QUESTIONS FOR SIMON CALLERY, LAWRENCE CARROLL, ANGELA DE LA CRUZ, AND ONYA MCCAUSLAND: ENANTIODROMIA PART I AND II
 2014
Abstract Critical

Questions for Angela de la Cruz and Simon Callery: Enantiodromia Part I

by Sam Cornish

abstract critical asked a series of seven questions to the four artists currently showing in the FOLD Gallery exhibition, Enantiodromia. Below are the responses by Angela de la Cruz, Simon Callery, Lawrence Carroll, and Onya McCausland. Enantiodromia is on until the 10th of May.

 

Angela de la Cruz

Do you see your work as continuing or rejecting the tradition of painting?

I am continuing the tradition of painting. I use very good quality, traditional, materials. It is very important for me that everything is made to a very high standard so for that reason I use quite traditional methods. I believe that if you want to continue the language of painting, you have to use very good technical understanding and you have to know what you are talking about in terms of the history of painting. If you know that, then you can choose to reject it or break it.

What does the word ‘image’ mean to you?

I want to project an image of what my work is about, even if it’s quite abstract physically. I impress figuration on the outside of the painting through my titles, which are quite anthropomorphic.

The works in the exhibition tend to the monochromatic – what do you think lies behind this avoidance of complex colour?

I use the scheme of minimalism because it suits my work and my language. I often use the colours of what is currently in fashion, which I follow quite a lot. I believe fashion is a reflection of the economical times.

Are you an abstract artist?

Yes, I am an abstract artist but only aesthetically. I use the same colours most of the time, and the same shapes because I quite like to recycle everything so the works can be transformed into another work, which is quite traditional – artists have done that since the beginning of time.

Who are your antecedents?

Robert Ryman, Lucio Fontana, Luc Tuymans, Marcel Duchamp, a mix of Minimalist and Arte Povera artists. But I am influenced a lot by film directors such as Luis Buñuel, Jacques Tati, Lars von Triers, Herzog, at the moment I like Wes Anderson a lot. Fashion (especially the Belgian designers – Dries van Noten and Martin Margiela), literature, politics and everyday life are also great influences.

If you accept the idea that your work is three-dimensional or extended painting what distinguishes it from sculpture?

Nothing.

Why do you make physical objects when the whole breadth of the ever-expanding field is open to you?

The physicality of objects interests me, and I believe it is still relevant.

 

Simon Callery

Do you see your work as continuing or rejecting the tradition of painting?

Without a doubt I see my work as continuing a tradition of painting. Although, I don’t think it is possible to talk about ‘the tradition’ of painting without revealing the fact that this tradition has many strands and facets – some are deeply conservative and others progressive and experimental.

I would like to think I have learnt from and share the ambitions of the painters from the past who took risks and challenged the accepted conventions in order to keep painting vital. This is the strand of the tradition that I really value.

What does the word ‘image’ mean to you?

Magazines, newspapers, computers, mobile phones, hand held devices, televisions and cinema screens are all full of images. So are our roadsides, train stations, airports, shops, and city walls. Painting has undoubtedly contributed to this image-dominated environment because it is the medium that drove the development and production of the image. I would argue, as evidence of its current vitality, that it also the medium best placed to critique the way we currently use images and may be best placed to offer an alternative.

The works in the exhibition tend to the monochromatic – what do you think lies behind this avoidance of complex colour?

There is something idiotic about the sight of the painter’s palette with a long row of equally squeezed out colours, in a line, ready to make a picture. What I avoid by restricting colour is the dilemma of endless choice.

When I think of colour, I think of the different organic material or geology we dig up, grind down, burn or dissolve to transform into coloured pigments. I use them as a material element alongside the other materials that I use when I am making a painting. This can be wood, canvas, linen, aluminium or steel, threads, cord, pencil, paper, glue, screws and nails. When they come together as a painting, they form a complex of colour.

Are you an abstract artist?

Up to a point.

We need a new term. The term ‘abstract artist’ makes me think of the great experiment in painting at the beginning of the C20 in Paris more than anything else. By the time we get to Barnett Newman and the late 1940s the use of ‘abstract’ is inaccurate and misleading.

Who are your antecedents?

In relation to this show they are Lawrence Carroll and Angela de la Cruz.

I saw a shelf-like painting by Lawrence Carroll in the Panza Collection in Varese in the early 90s that I just couldn’t tear myself away from. I had not seen a painting that looked so unlike a conventional painting and yet was so totally and convincingly a painting. It was so full of suggestions of exciting possibilities of paintings to come.

A little later I remember watching open mouthed as Angela de la Cruz kicked a painting to life across the floor in her Kings Cross studio in London. This was at a time when I thought you should only really handle paintings with white gloves to keep the edges clean.

