Review of Twenty

A review of Twenty in today's Irish Times.

Twenty

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 text written 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."

From The Death of the Moth and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf. Copyright © 1942 by Harcourt, Inc.

Swarms the Moth, 2010, oil and collage on linen, 160x180cm, collection Irish Museum Of Modern Art.

Yesterday in the Studio...

Nocturnal Walk

"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"

Fernando Pessoa from The Book of Disquiet.

New York, the open box and getting beyond the surface...

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

New York

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).

André Derain, The Sunken Path, 1906, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

André Derain, The Sunken Path, 1906, oil on canvas (detail).

Old geezer painters...

“In painting, youth will only be granted to the most deserving of old geezers.”

Jean Bazaine (quoted by Gwenaël Kerlidou in his article about the painter Eugene Leroy in the Brooklyn Rail)

Book Event

Open publication - Free publishing - More invite

Three drawings...

Rustle (divide), 2011, coloured pencil on paper, 32.5x25cm




Rustle (night), 2011, coloured pencil on paper, 32.5x25cm





Rustle (Rose), 2011, coloured pencil on paper, 32.5x25cm

Some recent drawings...

Cluster, 2011, coloured pencil on paper, 32.5 x 25 cm

Cluster (red), 2011, coloured pencil on paper, 32.5 x 25 cm

Branching, 2011, coloured pencil & collage on paper, 32.5 x 25 cm

Interview

A new interview about my work can be found on the following blog:

http://standardinterview.blogspot.com/

Also follow the link from there to another blog of interest on contemporary painting:

http://fundamentalpainting.blogspot.com/

Roulette

"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".

Francis Bacon

New Paintings

Holding (for J. Fautrier), 2011, oil and Collage on linen, 180x160cm

Detail of Holding (for J. Fautrier)

Passage, 2011, oil and enamel on linen and wood, 50x45cm

Stages, 2011, oil on linen, 160x180cm

Swarms the Moth, 2010, oil and collage on linen, 160x180cm

The Tree (deliberation), 2010, oil and collage on linen, 128x106cm

Detail of The Tree (deliberation)

DRAWING NOW PARIS

A selection of new drawings will be on view with Guest Room Contemporary Art at "Le Salon du Dessin Contemporain/Drawing Now" at the Caroussel du Louvre from 25 to 28 March 2011:

Informal Relations Publication

Open publication - Free publishing - More works on paper

Esta mañana en el estudio...

Some pictures of my studio this morning. I have been working on larger paintings.

Bones, branches, sinews, overlapping swathes of colour, collage.... structures of pain and pleasure. The touch along the line - a curious affirmation in doubt.

Informal Relations

I am delighted to have work included in "Informal Relations" a project curated by Scott Grow at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art:

INFORMAL RELATIONS contemporary abstract works on paper December 3rd - January 15th Opening reception is December 3rd from 6pm - 11pm Gallery hours are Thursday - Saturday 11am - 6pm The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (iMOCA) is pleased to announce the group exhibition, Informal Relations curated by Indianapolis based artist and curator Scott Grow. Informal Relations presents recent abstract works on paper by a diverse group of international artists, and focuses on the diversity of practices-approaches, styles, and intentions-- within painting and abstraction today. The exhibition's title refers to kind the "informal relations" artists have with one another, their predecessors, with the modernist tradition, the future, and even with their own work. While works on paper may stand as finished works, they are also often places for exploration, thinking, planning, taking chances, and failure. Abstract art is challenging because of its concrete and/or metaphoric nature which refuses expected representation, its defiance of language and absolute interpretation, and because it requires the viewer's engagement and participation. And because abstraction is not a singular school or style, the term itself is not necessarily helpful in identifying the qualities or concepts embodied in the art object: artists often naturally have shared and conflicting objectives for the art they make. Abstraction, which lends itself to various aesthetic, conceptual, and political stances, is broadly multiphasic, utilitarian, and flexible. Each artist presented here confronts, investigates, and presents a definition of abstract painting true to his or her materials, motifs, and sensibilities. Informal Relations explores the similarities, differences, and connections between these artists, their dialog with abstraction's history, and various directions forward for abstraction. This exhibition presents the works of 32 artists from across the United States and abroad. Participating artists include: Patrick Alt, Chris Ashley, Patrick Berran, Kadar Brock, Matthew Deleget, Laura Fayer, Keltie Ferris, Patrick Michael Fitzgerald, Connie Goldman, Brent Hallard, Rachel Hayes, Jeffrey Cortland Jones, Michael Just, Matthew Langley, Jim Lee, Rossana Martinez, Rob Nadeau, Melissa Oresky, Paul Pagk, Danielle Riede,Maximilian Rödel , Eric Sall, Susan Scott, Gabriel J. Shuldiner, Jessica Snow, Henning Straßburger, Garth Weiser, Wendy White, Paige Williams, Douglas Witmer, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung and John Zurier. For further information visit, www.indymoca.org

Things Read...Macbeth

...Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Macbeth, act V, scene 5

Things read...Thomas Bernhard

"I now had an opportunity to examine my grandfather's assertions. I had an obsessive desire to gather the evidence in my head, and so I began a strenuous search for the evidence, tracking it down in every direction, in every corner of the city of my youth and its surroundings. My grandfather had been right in his judgment of the world: it was indeed a cesspit, but one which engendered the most intricate and beautiful forms if one looked into it long enough, if one's eye was prepared for such strenuous and microscopic observation"

Thomas Bernhard

A few thoughts (doubts)...

How should we understand the political in art?
Everything is political on one level, or so it is said.
To be very wary of systems though… in thought too (My love for Pascal). And is it possible to do this in painting? Painting as something forever renegade?

Critical theory can become an orthodoxy in its own right. Before one knows it you are dancing with the devil.

We have seen that everything can become a commodity. Even ideas.
Is this an absolute? How determining is this fact? What status can things (eg. Paintings) have outside the commodity realm?
Painting has its inner worlds; its history makes it problematic but also provides the conventions and frameworks to sustain it (problematically).

Art needs to be problematic. Its very nature is problematic. Does this problematic nature need to be tempered by existential factors? What about pleasure?
The pleasure of making? The pleasure of viewing? Why shun these?

Painting is not one thing. It is not static. It is a confluence (a meeting place?).
Painting (as I see it) is pre-political. It is not sustained by circular critical theory in this sense. Can it lay the ground for kinds of experience from which we can learn (politically)? Crucially, painting can be a place where we can interact on many levels, especially at a phenomological level: forces, energy, synthesis, destruction, creation, openness, flow…