Cecily Brown

I like Cecily Brown’s work. Her figures emerge and get lost within dense painterly surfaces, which often have a nod to the alloverness of abstract expressionism. Sometimes they are masses of figures, piled up like abstract shapes in some filthy orgy. Other times the spatial setting is more literal, the classic window box setting put through a de Kooning blender, pastoral idylls recalling renaissance depictions of figures ‘courting’ in the idyllic countryside.

The slipperyness of her surfaces attracts me, its not the meaty flesh of Saville, the ripped open flesh of Bacon or the fleshy flesh of Freud. It’s a sexual flesh, the very spreading of the medium, its seeming fluidity, as if on the verge of coagulating. It speaks lucidly of the transformation between states of matter, be that paint or flesh. The eroticism and sexual allure of both is not presented as some academic diatribe, but merely presents itself as the result of a painter instinctively aware of both.

I don’t know how much more Cecily Brown’s work does for me. Certainly anything else it does is in direct association with this kind of sensibility, delighting in the playfulness of her understanding of matter, colour and mark. They don’t seem to engage me beneath the surface. It’s more like a night of passion, which whilst you might come back for more, you don’t see yourself developing a truly meaningful relationship.

Martin Kippenberger was one of a series of younger artists from the 1980’s influenced by the influx into Berlin of renegade artists such as Richter and Baselitz. Berlin, whilst a centre of political and socail unrest, became a melting pot of creative forces. Kippenbergers death at 43 in 1997 has made him an iconic figure of this period. His open embrace of a wide variety of media and methods heralded new levels of creative liberation.

Martin Kippenberger Selfportrait

Underlying the hetrogenous nature of his approach is a contextual framework of deconstructing and rebelling agasint systems and idealism.

The above work, with Kippenberger himself the model, sees the figure respond to a history of self agrandising heroism and myth making. He presents himself as middle aged, stripped down to some kind of nappy, scruffy and chubby. No idealistic youth, musculature of stature. Not even the grandeur of the occult or the signfiicantly deformed. The parody of the two limp ballons improbably lifting his lardy torso is has a certain melancholic wit, the melancomic. The wit comes from the our understanding of the imbalance between the reality of such physics and the illuded possibility.

A certain triggering of shadowed pasts flickers into our heads. A middle aged, lumpy Icarus with ballons instead of wings, no grand ascent or decent. Instead a rise and fall so small that rather than a narrative ark we are left with a moment in flux.

Like in past works of grand subjects, the single figure becomes a metaphor for wider conditions. Kippenbergers floating man seems to resonate with certain conditions which seem to ooze out of the discourse of the Western world towards the end of the 20th Century.

Everything she references, whether consciously or not, appears to be contained in quotation marks but the citational act is almost inconspicuous, happily lacking the pomp or pious irony so prevalent in much contemporary art. It’s as though the artist is telling us “here’s a shipwreck in the manner shipwrecks apparently demand”, or “let’s pretend that painting this way is still possible and we’ll see what the result is”. And the result is somewhere between playful questioning and genuine emotional investment, the ghosts of past pictorial conventions making themselves present in and through a practice that is “absolutely modern”, receptive enough to entertain – but also transform – selected moments from the art historical archive, reactivating these borrowed or stolen signs of painting so as to recharge and regenerate painting itself. (Letting the Ghosts In: Nadia Hebson, Peter Suchin)

The proposition of the title to this blog, taken from Peter Suchins essay on the artist Nadia Hebson has a massive pull for me at the moment. So much of my research has taken me towards this fundamental question about the problems of knowledge in contemporary society. The notion that we now “know” so much, conversely leaves us with not very much to say other than cynical put downs and ironic quips. The interesting artists around at the moment are the one’s who arrive at their subject with geniune fondness.

For me this problem has resulted in an interest in religious iconography, childhood play and the practice of Shamanism in indigenous communities. I will put some of my works up when I feel they start to succeed in capturing some of the honesty that belief bestows, at the moment they appear to be commenting on the problem without engaging with it. When you look at work by the old masters, or anything up to the modernist period, there is a conviction in the production, the belief that their work means something and can fundamentally change someones perception of the world, the work of today is struck in its majority by a crisis in confidence and often it appears to be the case that the artist avoids opening themselves up to the criticism that they are naive, by finding ways to avoid commiting themselves utterly to their art.

