Cinematic Visions Painting at the Edge of Reality
Njideka Akunyili Jules de Balincourt Ali Banisadr Hernan Bas Joe Bradley Cecily Brown Peter Doig Inka Essenhigh Eric Fischl Barnaby Furnas David Harrison Secundino Hernรกndez Nicholas Hlobo Chantal Joffe Sandro Kopp Harmony Korine Yayoi Kusama Glenn Ligon Wangechi Mutu Alice Neel Chris Ofili Celia Paul Philip Pearlstein Elaine Reichek Luc Tuymans Adriana Varejรฃo Suling Wang Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Cinematic Visions Painting at the Edge of Reality An exhibition in support of the Bottletop Foundation curated by James Franco, Isaac Julien and Glenn Scott Wright 8 June – 3 August 2013
Victoria Miro
Cinematic Visions: Painting at the Edge of Reality Curated by James Franco, Isaac Julien and Glenn Scott Wright Since the infancy of cinema, when moviegoers would watch in disbelief as two-dimensional images leapt into life, painting and film have enjoyed a fruitful if sometimes fraught relationship. Cinematic Visions: Painting at the Edge of Reality takes as its starting point an ongoing dialogue between the two media, looking at the enduring influence of film on visual artists and how in an age of the Internet and social media painters continue to engage with and redefine their practice in relation to the moving image. At the exhibition’s heart are questions about time, technology, narrative, memory and their impact upon contemporary painting. The exhibition brings together a broad spectrum of leading artists, prompting thematic conversations across generations, between those who rose to prominence during the closing decades of the last century and younger artists who have found their voice in today’s world, a place of incalculably more images, where distinct movements have given way to heterogeneity and the availability of and reliance on technology is taken as given. Shifting ideas about portraiture and our relationship to the body are central themes. Ian and Mary, 1971, by the late American painter Alice Neel, is one of a handful of images in the exhibition painted directly from life, yet in her spare, urgent paintings Neel, who famously stated ‘I don’t do realism’, always alerts us to pictorial shifts and disjunctions that trigger psychological readings beyond the painted surface. Painted four decades later, Chantal Joffe’s Jessica, 2012, a portrait of the actress Jessica Chastain, was made by remarkably different means. The result of a photographic shoot directed remotely by Joffe via Skype, the painting could be regarded as an archetypal twenty-first-century hybrid – an oil painting derived from a photographic image, which was created via camera and screen with artist and model thousands of miles apart. Joffe’s is certainly a highly mediated image, yet her direct painterly approach bestows a convincing physicality that, as with Neel’s painting, transcends space and time. Painting, like film, is revealed to be a powerful motor in the creation of fiction. Like cinematic moments, many of the works in the exhibition invite us to construct a whole from isolated images. In Eric Fischl’s Victoria Falls, 2013, figures ascending and descending are caught in a moment of stasis that resembles a perilous psychological dance. The noir-ish scene depicted in Hernan Bas’ HOAX REVEALED: the Devil of Deckheart Manor caught on film, 2013, reads like a still from an imagined movie, one in which the central character – a figure in disguise – seems humorously to question ideas of authenticity and authorship. Peter Doig, whose practice over the past twenty years has drawn heavily on the language of cinema, layers the personal and public, figurative and abstract, visual and conceptual in
works that resonate with narrative potential. In 2003, Doig started a film club, StudioFilmClub, in his studio near Port of Spain, Trinidad, making posters for the weekly screenings. An audience member walking in front of the screen, casting a shadow across the moving image, inspired the artist to create a version of Lapeyrouse Wall, one of a number of works by Doig that depict a mysterious figure walking beside a cemetery wall. In Doig’s shadow world the real and cinematic merge. Fittingly, the image was eventually reproduced as a poster for the 2008 Trinidad + Tobago Film Festival. While several of the images in Cinematic Visions appear haunted or suggest heightened states, as in the metaphysical world conjured by Chris Ofili in Ovid-Windfall, 2011-2012, others seem subject to unseen forces or interior compressions. For many artists in the exhibition, the radical language of modernist painting developed during the early twentieth century – of collapsing and expanding picture planes responding to the frenetic pace and fragmentary encounters of modern life – continues to evolve as distortions and mutations of the image take on new permutations with each technological advance. Cinematic Visions examines how, through a variety of painterly strategies and gestures, figuration starts to break down and, conversely, how a residual figurative substratum can be found in even the most apparently abstract image. In Cecily Brown’s Sweetly Reminiscent, Something Mother Used to Make, 2013, brush marks and body parts, paint and flesh, begin to dance in a contemporary bacchanalia. The cut and splice of Wangechi Mutu’s hybrid figures and Inka Essenhigh’s sinuous