The Irish Museum of Modern Art recently acquired my painting Swarms the Moth for their collection. This painting along with Domingo (also in the IMMA collection) and five recent drawings are currently on display in a group exhibition entitled Twenty curated by the director Enrique Juncosa. Swarms the Moth as a title was inspired by a textwritten by the German expressionist painter Franz Marc. For the opening event of the show I arranged a reading by the actress Edel Murphy. For this I chose a text by Virginia Wolf entitled The Death of the Moth. I was moved by this text for many reasons. It seemed like a poetic description of my process and how that might be bound up with our obscure existential condition. Here is an extract from the text (full version here):
"The same energy which inspired the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and even, it seemed, the lean bare-backed downs, sent the moth fluttering from side to side of his square of the windowpane. One could not help watching him. One, was, indeed, conscious of a queer feeling of pity for him. The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth’s part in life, and a day moth’s at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meager opportunities to the full, pathetic. He flew vigorously to one cor- ner of his compartment, and, after waiting there a second, flew across to the other. What remained for him but to fly to a third corner and then to a fourth? That was all he could do, in spite of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea. What he could do he did. Watching him, it seemed as if a fiber, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body. As often as he crossed the pane, I could fancy that a thread of vital light became visible. He was little or nothing but life."
"Who even knows what he thinks or wants? Who knows what he is to himself? How many things music suggests, and we're glad they can never be! How many things the night recalls, and we weep, and they never even were! As if a long, horizontal peace had raised its voice, the risen wave crashes and then calms, and dribbling can be heard up and down the invisible beach. How much I die if I feel for everything! How much I feel if I meander this way, bodiless and human, with my heart as still as a beach, and the entire sea of all things beating loud and derisive, then becoming calm, on the night that we live, on my eternal nocturnal walk to the seashore"
I had a number of very interesting conversations with artists in New York. The ideas sometimes revolved around certain questions... most notably the need for painting to have a relationship with reality and experience as opposed to painting as a kind of exclusive painting language game. On one level it is a language game of course but I increasingly see its meaning as a much more layered and open. The question is, what do we have left that we can draw on as a source and how do we go about making paintings that do this?
Mark Grotjahn is showing nine paintings at Anton Kern Gallery (the show has been titled Nine Faces). The images consist of curving lines that seem to be painted with a palette knife. The lines accumulate into layered, woven swathes of paint, which somehow conjure up faces and eyes. It is exhilarating to behold them but I do sense a danger in these paintings which is that the technique might become too assured and predictable. Editing (so crucial) is always a challenge because one can never get enough distance from ones work to be objective. What does one release from the studio? Why is one painting so much better than another very similar one? How should the work be presented? I think this show might have been much more intense with just five paintings.
Mark Grotjahn Untitled (Vertical Almond face 41.04), 2010 Oil on cardboard mounted on linen 108 1/8 x 73 1/4 inches Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, NY
Mark Grotjahn Untitled (Distinguished Multiple V's Late Monet Face 41.34), 2010 Oil on cardboard mounted on linen 119 3/8 x 84 3/8 inches Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, NY
Installation view Anton Kern Gallery, 2011 Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, NY
Jean Fautrier knew that paintings could become paintings of paintings. Style then becomes everything and the inherent risk of kitsch and self-parody are ever present. Fautrier devised strategies to navigate this problem. The English painter Katy Moran does so as well. Initially seductive, the paintings she has on view at Andrea Rosen Gallery look like excercises in a certain kind of post-war European painting. They play the painting game. The problem is that if painting is a closed box the air inside can get sterile. It is necessary to create small openings in the box to let life in, sunlight, rain, the smell of the street or the earth, the cries of a child or the sounds of the night. Suffering, pain, sadness, joy, love, sex… these too of course, not necessarily as representation but as a source.
Katy Moran at home with mickey 2011 acrylic and collage on canvas 19.88 x 17.09 inches (50.5 x 43.4 cm) courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery
Installation View at Andrea Rosen Gallery courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery
View through the window of a corner cafe, Union Square.
I spent some time in New York this month. I still have the sensation of seeing certain paintings by Bonnard in the Metropolitan Museum and at MOMA fresh in my memory. I’m still trying to articulate to myself just what it is about Bonnard that makes such an impression on me.
Pierre Bonnard, The Dressing Room, 1914, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum Of Art.
Painting is never just a visual phenomenon. It is about the body and how the mind’s eye becomes physical through touch. Bonnard seems to rebuild the world in painting. He uses certain painterly components of a certain kind, limited in their range but with sufficient variety to enable him to reconfigure (at the equivalent of an atomic level) the nature of things - light and material become one thing. A typical 'Bonnardian' head is painted in exactly the same way as say a jug on a table which that same painted head seems to contemplate. Bonnard had his own very specific touch which had its origins in his bodily being and the multitude of indefinable qualities that made it up.
Painterly components governed by sensibility (I use this word with its explicit links to our all our senses). I have my own supply of painting components to use of course. Whether they are painted marks, collaged forms or materials, drawn lines, accumulations etc. they all present themselves in a painting as a kind of combined energy. There are gestures, but also placements, idle deposits or very precise positioning of elements. I think I can finally understand that a painting is a figure – not just a figure on a ground but the painting as a figure in its own right which is both concealed and disclosed in the process of making.
All the photographs in this post are my own. I also looked at paintings by Courbet, Braque, Derain and Matisse.
Pierre Bonnard, The Dressing Room, 1914, oil on canvas (detail).
Pierre Bonnard, The Dressing Room, 1914, oil on canvas (detail).
Pierre Bonnard, After the Bath, 1910, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum Of Art.
Pierre Bonnard, After the Bath, 1910, oil on canvas (detail).
Georges Braque, The Garden Chair, 1947-60, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum Of Art.
Georges Braque, The Garden Chair, 1947-60, oil on canvas (detail).
Georges Braque, The Garden Chair, 1947-60, oil on canvas (detail).
"Well, again, I don't think one really knows whether it's a run of luck or whether it's instinct working in your favour or whether it's instinct and consciousness and everything intermingling and working in your favour".
A selection of new drawings will be on view with Guest Room Contemporary Artat "Le Salon du Dessin Contemporain/Drawing Now" at the Caroussel du Louvre from 25 to 28 March 2011:
