Untitled, 2019, Oil on canvas, 65 x 60cm
GM: If I had been able to say hello in person, I would have loved to ask you if the cigarettes in your work had any connection to Italy and Italian cinema, and I would have asked you about the time-frame that inspires you to make your paintings. They seem to me nostalgic yet very contemporary at the same time.
PB: That’s very true. They feel of a period that is difficult to define while also feeling like they are being made now. One of my tutors at the Slade used to say they looked like they were made yesterday, 150 years ago. Ha!
It’s not timelessness exactly but I am looking for them to exist in both some sort of now AND some kind of then and that happens kind of ‘instinctively on purpose’. It is quite difficult to force it, it tends to be more by intuition than design and perhaps is more related to the colour and especially the muted, crepuscular tonality. And probably me looking at a lot of paintings from certain periods, Belgian Symbolists, Spilliaert, Sickert, Decadent art and art deco/art nouveau, the Wiener Werkstätte designs of Dagobert Peche, Aubrey Beardsley. For about a year, all I looked at was Gwen John. I don’t think I ever got over that!
The cigarette/smoker theme does have something to do with that nostalgia you talked about. I could talk about smoking all day long! Like painting itself, smoking (cigarettes) now is an oddly quaint, nostalgic, belated, anachronistic activity [i]. It is also beautiful. I mean it looks beautiful and it is beautiful to paint, unlike vaping which makes everyone look like Gandalf and offers no satisfying whisps and curlicues! It is not as romantic; it contains none of the hints of exoticism even eroticism that haunt cigarette smoking. And of course, there are no real connections to death. Cigarettes are also deeply generous in terms of temporality. Cigarettes effectively gift you time. The few minutes it takes to smoke a cigarette, as any true smoker knows, is most satisfyingly enjoyed alone. Suddenly the smoker is absolutely in the moment, set within those few minutes, enjoying being alive and engaged in an activity that is both physical and cerebral because cigarettes for me are also an embodiment of contemplation. Again, this is where the connection to painting comes in because painting for me is absolutely a thinking space. The thinking that painting produces is often more interesting than the paintings themselves. I am interested in that ‘state’ of painting which exists somewhere between daydreaming and reading and the cigarette is a very loaded cipher for that. It also gives the figures in the paintings agency, they are ‘doing’ something (though smoking, also, isn’t actually doing anything) and, because of the allusion to thinking, it also gives them a sense of autonomy. To answer the first part of your question, not films so much in this case but certainly the remarkable chapter in Italo Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, one of the greatest of all Italian novels, where the protagonist, Zeno talks about the problem of the last cigarette. BUT I did see this film about the philosopher Hannah Arendt which had an impact on my thinking. It wasn’t a particularly great film, but they needed to show her thinking because it was kind of her job and the subject of the film, and they did that merely by having her in a room, on a couch, on her own, looking off into the distance and very slowly smoking a cigarette.
So, again, the cigarette is a manifestation of pensiveness, of thought and most importantly of all, of reverie, daydreaming.
[i] My friend Francesco told me about this oddly moving series of filmic portraits that the French director Alain Cavalier made in the 1980’s, about older women who were still engaged, mostly in Paris, in trades or activities that were about to disappear (because of mechanisation or digitalisation etc.). They all worked with their hands, on tasks like corset making, mattress stuffing, hand stitching books and jobs like that and they were all the last people who would ever be engaged in them that way, jobs that had continued for generations. It reminded me of something Walter Benjamin said about finding new beauty in that which was vanishing and, of course, it reminded me of how odd and outmoded it often feels to be a painter.
The Reflexologist’s Reflexologist, 2019, Oil on canvas, 90 x 76
GM: The sinister, perverse nature of some of these works’ seeps through defenses, superficially pleasing with their non-threatening flatness, their pastel tones and playful subject matter. Yet something disrupts the narrative, maybe it’s a gaze outside of the picture plane, or uncomfortably long feet, limbs holding strange objects or faces caught in unpaintable moments. I wonder if you work until an oddness is reached, if you know from the beginning what this oddness must be and if the original subject matter is transformed through the act of painting so as to reveal its ‘strange self’.