If you accept the idea that your work is three-dimensional or extended painting what distinguishes it from sculpture? 

What distinguishes my paintings from sculpture is that a painter has made them. No sculptor could make my paintings.

Actually, this is a question I get asked quite a lot. It is as if the success or failure of the painting depends on the answer. On reflection, that this seems to be an important question says more about a society that values specialization – in business, in education and of course, in art (otherwise how else could you market it?) – as a sign of success; to have a specialized product is ‘better’.

Yes, my paintings share qualities with sculpture and I embrace it. I am much more interested in collaboration, in sharing ideas and revealing shared common ground and ambitions with other art forms and disciplines. To be able to move around a painting and to navigate and explore it as lived experience, in common with three-dimensional objects like sculpture, is an example of this.

Why do you make physical objects when the whole breadth of the ever-expanding field is open to you?

 My best work emerges from working with materials. The ideas that keep me awake at night evaporate during the day to be replaced by ideas based in the realities of what materials can or can’t do and how we do or don’t respond to them.

I make physical paintings – because I am interested in the viewer as a physical being – a fully sentient, inquisitive, perceptive, decision-making, information-processing, emotional, idiosyncratic thinking being. I want the painting to involve and engage the full attention of that person.

 

Questions for Lawrence Carroll and Onya McCausland: Enantiodromia Part II

by Sam Cornish

 

Lawrence Carroll

Do you see your work as continuing or rejecting the tradition of painting? 

I am a painter and I have always thought of myself as a painter, that is what I simply do. I am always thinking what I can add to the thread of painting, what I can give it and leave there, this is what has always been important to me.

We leave something if we are lucky for the next generation to take and unfold into their own work. This is the thread that I am interested in continuing.

What does the word ‘image’ mean to you?

Nothing. I don’t think nor do I work in those ways of placing my work in the brackets of categories. I try to get away as far as I can from what I call the “noise” around making a painting. To be as independent and as free as possible from what I see as the restrictive nature of language surrounding painting and aimed at painting. I look at the vast landscape of painting and the world around me, and that is where I am inspired and moved to make what I do.

The works in the exhibition tend to the monochromatic – what do you think lies behind this avoidance of complex colour?

In 1984 I started to use this color I have using since that time when I moved to NYC from LA. My idea was to find a color as close to the color of canvas that I could find.

It allowed me to always paint away what was there, erase my path and start over. I always viewed this as an extremely optimistic belief that I could “always begin again”, that painting was never stalled and always had a potential to move forward.

For me there was never a plan to avoid a more complex color using your terms. As I see the colors I use to be deeply complex.

Are you an abstract artist?

I work between worlds, not only the abstract.

Who are your antecedents?

There are many, as for most artists. And they surround you and keep you company at different times during your life. Some are always around you, some visit awhile and then they are gone. I see them as stepping stones that in a way give you permission and support and shoulders to stand on, until you can do that alone and find all you need.  I think this is always the case for me, as I am always coming across artists and maybe I had seen them before but I was not ready or was unable to see what I needed from them. The door is always open. How could it not be?

I absorb things around me, and store them away and I never know when they will come out. This is the complex beauty of painting for me. I never know when these things I have absorbed will come out and I how I will use them in some way. What I do know is that I need to be in the studio, I need to be fully engaged in the studio. It is not something that simply comes to me, it is something I have to create, a place and room for them to arrive.

I work in cycles, in groups of paintings, this is always something I have done. For me it is a process and this process takes time and this time I give to the work draws me deeper and deeper in and it is in this place that something happens. It does not happen the same way all the time, this I am thankful for, as frustrating as it is. I simply trust my nature and in knowing what I need to find something. I am always seeing more in others’ work and that opens doors to ideas the feelings that I want in my own work in my own way. What a blessing to have the company of others around, and to visit when you need.

If you accept the idea that your work is three-dimensional or extended painting what distinguishes it from sculpture? 

I always approach what I make from the mindset of a painter. My work is not always three dimensional, although part of the vocabulary of my work is. As I mentioned before I need to be free to move my paintings where they need to move, whether on the wall the floor or in a corner, folded up etc. This has been true since arriving in NYC in the early 80s. Also, looking at the object quality of John’s, for example his stacked Flag paintings, I was conscious of how Mondrian would bend his line around the edge of some of his paintings and this opened up for me the idea that I could extend the painting. That painting had more than the facade. That the painting could not be seen in one glance.

In contrast to what Frank Stella said “what you see is what you see” I felt that what you saw was not what you got. And in my early “box” and “page” paintings this was indeed the case. What you saw was not what you got. It was impossible to take in the whole painting at one time. And often the alternate view would change the initial view of “what you got”. This for me was also a way of slowing down the viewer. In the early box paintings there where 5 views and then later when I would cut into my paintings as a way of bringing drawing into my paintings there would be also the view of inside, which added not only another view of the painting but also another psychology.