biomorphs, meanwhile, seem to exist on a sliding scale between figuration and abstraction, realism and surrealism. For many artists the questions, diversions, doubts and decisions of the painting process become ways of altering an image’s rhythm, narrative and meaning. If film has the capacity to capture its subject in an instant and painting, by its nature, requires time for its production, the decelerated space of painting becomes an expanded arena for enquiry. Painted surfaces invite the eye to linger. Working between surface and image, flatness and materiality, source and transformation, artists such as Peter Doig harness the operations of memory and desire to uniquely atmospheric ends. In more abstract works by Yayoi Kusama, Adriana Varejão and Nicholas Hlobo, embellished surfaces are designed to engage the mind while leading the eye on an orchestrated journey around the picture plane. It is through these shifts and nuances of pace and touch that the paintings in Cinematic Visions address the slippery world of image making and image reading in the twentyfirst century, where access can be instantaneous yet often at one remove and the screen dominates experience. If individually some of the works bear a resemblance to film stills, installed across all three spaces of Victoria Miro Gallery the paintings gain a cumulative momentum that can be thought of as a kind of tracking shot. Narrative threads are revealed and renewed with each experience of viewing. The act of looking becomes cinematic.
Njideka Akunyili Something Split and New, 2013
Ali Banisadr HRH, 2013
Jules de Balincourt Hidden men and lost monkeys, 2013
Hernan Bas HOAX REVEALED: the Devil of Deckheart Manor caught on film, 2013
Joe Bradley Untitled, 2013
Cecily Brown Sweetly Reminiscent Something Mother Used to Make, 2013
Peter Doig Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival, 2008
Peter Doig Two Students, 2008
Inka Essenhigh Daphne and Apollo, 2013
Eric Fischl Victoria Falls, 2013
Barnaby Furnas Creation of Adam, 2013
David Harrison Moonstruck, 2011
David Harrison Midnight Meet, 2013
Secundino Hernández Don’t let our youth go to waste, 2013
Nicholas Hlobo Uvukelwano, 2013
Chantal Joffe Jessica, 2012
Sandro Kopp Ambassador, 2013
Harmony Korine Trap Lord, 2013
Yayoi Kusama IN THE SPRING SUN, 2009
Glenn Ligon Silver The Future #4, 2013
Wangechi Mutu Girl Specimen XI, 2013
Alice Neel Ian and Mary, 1971
Chris Ofili Ovid-Windfall, 2011-2012
Celia Paul Painter and Model, 2012
Philip Pearlstein Model on African Chair with Japanese Robe and Wooden Owl, 2011
Elaine Reichek Ariadne in Crete, 2009-2010
Luc Tuymans Album, 2012
Adriana Varejão Monocromo “Jiaguwen” Azul, 2013
Suling Wang Shadow Wing, 2013
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Alive To Be Glad, 2013
The Painter Character James Franco We live in an age when everyone alive is aware of the moving image, it has been among us for over a century. Back when William Wordsworth or Monet were alive they could easily turn to nature as a subject for their work and still have it say something about the way that humans interact with the planet. But today our world is mediated by film and video; half of our experiences come from direct or secondary engagement with the moving image and specifically the digital world. Since the sixties you can peer into any home and see the television screen glowing before rapt viewers; look on any urban street corner today and you’ll see people bent over their smartphones. I remember a time when as a boy I dreamed about having phone conversations and being able to see the person I spoke to and it seeming so futuristic, but that time is now. Our lives are lived in the digital world as much as they are in the real world. Artists nowadays, if they want to engage with who we are take these new facts of life into account. If the advent of photography pushed painting into the rarefied realm of modernism then the moving image has taken it one step further. There is no art form today that has not been affected by the moving image. Michael Fried warned against the theatricality of art, that the fine arts should remain distinct in order to retain their rarified status of heightened objects of contemplation, but it seems that in the fifty years since, the tides of mixed media have broken down any barriers between forms so that we have one swirling pool of shifting shapes called contemporary art. If anything, performance is now the all-pervasive entity in any art form. If all forms are open to a contemporary artist, the choice of medium is a performative act, like an actor picking up a prop with which he will define his character. If all mediums are open, then form can truly fit subject. And painting, the most classical of art forms, finds both its form and content being unsettled and broadened and re-codified as artists embrace our ever-changing relationship with the world and each other. Greenberg famously cast the action painters as performers, and their canvasses as traces of performance. But sixty years after Pollock we now see that approach and technique are not the only things affected by theatricality; subject matter is also full of the ever-expanding pervasiveness of the moving image. If we view some paintings as film stills, this is because our collective relationship with film and video is as influential as the way we interact face to face.
