. Electric colour sets everything around it alight, breathes pink onto adjacent surfaces. This is raw, stark colour. Defenceless, it is unclothed waiting to be covered. Bare flesh that could be cut or sliced, oxidised blood flowing out, body inverted.

Now imagine these naked, jittery canvases of flesh lying around the studio in an orgy of pink. She prowls between them with intent, dark alizarin crimson poised and ready. This is the colour of blood, an indicator of pain and fear. The smell of oil is emitted from the tube alongside the pigment, rising to invade the nostrils, latching onto oxygen molecules to penetrate from the inside out. This is infective colour that seeks to coat everything beneath its sticky surface, layer upon layer, darker and denser with every stroke and then shining under the light to offer deceptive cherry kisses.

Her process is a performance of repeated placing, slicing, swiping and wiping. The T-square, reminiscent of a disproportioned crucifix, is applied to the surface of the canvas, against which this rich paint is dragged downwards staining dark crimson upon pink – pale flesh coated with clotted blood, platelets and plasma combining to stem the flow. Residue slowly seeps onto the wooden cross, a sedimentary tide of crimson forming glossy skins that wrinkle as new layers wash in. She wipes these off with white towels, sterile flannel becoming infected (no use in trying to clean up a blood bath; instead, fold them to perfection and stack them high). Repeat the process, again and again; place, slice, wipe; place, slice, wipe. These paintings recall pain; these are paintings of violence.

And so they are titled: Paintings of Violence (Why I Am not a mere Christian). Weeping wounds, systematically hung to stare at each other, reinforcing lacerations, deep cuts and tears in skin. They speak of the violence surrounding us, acts that we watch endlessly repeated, that came before us and that will outlive us. We see it in the streets, on television, in movies, streamed online, via the newspaper and so on. Sex sells and, grotesquely, so does violence.

It takes many different forms, is waged against peoples of different colour, class, gender, race. I flash between newsfeeds over the Internet, see countless examples enacted in one morning alone. America: we know that the colour of your skin defines your right to live or die as one black person after another is murdered at the hands of trigger-happy police officers. We know that mass shootings – Orlando, Aurora, Columbine – continue to occur, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, people being picked off while the gun lobby continues to wield its power. Britain: we know that Tony Blair said to George W. Bush “I will be with you, whatever”, as the protest voices of millions were ignored and the American-British coalition waged war on Iraq. We know the effects of shock and awe violence; we know state violence; we know gun violence; we know domestic violence. We know it all.

The violence that Rachel Howard speaks of is not the bacchanalian crime of passion, but the steady calm hand of violence. Calculated violence that is controlled, meticulously planned, thought out; slow violence that plays out over time, ideas developed to culminate in premeditated expressions of hatred. This violence always brings with it a bloody message: maximum damage for the most widespread effects. Howard is referring to the acts of violence planned on a scale that overwhelms; think of 9/11, 7/7; the Madrid train bombings of 2004; the Mumbai attacks of 2008; Kenya’s Westgate shopping mall attack of 2013; the Bataclan theatre in Paris of 2015; Brussels’ airport and metro bombs; the Istanbul airport attack, also of 2016. She points to the violence enacted by ISIS, the most recent bombings claiming over 250 lives in Baghdad in July 2016; or before that their murder of the Royal Jordanian Air Force pilot, Muath Safi Yousef Al-Kasasbeh who was burned to death; or Khaled al-Asaad, the octogenarian archaeologist who was killed alongside the desecration of Palmyra in Syria. Before any of these atrocities had even occurred, before Jihadist extremism became the focus of fear, there were the commonplace Irish Republican Army bombings amidst the Northern Ireland conflict – the Troubles. Before that, even, there was the threat of calculated nuclear war between the Western and Eastern Blocs, the profound ideological differences of the Cold War threatening the ultimate survival of mankind. What if the Cuban Missile Crisis had happened?

These acts of terror, these threats to the stability of everyday life, have something in common. They are different but also, in many ways, the same. Their aims are uniform – to override existing systems and implement idiosyncratic ideological beliefs; their approaches match – forcing change through violence; and their will is consistent – to foster an atmosphere of fear through which the control of others, both physical and psychic, can be harnessed. These groups may exist at different geographical locations and at different moments in time, their methods may differ, but their effect is the same and the feelings that they stir are similar.

This tracing of violence through history, this repetition, is emulated by Howard in canvas after canvas. They are different, but also, the same. They are meticulously planned, playing out over time – Howard worked on these paintings over a period of five years from 2011-2016, slowly adding, repeating, developing. Vertical slices of fluorescent colour rhythmically reappear, peeping out from behind curtains of thick oil paint. Great swathes of colour pull the eye around the room, enveloping the viewer – a zoetrope that might reveal itself to you in motion if you spin fast enough. A controlled hand smears red paint onto the surface, waits eagerly for it to dry as diluent evaporates (a small death), before applying further slashes of colour; cut after cut after cut, until the floor is covered in a massacre of red, the aftermath of violence, and sodden white towels stained with ruddy imperfections are piled high beyond hope of ever being washed clean.

Throughout her oeuvre violence has been a theme that Howard has continually returned to. Take the Sin Paintings (2003), where household gloss suffocates the canvas with sticky succulence – the gloss being allowed to separate in the can, then being applied so that it uses gravity to drag pigment back down to earth. Each of the seven deadly sins is represented as luminous layers of red paint pulsate over yellow, streaking the canvas as if it were bleeding and revealing an embedded cruciform image. Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine. Indeed, the Suicide Paintings (2007-8) depict suffocated figures hanging limply from ropes, paint propelled by a never-ending downward cycle that blurs the image with trails of pigmented tears. Similarly, the Suicide Drawings (2005 onwards), comprised of ink or oil paint on paper, show black lifeless bodies contorted, marked by what appear to be traces of blood.

