GM: Some of your most recent paintings on cut board have this floating quality to them, almost as if they have emerged from the tapestry of pre-existing marks on the wall of your in-house studio, crystallised for a moment like clouds before disappearing again into the fertile ground of weathered domestic surfaces. There is also a feeling of vast space within these “cutouts” because of your use of colour to create perspective, yet the images dissolve into abstraction as soon as we delve too deep. A sort of balance is achieved, as the objects teeter a few centimetres from the wall, offering themselves up to us as illusionary planes for gazing into.
The work seems so integrated within its surrounding space that I wonder if you are thinking about different readings emerging from its eventual displacement, especially in relation to a more sanitised, traditional art-space with its pristine white walls.
EC: Actually, the shapes at first came by themselves as I was working for a friend in a big project where there were a lot of leftover materials that I ended up partly taking back home. I realised that some of the wood trimmings had something that interested me, something that reminded me of scenography and painted shiftable backgrounds. I reused some of these leftovers for a workshop I did at the Macro, later realizing that something had missed the point : the shapes themselves were the object of attention and the formal investigation didn’t feel resolved. Now I’m taking similar shapes and asking them to act like supports for these imaginary vistas, and it’s pushing me to explore painting for the first time. This is my first venture from sculpture to more two dimensional concerns and I am really aware of how much I don’t know about the preoccupations and history of this medium, let alone the implications of a shift of context in relation to the objects I am creating. What I do know is that I’m much more comfortable painting inside the borders of these shapes than I would be within the constraints of a more traditional squared support.
Even though the surface area seems small for these illusionary images, I am interested in that difficulty, where some things are revealed and others are not. I like the idea that maybe the borders of the image are closing and the viewer is taking some last glances at her surroundings.
In terms of the wall-markings and how they affect my work, my studio is full of these marks, even some drawings done sometime in the 20th century by somebody who added a wallpaper to the room, which I later removed with my flatmate. All of these scratches come from different actions from all these people I didn’t meet, and sometimes I feel the desire to spend an infinite amount of time studying them and their complex morphologies, trying to guess what caused them. Maybe in a parallel life I could have recorded them all and spent my whole life organising them by similitudes, by isomorphic growths, by differences. The fact is they are part of my daily reality and without even knowing it, I absorb them.
Images courtesy of artist’s studio
GM: In terms of painterly devices and colour choices, the tentative brushstrokes and almost sickly palette creates this atmosphere of a dream revealed, something ominous always lurking, veiled yet in plain sight. The smoke-like wispy quality of the higher and lower edges of these works jolts me away from a comfortable appreciation of what is being depicted into a state of soft vigilance. Something doesn’t feel quite right, the painting is too precariously placed, the edges so thin they are almost blades. Of course, this is only my interpretation. Could you shed some light on your own thought process connecting the supports to the painted scenes?
EC: Actually in a way I think you are right about the sharpness and precarious edges, I never thought about it in this way. The reason I ended up here is that by looking at the leftover scraps from the job I was working on for my friend Leonard, I noticed the quality that this wooden material had to make a clear line when cut; it had the neatness of a precise drawing or the edge of a piece of paper. That’s what interested me at first. I am pairing up the sharp line of the borders of the piece with the out-of-focus painted inside to create a contrast that starts to do something…
The way I see these works is similar to the situation of being in a conversation with someone when everything makes perfect sense and it starts to get a bit boring and you both feel like you have something else to say but can’t quite break the fluidity of sense – and then suddenly you feel an image or a memory or a joke hitting you that needs to be vocalised. There is the incursion of this urgent something that once is out there searches for somewhere to land. When the other person doesn’t receive it or understand it, this thing floats in the air – a gaffe, a blunder.
There’s a part of a book by Adam Phillip’s called Attention Seeking (2019) that I’ve been reading recently where he talks about the gaffe as an unreceived and perhaps unwelcome message that has entered the conversation very suddenly, (or maybe I’m confusing myself with something expressed in Pierre André Boutang’s documentary Deleuze from A to Z). Not that these paintings are jokes, but I am hoping to make them act in a similar way, as disruptive devices that intervene within a room like a gaffe intercedes a tranquil sentence, if that makes sense.
I’ve also been thinking about renaissance palas or orthodox icons in relation to this body of work, for being both serious and funny objects to me. The serious thing is that they have to be portable devices for painting, because canvases hadn’t been invented yet. If calamity hit for example, you had to be able to quickly pack these up and bring them with you, as they were also believed to be of great spiritual importance. Although the function of these objects was quite strict, the idea of these paintings being carried around like portable devices for some kind of other dimension makes me laugh.
GM: They are also like speech bubbles gone wrong, in a very obvious cartoon-like way. It’s almost like you collect all these moments that haven’t hit home, which perhaps explains the feeling of uncomfortableness, of awkwardness, of something too personal or too true and sincere that has emerged when no one wants to hear about it or finds it minimally amusing. These works also feel like solid failed metaphors, like physical anecdotes gone askew. They speak of humour perhaps but maybe a sort of humour lost – the tracings of a story between people that has been launched, looks for someone to receive it but pathetically runs out of steam before it does. I also like this image that if something happens, you have to take all your paintings and run.
EC: HA, Yes exactly
Courtesy of artist’s studio.
GM: I am curious to know how these sculptural painterly works are coming about, do they start from an original desire or image? Are they planned? Do the paintings and the outer shapes appear together or does one precede the other in the formation of your ideas? What have been the visual and written references surrounding the making of these works?
EC: I prepare the supports before, starting from drawings and then projecting the shapes on the wood. I then stare at them for a lot of time and at some point I just give up and start reading something blandly related or I sketch or I look for things. And then days or weeks go by and one day I feel like I can enter the image, and then without much planning I try to be with the situation I am painting. The moments where I apparently work the hardest are very sparse in comparison to the majority of the time that I spend reading, doing nothing and feeling very frustrated in the studio. Then I realize that those moments of non-work come back into the paintings somehow and are also very important.
For this quarantine and while I work I’ve been reading Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Michel Foucault’s The Care of the Self (1984), Anton Chekhov’sThe Steppe (1888), John Ashbery’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) and Natalia Ginsburg’s The Road to the City(1949), and Family Lexicon (1964). I am especially interested in Ginsburg’s work and am planning to read more of it. I am fascinated by her dry and sharp writing style and the way she approaches her characters, describing individuals, their relationships and how they coexist with both their close social group and the larger power structures during, before and straight after the war. Perhaps, beyond really liking her testimony as a writer, I am finding it poignant that she seems to be describing the beginning of a time that many feel is coming to an end right now.
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