Julian Schnabel, a great practitioner of both painting and film direction makes a great distinction between the two mediums: a viewer needs to watch a whole film in order to grasp its full significance, it is a time based work, while a painting gives a viewer it’s whole impact at once. For the comedic film, This is the End, in which the actors play exaggerated versions of themselves while the world ends, I made a series of collaborative paintings with the great contemporary painter Josh Smith. We each worked on the canvasses, trading off and filling in each other’s work. The paintings featured images of the characters within the film, and because the characters in the film were ostensibly the actors James Franco and Seth Rogen, etc., the paintings of them captured them in their previous film and television roles such as those in Pineapple Express and Freaks and Geeks. Here is an example of paintings taking their direct cues from film – and in addition being painted by a film actor, someone who makes his living from performance. And to complicate this strange hall of cinematic and painterly mirrors, the paintings were made to be framed by the new film, their existence – or “performances” – are forever encapsulated within the frame of that film. The work with Josh made me think about many things. It made me think about painting as a potentially collaborative effort that parallels film production: just think of the heavily assisted work of Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol or Paul McCarthy. Think of the innumerable studio assistants behind the works of Paul Rubens; here the painting process is akin to the cinematic process of a director and his collaborators. It also made me think about medium. Today hundreds of digital programs can change an image into whatever color, style or even texture that is desired. I can turn a photograph of my mother into the style of a Van Gogh painting in a few seconds. This means that a painter’s choice to be a painter in the age of digital reproduction is the choice of a performer. She is choosing to put her hand into the work, her delivery of the paint through the medium of her body is a casting choice and a technical choice; one among many that she could possibly make.
Marking Time Isaac Julien While I was studying at Central St Martins in the early 1980s - where I first encountered Peter Doig and others as painting students – we entered our work in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. I didn’t believe that my painting would be accepted (my tutors, Adrian Searle and Eileen Foster also submitted works), and I was surprised when it sold. With funds from the sale, I bought my first super-8 film camera and made my first film featuring fellow paintingstudent and friend, David Harrison. Although my work has been predominantly film- and photography- based since that time, I have always retained an appreciation of painting and an awareness of how it has influenced and continues to influence my moving-image works. What I have always liked about painting is the time it requires. You can’t rush it, and one brush stroke too many can destroy the work. Filming is similar in that it takes time, and also in the process of building up images and editing them into a whole. Painting, like cinema, marks time – this process of marking time is what brings the worlds of painting and the cinema together. The question of timing and movement are instilled in a painter’s brushwork, and brings to my mind the Calligrapher, a figure who appears at the beginning and the end of my installation Ten Thousand Waves who uses an ancient art form that requires a rhythmic harnessing of yin and yang, performed on the breath and on the stroke. The birth of new technologies has had a profound effect not only upon the painting of today but also upon how one views painting. We tend to look at paintings as if we are cameras, creating our own tracking shots: the mise-en-scène of an exhibition, like that of a film, is created by the gaps between each painting and within the three-dimensional space of the gallery itself. The movement through the space engenders a cinematised way of looking as the spectator tracks from one painting to the next. In today’s world, one cannot look at painting without the perspective of the moving image and vice-versa. Pixel, image, text - what more does the mind and eye want? Let the movie begin. Cinematic vision is alive again through paint.