In terms of repeating the same motif, perhaps most strikingly similar to the Paintings of Violence (Why I Am not a mere Christian) are Howard’s Repetition is Truth - Via Dolorosa paintings (2005-2009). Reiterating the same subject and technique through a total of fourteen canvases, the human cruelty and torture exercised at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison is pinpointed. The images of torture that were exposed by the media in 2004 shocked the world, as smiling United States Army officers were photographed committing human rights violations, intimidating and humiliating detainees with physical and sexual abuse and murder.

The plinth upon which the now infamous hooded figure of Ali Shallal al-Qaisi stood – arms outstretched and wired with electrodes – recurs throughout the series. This was a symbol of the human suffering perpetrated by fellow human beings. Using a palette of predominantly pale yellows and whites, rich blues and sharp pinks, the form of the plinth is unmistakable. The suggestion of cruelty is subtle and implicit, reinforced by the vertical lines of paint that dynamically pull your eye from up high to down low, giving a sense of hanging, falling, and in some cases where lines move in both directions, floating. The Christian symbolism embedded in the series’ title, Via Dolorosa, describes the Stations of the Cross that Jesus followed on the way to his crucifixion. This links the story of Christ’s suffering (perhaps the most recognisable expression of torment through history) to a broader commentary on the universality of human rights abuses and our capacity for cruelty.

Arguably, Howard’s repeated reference to the Christian doctrine could be connected to her childhood, being educated at a Quaker School. Abandoning any belief in Christianity at a young age, her interest in the themes, rhetoric and moral codes embedded within Christianity have evidently continued to inform her practice as an artist. Sin, the ‘Way of Suffering’ and references to crucifixion recur throughout her body of work as a whole. Indeed, the Ten Commandments, also known as The Decalogue, are directly linked to Howard’s ten Paintings of Violence (Why I Am not A mere Christian). She describes these works as her ‘ten reasons’, her ‘ten non-commandments’. Reasons for what? For how not to treat others, or for how not to live your life.

In parenthesis, the title of this body of work references two literary texts that explore Christianity. One is Bertrand Russell’s 1927 lecture Why I Am Not a Christian, delivered almost a century ago at Battersea Town Hall, just down the road from Howard’s studio. She has described how this is “an amazing text which has only, to my mind, been repeated and rehashed by more recent secularists.” The ‘Mere’ was added upon her reading of Mere Christianityby C.S. Lewis, who was part of the Christian Apologetics, a defender of the faith against objections. With chapters exploring issues such as the meaning of the universe, Christian behaviour and the doctrine of the Trinity, Howard feels that – “even as a non-believer this book is a really beautiful read.

”I listen to Bertrand Russell’s clipped voice over YouTube, uttering the words that comprise his critical analysis of the Christian faith. Repetition begets my own experience of this recording as an echo returns Russell’s words very faintly. A quiet chorus of the philosopher is brought into being, voices of harmony in multiple parts:

Why I do not believe in God or immortality (...believe in God or immortality)

There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause, also no reason why it has not always existed (...why it has not always existed)

The idea that things must have a beginning is to do with the poverty of our imagination (...poverty of our imagination)

I am reminded that repetition is truth – depending on what you believe, of course – and it feels strangely appropriate that within this context any utterance of Russell’s might come bounding back as a recurrent afterthought. A scrutiny of repetition characterises a particular passage in his lecture:

Christ says: ‘The Son of Man shall send forth His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth’; and He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often.

And Russell continues:

He says again: ‘If thy hand offend thee, cut if off; it is better for thee to enter into a life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched; where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched.’ He repeats that again and again also.

Repetition is highlighted as a means of obsessively conveying violent rhetoric, pleasurably embedding it within the contemplating mind of the believer. Russell describes how the punishment for sin – as defined by the Bible – is in itself a doctrine of cruelty, or perhaps more potently, a doctrine that actually put cruelty into the world. Hell as everlasting punishment. Place, slice, wipe; place, slice, wipe.

Beyond these conceptual references, Howard’s paintings primarily connect with the viewer via two main elements: colour and composition. Her use of colour is pure and honest. It speaks of related tones of pain, suffering and violence, the electric pulsing heat of lacerated skin. It relates directly to the pigments of our flesh, above and below the epidermis, the flow of blood within our veins. Her compositions also express our physical condition, the gravity that pulls us to the earth, that ages us and takes us closer to death. They recall cages, bars behind which one might become trapped, fighting to escape; or cutting, through which blood seeps; or even disintegration, all structure and reliability falling away (her most recent paintings dating from 2014-16 use techniques of sanding and the application of turpentine to loosen paint, aiding its disappearance and instability). Together, these become primal elements that root us in our physicality, in our emotional bodies, to bring forth a visceral response, gut-deep. When I look at her work, colour seeps into my eyes and flows into my body, pin-pricking my arms, hairs standing to attention. What compels her to paint? To apply pigment to canvas, to stand alone in a room, isolated, day after day recreating the slow hand of violence? Does she seek to represent the fire that never shall be quenched as a process of catharsis? Is this a way of contemplating the wailing and gnashing of teeth, of coming to terms with the repeated follies of the world, the chaos of conflict that seems inconclusive. God or no God, here we are: paint is applied, towels are scattered, blood is spilt and so the cycle will ever continue. As Bertrand Russell would say, we repeat that again and again.

Louisa Elderton is a contemporary art writer and curator based in Berlin and London.