LAMB arts - christopherpage by Frederico Dietzsch

Residuals Christopher Page

Christopher Page, Residuals

by Chris Sharp Playing on the anonymity of the hand, labor, light and shadow, the interior, issues of opacity, simulation and dissimulation, as well as support structures, Christopher Page has created a suite of quasi-site-specific paintings for Institute Inclusartiz International Residency Program in Rio de Janeiro. Although many of the core concerns of his practice remain intact, this group of works, entitled Residuals, represents a new direction in the practice of the artist. Abandoning the traditional support structure of canvas on stretcher, Page seeks to close the gap between his interest in labor, opacity and the enclosed, domestic interior and the support upon which it exists. To this end, he has started working directly on the walls– or better yet, segmented sections of walls. Nominally mimicking the support structure of a canvas on a stretcher, the artist squares pieces of drywall and screws them to metal stud structures fashioned like stretchers, in addition to creating a corner, as if of a room. It’s almost as if he had segments of the walls removed from a given interior, which renders them, when hung, walls upon walls. These segments themselves then become sites of a form of trompe-l’oeil painting, which operates in two ways: it seeks both to replicate the artificial light and shadow of a given interior and create an illusion of space within the painting. Here painting is deployed in the most classical fashion, in so far as its aim is to be mimetic and illusionistic. The mimesis comes from its attempt to recreate and depict light conditions, and the illusion comes from what happens on the interior of the picture plane, in which Page creates an illusion of depth. Inserting trompe-l’oeil bays shallowly recessed into the painting (like a window within a window), which merely frame the interior of the painting or lead to other flat, wall-like planes, Page both asserts and repudiates the construction of space in a painting. Where there is normally a window, or painting functioning as a window of selfcontained space that looks out onto a greater space, there is a wall. Blocked off and shut in, Page deploys illusion to singularly paradoxical effect. Not mere irony, this simultaneous creation and denial of illusion constitutes, in many ways, the core of Page’s practice, out of which everything else could be said to irradiate. For instance, issues of simulation and dissimulation are crucial to what he does. This can be seen in the support upon which he is working, and the issues of labor which attend it, as much as in how he paints. Indeed what he does seems to be simultaneously tautly woven together and blown apart by a host of contradictions. First of all, by calling attention to the unconventional nature of his support, an attention notably aggravated by repainting the screws on its surface, he seeks to deliberately put pressure on, if not undermine the illusion of trompe-l’oeil painting. But like an actor expertly poking through the fourth wall without collapsing it or better yet, a magician revealing to you the mechanics of a trick without however releasing you from its spell, Page questions the extent to which this is possible. For no matter how visible he renders the structure of the painting, the enchantment of illusion maintains its hold. The same two points of tension undergo another contradiction when considered in terms of labor and finish. The explicit revelation of the support and its incorporation into the work reveals in itself the labor and the hand from which it issues, as in the construction of a house, that should normally be hidden and dissimulated from view¹ . Meanwhile the other form of labor that ¹ Labor undergoes another visualization entirely in a collaborative work, “Untitled (4 hours of work with Helaine and Marilene, staff at the house of Frances Reynolds Marinho, Rio de Janeiro; paid @ UK m/wage, 6.70 GBP; Google x-rate provided by Citibank NA: 139.6459094 BRL on 25.3.16)”, 2016. In this work, Page paid two of the permanent staff of the residency in Rio de Janeiro to fill with pencil the designated areas of a painting, which he himself then airbrushed, dropping the labor of his collaborators into the shallow space of illusion.

constitutes this work– painting– does dissimulate itself, willfully dissolving into the illusion it aims to create. This specific intention is further aggravated by the comparative roughness, lack of finish, and fragility of the drywall– in some works, for example, the surface is conspicuously damaged, which further discloses the non-traditional material, worrying its already dubious capacity to host illusion– while the hand all but disappears from the smooth, quasi-precious finish of the painting, which is executed with tape, oil paint and airbrush. Such a complicated, seeming sleight of hand procedure points toward a general refusal to take the fact of painting for granted. This refusal is further emphasised by a direct engagement with context and architecture. Akin to say, the shaped, architecture-specific paintings of Morgan Fisher, Page’s paintings, and most notably this suite of works, are created for a particular architectural context. But unlike Fisher’s paintings which merely replicate the contours of a given architecture (for example, an L-shaped painting to be hung above a door way), Page’s works attempt to replicate the atmosphere of a home by mimicking the color of the walls, their lighting conditions and the shadows known to haunt them. It’s as if he wants to communicate the spirit of the place– a spirit, it just so happens, whose subtle richness of nuance is virtually commensurate to the multiplicity of anonymous hands and forms of labor which have collaborated in its composition. Another point of interest about this new body of work is how it seeks to close the gap between painting and domestic architecture, synthesizing them into a singly unity, and in doing so, all but disclosing the strangeness of both. And it is precisely this disclosure that makes this body of work a strange and compelling bedfellow with the overall practice of Louise Lawler, most notably her oblique forays into institutional critique via the domestic. All of which is not to say that this is purely conceptual painting. Page is not simply painting ideas. Although these works, and his practice in general, depend upon a complex and engaged armature of thinking, the artist is still wholly committed to painting as such. Personally, I think this becomes most obvious when you consider his debt and affinity with the work of Robert Ryman. Page is clearly preoccupied with a very similar set of concerns around the support and its relationship to illusion, but in a way that more explicitly engages a whole new series of variables, e.g., architecture, light, shadow, and even history. It is for this reason that the affinity does not end there, but extends to the act of painting itself and questions of nuance. Where Ryman could be said to exhaustively explore the myriad nuances of paint and its application, reducing that exploration to its most essential components, Page assumes a similar stance, and reproduces the vast and unsuspected complexity of a wall in a given architecture. In a way, Page could be said to respond to Ryman’s analytical, painterly empiricism with a similarly analytical approach, but one which veers off into something altogether more lived, quotidian, and narrative, and therefore full of a certain, if surreptitious pathos. And yet this so-called pathos could hardly be anymore understated. The specific histories to which it alludes are essentially indecipherable, ultimately just beyond our ken, lurking on the surface, like so much residue.

Untitled (Study for a Blind Arcade) oil and acrylic on drywall with metal stud support 275 x 80 cm 2016

Untitled (Study for a Corner) oil on drywall with metal stud support 110 x 120 x 180 cm 2016

Untitled (Study for a Wall / Painting) oil on drywall with metal stud support 40 x 180 cm 2016

Untitled (Study for a Blind Gallery) oil and acrylic on drywall with metal stud support 500 x 75 cm 2016

Untitled (Study for a Blind Gallery; Panel 1)

Untitled (Study for a Blind Gallery; Panel 2)

oil and acrylic on drywall with metal stud support

75 x 75 cm

2016

Untitled (Study for a Blind Gallery; Panel 3)

Untitled (Study for a Blind Gallery; Panel 4)

oil and acrylic on drywall with metal stud support

75 x 75 cm

2016

Untitled (4 hours of work with Helaine and Marilene, staff at the house of Frances Reynolds Marinho, Rio de Janeiro; paid @ UK m/wage, 6.70 GBP; Google x-rate provided by Citibank NA: 139.6459094 BRL on 25.3.16) pencil and acrylic on drywall with metal stud support 90 x 96 cm 2016