Installation views Cinematic Visions: Painting at the Edge of Reality Victoria Miro Gallery, London 8 June - 3 August 2013
Artworks
Artworks Njideka Akunyili
Something Split and New, 2013 – Acrylic, charcoal, pastel, color pencils, collage and transfers on paper 213.4 x 266.4 cm 84 x 104 7/8 in Courtesy the Artist © Njideka Akunyili
Ali Banisadr
HRH, 2013 – Oil on linen 76.2 x 91.4 cm 30 x 36 in Courtesy the Artist and Blain|Southern © Ali Banisadr
Jules de Balincourt
Cecily Brown
Sweetly Reminiscent, Something Mother Used to Make, 2013 – Oil on linen 170.2 x 165.1 cm 67 x 65 in Courtesy the Artist and Gagosian Gallery © Cecily Brown
Peter Doig
Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival, 2008 – Oil on paper 76 x 105.5 cm 29 7/8 x 41 1/2 in Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London © Peter Doig
Hidden men and lost monkeys, 2013 – Oil and oil stick on panel 243.8 x 152.4 cm 96 x 60 in Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London © Jules de Balincourt
Peter Doig
Hernan Bas
Inka Essenhigh
HOAX REVEALED: the Devil of Deckheart Manor caught on film, 2013 – Acrylic and silkscreen on linen 152.4 x 121.9 x 5.1 cm 60 x 48 x 2 in Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London © Hernan Bas
Joe Bradley
Untitled, 2013 – Charcoal on paper 45.7 x 61 cm 18 x 24 in Courtesy the Artist © Joe Bradley
Two Students, 2008
– Oil on Paper
73 x 57.5 cm 28.76 x 22.66 in Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London © Peter Doig
Daphne and Apollo, 2013 – Oil on canvas 152.4 x 182.9 x 0.6 cm 60 x 72 x 1/4 in Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London © Inka Essenhigh
Eric Fischl
Victoria Falls, 2013 – Oil on linen 208.3 x 172.7 cm 82 x 68 in Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York © Eric Fischl
Barnaby Furnas
Chantal Joffe
David Harrison
Sandro Kopp
Creation of Adam, 2013 – Acrylic on linen 129.5 x 177.8 cm 51 x 70 in Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London © Barnaby Furnas
Moonstruck, 2011 – Oil on paper on board 59.4 x 52 x 43 cm 23 3/8 x 20 1/2 x 16 7/8 in Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London © David Harrison
David Harrison
Midnight Meet, 2011 – Oil on paper on board 50.7 x 40.5 x 42.5 cm 20 x 16 x 16 3/4 in Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London © David Harrison
Secundino Hernández Don’t let our youth go to waste, 2013 – Gouache, acrylic, alkyd and oil on canvas 240 x 200 cm 94 1/2 x 78 3/4 in Courtesy the Artist and Galerie Forsblom © Secundino Hernández
Nicholas Hlobo
Uvukelwano, 2013 – Ribbon, steel on canvas Diptych: 120 x 180 cm each 47 1/4 x 70 7/8 in each Courtesy the Artist and Stevenson, Cape Town © Nicholas Hlobo
Jessica, 2012 – Oil on board 305 x 150 cm 120 x 48 1/8 in Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London © Chantal Joffe
Ambassador, 2013 – Oil on linen 80 x 80 cm 31 1/2 x 31 1/2 in Courtesy the Artist © Sandro Kopp
Harmony Korine
Trap Lord, 2013 – VHS tape, oil paint and marker 81.9 x 58.4 x 5.7 cm 32 1/4 x 23 x 2 1/4 in Courtesy the Artist © Harmony Korine
Yayoi Kusama
IN THE SpRINg SUN, 2009 – Acrylic on canvas 162 x 162 cm 63 3/4 x 63 3/4 in Courtesy Yayoi Kusama Studio Inc., Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo and Victoria Miro, London © Yayoi Kusama
Glenn Ligon
Silver The Future #4, 2013 – Acrylic and oilstick on canvas 81.28 x 81.28 x 3.8 cm 32 x 32 x 1 1/2 in Courtesy the Artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London © Glenn Ligon
Wangechi Mutu
girl Specimen XI, 20 – Ink, latex paint, glitte collage and contact linoleum 53.3 x 46.4 cm 21 x 18 1/4 in Courtesy the Artist Victoria Miro, Londo © Wangechi Mutu
Alice Neel
Ian and Mary, 1971 – Oil on canvas 116.8 x 127 cm 46 x 50 in Courtesy the Artist’s and Victoria Miro, L © The Estate of Alic
Chris Ofili
Ovid-Windfall, 2011 – Oil and charcoal on 310 x 200 x 4 cm 122 1/8 x 78 3/4 x 1 Courtesy the Artist Victoria Miro, Londo © Chris Ofili
Celia Paul
painter and Model, 2 – Oil on canvas 137.2 x 76.2 cm 54 x 30 in Courtesy Victoria M London © Celia Paul