Why do you make physical objects when the whole breadth of the ever expanding field is open to you?

I love painting  in all it complexities and challenges  and made a decision many years ago this is how I would spend my life, making paintings. I enjoy looking at art in all forms and genres, but in painting I find something deeply personal and human that I have not found in anything else that feeds and moves me and motivates me and fuels me to make paintings.

The more I paint the more I realize how it allows me to understand my world and to give meaning to it. What I also believe deeply that when a painting is successful it has taken something from me, and that something now lives in the painting. However one would describe what that is.

 

Onya McCausland

Do you see your work as continuing or rejecting the tradition of painting?

I have always defined myself as a painter, so part of the western ‘tradition’ but also a little wary of this language and these terms, because they can be used as shorthand to achieve a consensus about what makes something a painting or not, or someone a painter or not, it sets up false parameters. It is important that if an artist who makes films describes their work as painting then it is painting – I’m thinking of Sophie Michael’s work for example. Because the histories of painting – going back to marks on cave walls if you want – are so incredibly rich, expansive and diverse, contemporary painting doesn’t need to be limited to ‘conventional’ approaches to the medium, processes, methods or forms because there is too much packed into this history for it to tolerate confinement. My paintings are just fragments, they are just as connected with the landscape they originate in as they are to the wall of the gallery space, they are fragments that belong with other fragments; of journeys in my car to places, collecting materials, the lengthy processes of turning the materials into usable pigment, and then paint, writing and films recording these processes. The paintings are a mark along this trajectory. In this way the monochrome painting is simultaneously a fragment of landscape.

What does the word ‘image’ mean to you?

Images define and transform our relationship to the world, they are our codes, signals, signifiers, reflections, mirrors, guides, and they fill our world and make it meaningful. Images are inseparable from the physical properties of their material ‘carrier’. But images have become separated from the material site of their production, from the world of things. Digital material is just a particular new carrier of image, a new technology that can (and does) homogenize image, a new technology that has the capacity to manipulate, distort, control and co-modify images. We all own and carry our own portable image-viewers and image-makers that we project onto, informing and filtering constantly into the psychic world, flooding – like a saturation of disembodied abbreviated information. In this un-physical world – the virtual world – images are like ghosts, there and not ‘there’. Images are also our psychic guides in the dream-world, where complex layers of imagery are absorbed into the unconscious from every waking moment of looking and seeing and feeling and thinking. I wonder what the screen-world does to the dream-world.

The works in the exhibition tend to the monochromatic – what do you think lies behind this avoidance of complex colour?

For me colour is inseparable from its materiality, and this is very complicated – hue and saturation, reaction with light, how it responds to a particular site, among other things and how it responds to other colours in the surrounding world – a single colour is loaded with associations, changing affects, multiple histories, these to me are already very interesting. The addition of a second colour (in a painting) becomes a relationship between two colours. The relationship somehow supersedes/overrides their individual qualities – two colours together are more than the sum of their parts, combined they are something intangible and illusive, and amazing sometimes – I’ve just seen the Matisse exhibition, and Albers immediately comes to mind. But it is too complex for me; to explore a colour as a material in it all of its physical, sensory complexities alone is enough for now.

Are you an abstract artist?

I am uncomfortable with distinctions like abstract / figurative. I am working with the material world, moving stuff around in different ways. I think any attempt to explore, question, understand our relations with the world is fragmentary and abstract by its nature. The first marks on walls might be described as ‘abstract’, yet there was not necessarily any separation in meaning between these abstract geometric marks and the marks that describe say an antelope or a banana which are also abstractions really. All art is an abstraction, a fragment.

Who are your antecedents?

I’ve just seen the Matisse exhibition. It’s Matisse at the moment.

If you accept the idea that your work is three-dimensional or extended painting what distinguishes it from sculpture?

Hopefully you won’t back into it while observing it. Seriously though, nothing really. Just the term. And although this question doesn’t apply to me as much as the others, my approach to painting is close to sculpture in many ways; relations to three dimensional space and, to use one of sculpture’s original definitions, the physical processes of ‘carving and modeling’ and a particular relationship with the matter itself. But since my work has manifested through the material of colour which has a particular relationship to the history of painting, I define my work as painting.

Why do you make physical objects when the whole breadth of the ever expanding field is open to you?

Everything is physical. Even Metaphysics is physicalwhose origins are derived from the naming of the physical volumes of Aristotle’s writings that came after or beyond his works onPhysics. (“Metaphysics” derives from the Greek words μετά (metá, “beyond”, “upon” or “after”) and φυσικά (physiká, “physics”) Wikipedia