PB: I partially answered this already in terms of agency and autonomy. It is important that the figures have a life, not just the women in the paintings but all the figures. I think, again they are emblematic of something about painting itself. I have very unconventional beliefs about painting that border on the esoteric. I believe that an autonomous vessel containing both emotion (feeling) and intellect (thinking) can make a perverse claim to a unique kind of sentience. I think certain paintings, really do have a form of life, obviously not as we understand life, but they do have a singular existence, a state of being involving time and space and dream. When I was teaching painting I was always talking about letting paintings breathe, not killing them by overpainting…
To respond to you in another way I am always battling with the problems of being a figurative painter and the problem of the figure itself, especially if, like me, one is not using any form of reference material: no photographs, no drawings, nothing. Because I am not interested in the figure looking ‘real’ (god forbid) or like a photograph because I am using my imagination only and while I like the reverse constraints of that, I also don’t want the figure to look whimsical or twee so it can be dismissed or neutered as something childlike. I want it to be mine, I want it to look like something arriving barefoot in the world, for the first time. This is what excites me about painting in oils, its capacity to facilitate exactly that. So, to do that I make the figure a bit more mannered, a bit more like it has its own physical rules.
A Mirror, 2017 Oil on canvas 30x25cm
GM: Cats, foxes and dogs populate your work… so do backs of heads, clothes that seem animated of their own accord and hair that sometimes overwhelms the wearer. A friendly animal seems to almost strangle a neck, yet there is never a feeling of urgency or alarm. The population of intimate space seems to allow you to juggle certain unnamable concoctions of emotion at the same time, creating work that leaves one wanting sequels. What is the space you work in? Where does it come from, where does it go?
PB: This is a very generous question. I really appreciate it because I really feel it comes from behind a set of eyes, from someone who has looked very carefully at the work, so thanks! That said, I feel I am unable to do it full justice because I’m not convinced I have a cogent answer to this. Yes, you are right, certain motifs reoccur though I am really wary of repetition, it does creep in. I mentioned this thing earlier about wanting to put things in the world for the first time and so everything I don’t scrape off or paint over has to have surprised me in some way, even if I am not reinventing the wheel. The space isn’t exactly theatrical, at least in my understanding of that term but it is close, everything happens in a space that is meant to have a close physical relationship to the viewer. When I was a student I read one of the School of London painters had said that paintings should be like flags, you should be able to see them from across the room and though I don’t really agree with that at all, I do think in my paintings clarity is important, in that the viewer should be able to see exactly what is happening while at the same time what is going on is completely ambiguous, the two things are quite different. And I think the ambiguity, the mystery is fundamental. In effect, if they are ‘about’ anything, it is probably that. They are not meant to be ‘read’ or explicated. My old colleague from Newcastle, Giles Bailey always used to say that art is a really bad tool for delivering clear, readable meaning and a very good tool for offering equivocation, ambiguity. I don’t think my job as an artist is to know. I’m not sure what it is but it is certainly not that. Perhaps that sounds like a cop out? But, I mean here we are, careering though an endless, dark void, with no idea about anything apart from the fact that one day it will all stop and to me it’s heartening to know a vocation still exists that is able to represent something of all that instead of pretending it has all the answers. So, not only did I not have an answer to this question, it turns out that is actually my job! Hahaha!
Becker’s most recent paintings would have been exhibited at the BSR’s Marzo Mostra, now cancelled due to the Covid-19 outbreak.
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Recent Writings:
2020 Co-Editor: A Table Made Again For The First Time: On Kate Briggs’ ‘This Little Art’ (with Kate Briggs, Daniela Cascella, Sophie Collins, Renee Gladman, Nadia Hebson & Alejandro Zambra, Published by Juan de la Cosa, Mexico.
2018 Legsicon for Laure Prouvost (with John Latham, Elizabeth Price, Natasha Soobramanien, Agnès Varda, Emily Wardill, Marina Warner & Lawrence Weiner) Published by Bookworks, London & M_HKA, Antwerp, Belgium
The Kink in the Arc, Collective novel
Choreography, ARCADE, London & Choreography/Coreografia Juan de la Cosa, Mexico