Philip Pearlstein
Model on African Ch Japanese Robe and W Owl, 2011 – Oil on canvas 121.92 x 91.44 cm 48 x 36 in Courtesy the Artist Cuningham Gallery © Philip Pearlstein
Wangechi Mutu Wangechi Mutu
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Elaine Reichek Elaine Reichek
Specimen XI, 2013 Ariadne in Crete, girlgirl Specimen XI, 2013 Ariadne in Crete, 2009-2010 – – 2009-2010 paint, glitter, pearls,– – Ink,Ink, latexlatex paint, glitter, pearls, collage contact paper Hand embroidery on linen collage andand contact paper on onHand embroidery on linen linoleum 73 cm linoleum 97.897.8 x 73xcm x 46.4 38 1/2 28 3/4 53.353.3 x 46.4 cm cm 38 1/2 x 28x3/4 in in 18 1/4 Courtesy the Artist 21 x21 18x1/4 in in Courtesy the Artist Courtesy the Artist © Elaine Reichek Courtesy the Artist andand © Elaine Reichek Victoria Miro, London Victoria Miro, London © Wangechi Mutu © Wangechi Mutu Luc Tuymans
Luc Tuymans
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Album, Album, 20122012 – – Oilcanvas on canvas Oil on Ian and Mary, Ian and Mary, 19711971 162.6 x 120 162.6 x 120 cm cm – – 64 x 47 1/4 in 64 x 47 1/4 in Oilcanvas on canvas Oil on Courtesy David Zwirner, Courtesy David Zwirner, 116.8 x 127 116.8 x 127 cm cm New York/London and New York/London and 50 in 46 x46 50xin Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp X Gallery, Antwerp Courtesy the Artist’s Estate Zeno Courtesy the Artist’s Estate © Luc Tuymans Tuymans Victoria Miro, London © Luc andand Victoria Miro, London © The Estate of Alice © The Estate of Alice NeelNeel
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Chris Ofili Chris Ofili
Ovid-Windfall, 2011-2012 Ovid-Windfall, 2011-2012 – – Oil and charcoal on linen Oil and charcoal on linen x 200 x 4 cm 310310 x 200 x 4 cm 78 3/4 x 1 5/8 122122 1/8 1/8 x 78x3/4 x 1 5/8 in in Courtesy the Artist Courtesy the Artist andand Victoria Miro, London Victoria Miro, London © Chris © Chris OfiliOfili
Monocromo “Jiaguwen” Monocromo “Jiaguwen” Azul,Azul, 20132013 – – Oil and plaster on canvas Oil and plaster on canvas x 98.5 98.598.5 x 98.5 cm cm 38 3/4 38 3/4 38 3/4 x 38x3/4 in in Courtesy the Artist Courtesy the Artist andand Victoria Miro, London Victoria Miro, London © Adriana Varejão © Adriana Varejão
Celia Paul Celia Paul
Suling Wang Suling Wang
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painter Model, painter andand Model, 20122012 – – Oilcanvas on canvas Oil on 137.2 x 76.2 137.2 x 76.2 cm cm 30 in 54 x54 30xin Courtesy Victoria Miro, Courtesy Victoria Miro, London London © Celia © Celia PaulPaul
Philip Pearlstein Philip Pearlstein
Shadow Wing, Shadow Wing, 20132013 – – Acrylic on aluminium Acrylic on aluminium x 360 cm Triptych 228228 x 360 cm Triptych 89 3/4 x 141 in Triptych 89 3/4 x 141 3/4 3/4 in Triptych Each panel x 120 Each panel 228228 x 120 cm cm Courtesy the Artist Courtesy the Artist andand Victoria Miro, London Victoria Miro, London © Suling Wang © Suling Wang
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye Yiadom-Boakye Model on African Chair Model on African Chair withwith Lynette Alive To Be glad, Alive To Be glad, 20132013 ckcanvas on canvasJapanese Japanese Robe Wooden on Robe andand Wooden – – 3.8 cm cm Owl,Owl, 20112011 Oilcanvas on canvas Oil on n – – x 160 200200 x 160 cm cm ist and Oilcanvas on canvas and Oil on 78 3/4 xin 63 in 78 3/4 x 63 allery, 121.92 x 91.44 ry, 121.92 x 91.44 cm cm Courtesy Corvi-Mora, Courtesy Corvi-Mora, 36 in 48 x48 36xin London and Jack Shainman London and Jack Shainman Courtesy the Artist Betty Courtesy the Artist andand Betty Gallery, Gallery, NewNew YorkYork Cuningham Gallery, Cuningham Gallery, NewNew YorkYork © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye © Lynette Yiadom-Boakye © Philip Pearlstein © Philip Pearlstein
Cinematic Visions: Painting at the Edge Reality is published on the occasion of the exhibition Cinematic Visions: Painting at the Edge Reality 8 June - 3 August 2013
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