The problem is manifest in 2 ways however, not just is it the artists unwillingness to commit fully to their craft, it is also the audience and their knowingness of the same issues as the artist. There is a certain fear in the audience to be visibly moved by art, although it is ok to be cerebrally moved. I find this strange when the original conception of art was all fire and brimstone, to tell in pictures the stories of religions, to have an immediate emotional impact upon the viewer. Artists have thus attempted to escape from the habituation of cerebral lethargy by the audience by breaking the traditional boundaries of active and passive participation, shocking the viewer into a response.

As an artist I think this space should be explored more thoroughly. Perhaps a healing needs to be performed, the boundary of belief needs to be reinstated between viewer and the artist.

I had a truly great experience when I went to London last week, visited 2 shows that are 2 of the best I have seen in a very long time, Gerhard Richters portraits at the National Portrait Gallery and Annette Messagers retrospective at the Hayward.

Messagers retrospective, The Messangers,centred around her successful pavilion at the Venice Biennale which they have transferred to the Haywards space.  It is astonishing to me that this important artist has not had much previous recognition in the UK considering the validity and sensitivity of her output over the past 30 years. 

In my eyes (a masculine eye I consede) there are not many other artists who have succeeded so well in decoding and reviewing the mysterious quality of the female rhythm.  By this I refer to the problem facing female artists in a still largely male dominated arena and the difficulty they may face in finding their own true voice, where so much in the peripheral vision of their sub-conscious remains masculine. In musical terms I would describe the female rhythm quite literally in the rhythm of Laura Nyro’s music, it is not the boom cha-ca throbbing rhythm of much music, which I would describe as having masculine origins, but is more various, harder to pin down and relies much more on the flight of the melody leading the rhythm rather than vice-versa, a bit like a very complex song thrush. 

Annette Messager’s work speaks to me on these terms; it is at once whimsical, delicate and lyrical but is just as likely to flip suddenly to a forlorn melancholy or an aggressive and voracious sexuality (akin to P J Harvey at her best) .  Quite simply, it was an intoxicating experience, liable to cause a man to well-up or have to sheepishly walk out of the gallery space like a teenager with his bag in front of his crotch.

Richters show was a different experience.  As a painter I can’t begin to explain the importance that this man has had in defining my thinking on this, the most complex of practices. 

I was stunned first of all by the sheer painterliness of his portraits which I had been led to believe were much more closely reliant on their photographic roots.  It made my heart sing to see the tensions created on the surfaces between flat areas and thick gloopy masses, and I left feeling utterly dejected at the prospect that there was no way of topping his achievements. 

The thing that struck me was the deep expression and sensitivity within the clarity of his vision, by maintaining such a cold stance in the face of ideology I was wary that by seeing his works close up they would hold nothing more than all the other second rate photorealists that have been and gone.  I should have known this wouldn’t be the case, from looking at his abstracts you can clearly tell he has a deep relationship with the matter of paint, only with his portraits he plays with the lines of his diatribes so cleverly.  When talking about emptying out the idealogy of his work he succeeds in creating works that are more isolated in their completeness, even when they appear to be very similar, each image seems to have been approached successfully on its own terms and the reason for painting it is found within the diversity of one’s personality.  One image finds its sleazy core, another, a surreal whimsy whilst another finds a delicate tenderness and this is all in one room where the curators have hung them because of the similarity of their handling.

A painter par excellence, I can’t rate this show highly enough.  I want to go back.

Jeff Walls photography often makes deliberate and open references to past imagery. Often the imagery is from the Canon of Western history painting. This is the case here, with the nod being towards Delacroix’s ‘The Death of Sardanapalus’.

Wall does not borrow the specfics of the subject matter. Instead he takes something at its core, and then also pulls on the formal advances of the images.

Delacroix’s sub ject is of a meglomanic king, determined to outlive all his possesions. Aware of his impending death he orders all his possesions, horses and wives included, to be destroyed. The manic and uncontrolled violence is told through the deep reds which pervade the whole image, the violence and pace of the brushwork and the web of curving lines which mount up the picture plane. The whole image seems to have been tiled up, as if collapsing and pouring down across the surface.

Wall tells a parallel story but set in a contemporary, real and domestic setting.  It seems to be a story of domestic tensions having exploded in a fit of rage. We are left with the aftermath, once the cast (presumably of two) have left the stage. It is like the scene of a crime.

The red stays, filling the image with that sense of violent passion and lose of control. There is a strnage balance between chaos and stillness. The nature of photography and the abscence of any action or figures gives a sesne of increadible stillness. yet the chaotic spread of colour and objects creates a pattern of energy, as if remembering the recent past.

Wall sits comfortably and intellignetly on the boundary of painting and photography. He is a photographer in that he takes photographs, recording real visions. Yet he fits closely to a tradition of image making more traditiaonlly assocaited with painting. For the vision is constructed, it is composed, it is a synthetic ordering of parts. In this sense it has the theatricality and artificiality of painting.

Interview by Tom de Freston with Antonio Santin.Painter, born in Madrid, 1978, currently lives and works in Berlin. Exhibits broadly internationally.With many thanks to Antonio for the time and thought put into the following answers Read the rest of this entry »

 This waffled blurb could actually become something far more coherent, I could like to spend some time later looking into this notion…

Throughout the History of painting light has played a central and crucial role. A painters ability to excavate light from the stuff of paint has been a continuous fascination. The nature of the search and the type of light found has shifted, as if in some dialectical discussion with the zeitgeist itself.

 It seems that before now the various incarnations of light have tended to be the product of a meaningful, often spiritual search.

 A discussion with a friend yesterday made me reconsider in more depth the changing role of light in paint. He commented how the invention of electriicty must have significantly changed our relationship with light. before this point its existence, from either than sun or flame (notably in the form of candlelight) seems to be rooted to various religious belief systems. The sun as a symbol of God’s creative power, the candle as a ritulisitc tool in a various guises.

 We need only look to the type of light seen in medieval manuscripts or renaissance nad post renaissanace paintings. The type shifts hugely from an illuminated manuscript to a late Titian alterpiece or late Rembrandt self protriat. In eahc case, however, the light seems to glow from an inner depth, it seems to be conujured the medium itself. It seems weighted with a deep and moving spirituality. The light itself seems to be a manifestation of a deep and profound set of beliefs, imbued with a spiritual energy.

The invention of the electrical light bulb is a facet of the enlightenments wider program. Technological and scientific developments led to the deconstruction of previous belief systems and the arrival of doubt. Man repositioned himself as the centre of his own universe.

 The late modernist program seems, to me anyway, to be an attempt to find a new set of absolute ideals by which to measure ourselves and lead our lives. If we look to the late painting’s of Rothko it seems that this is one of the purest examples of this search for a new spirituality, a humanisitc one in his case.  The result is a form of light no less powerful, no less imbued and rising from the paint itself, than that seen in any religious altarpiece. The transformation of paint into light runs parallel and the notion of light as a motif of a deep spirituality continues. The context and framework of such a belief system seems more fragile, having been searched for rather than being the proudct of a certainty.

The biggest shift, however, for me, seems to be in the light of paintings beyond this date. The attack on the ideals and monolithic structure of the modernist program, as a whole, has led to the fracture and doubting period of postmodernism.

Along with this more philosophical and wide ranging shift have been contiued developments in the existence of light itself. We now have light everywhere and in various false forms. Television screens, computer screens, cities which never sleep in dark, mobile phones flashing constantly. We are surroudnign by a constant hum and glow of artifiically created light. Running parallel to this is a seeming lack of any credible and singular belief system to hold onto. Everything has been attacked, deconstructed, doubted and exposed as bankrupt. It feels, to me at least, a fragile and fasle existence, empty of any sense of divine prescence.

It seems both false and impossible to have the kind of light in painting now which exists, with great power, in a Rmebrandt or Rothko. Rather our light is more superficial, more surface based, more artificial. it is the light in a Daniel Richter painting, figure glows as if radioactive, burning form inside but due to some nuclear disfigurment or x-ray malfunction rather than any divine prescence.

Or the figures of Neo Rausch, a sickly sweet green or yellow glow often emminates, as if form within. it seems powerful and moving, but consciously false and unreal.

I think it is this form of light, deep and movign, yet false and artificial, which i want to imbue my figures with.

The Whale is back in town!!  Yeehaa its been a while.  Hello fans, and hello strangers, lets acquaint ourselves and be friends.

Painters who strive to remain open in their practice, where the act of painting avoids finding a solution/meaning sometimes until the very last brushstroke.  What techniques and systems do artists develop in order to reach this aim?  Matthias Weischer, Neo Rauch, Phoebe Unwin etc.

A painter whose context appears to remain open right to the death is the type of artist I most want to emulate.  Those decisions which can totally alter the direction of a work, when the work seems to be heading down a set path are the bravest of decisions, and you hear the great artists of the past talk about these moments in interviews and books.  These are defining moments in a works trancendence because they move apparently from an area of received wisdom into area’s where they end up discovering their own wisdom and resolution.

Phoebe Unwin, whose show was recently on at Wilkinson gallery in London tries to solve this issue by coming to the painting with no preconceptions of what she is going to make, this sounds like it could be a bit of a short cut or fake out, although actually when you try to follow the same path, you realise how hard it is to successfully do.  In essence the whole journey becomes about trying to resolve a problem whilst simultaneously denying yourself any notion of what it is you are trying to resolve.  Any point at which you begin to find a comfort zone, you force yourself out of it, towards the unknown.

Matthias Weischer achieves something similar, taking on board Cezanne’s principle of the questioning eye to constantly reinterpret and alter the spaces which he is creating.  Objects resolve only to be lost in memory and time.  It is interesting for me to think whether this solution in the soluble is indeed found through the constant questioning and rejigging of the spaces and objects, or whether its all in fact a clever illusion, where Weischer paints in objects, fully aware that he will again paint them out, leaving only traces of their existence.  It is probably somewhere inbetween, much like the case of the happy accident, where a good painter is able to create an environment in which he/she knows certain effects can be created, without ever having full control over the outcome.  Neo Rauch exists again within a similar space, however, he seems to be reacting almost immediately as the painting is being produced, it becomes much more about the intuitive, autonomous reaction to what is going on at that very moment.  As such, it is completely plausible that a tree can pop up sticking horizontally out of the side of the painting in an instantaneous reaction to the composition that is being developed, and then will alter the rest of the composition from then on, as Rauch strives to weave a certain sense into his dream images.

I come to this problem, just as I start to take more of an interest in the sculptural scenes that I am producing to aid in my paintings reality.  And so, the painting and sculpture are forming a symbiotic relationship, neither directly copying the other, but being produced at the same time in order to constantly throw up interesting opportunities and opening which the other disipline can take advantage of.

I was reading an iteresting catalogue essay on Daniel richter’s painting’s last night. One point in particular stood out.

In talking about the comedy in his work it comments that nothing is funnier than the presentation of the sole of a figures foot.

This seemed a ludicrous statment. Then i was looking at some images I have been making recently, of figures squirming figures on beds. A number of them have twisted and contorted in such a way that the sole of there foot is presented both towards the ceiling and the viewer. They do seem to be the figures who have more wit. Yet i just can’t work out why this would, or perhaps is, funny.

As contemporary image makers I think Crewsdon and Rauch are in the same mode.

They are both products of an approach which seeks to find the unique properties of their medium (be it painting or photography) but which borrows liberally from other art forms in this quest. Filmaking, collage, graphics, advertising are all disciplines which inform their practise.

 In both cases they seek a certain kind of narrative. They are fully aware of the limits and tendencies of narrative in still images. They avoid the temptation to play literature at the game of unfolding a story over time. Instead they make the most of the causal ambiguity inherant in the stilled moment.

For both artists the narratives are always of a poetic sort. That is we are but into a situation where the mood, the drama, the sense of tension are palpably present. Yet the specific nature and context of the scene is not completely clear. How a figure relates to its surrounding, how the various parts combine to a coherent whole and what has happened before or will happen after are unclear.

 The lack of clairty is played upon to give a heightened sense of tension and unease. Crewsdon’s work, for instance, could come straight form a scene in American Beauty or Magnolia. It like some Hooperesque image  but modernised and laced in excess.

In both cases we are left with the sense that this is a point of dramatic tension. That something is on the verge of collapsing, imploding or to be revealed. The moments, in Rauchs particuarly, are constantly left in a state of flux, as if everything could collapse in front of our eyes.

For Rauch’s saturated and unreal colour range read Crewsdon’s move style lighting. They are the formal tools they use to find theatre. It is theatre (in terms of performance, play and a sense of tragedy) which is the central tennant linking their practise.