Works on Paper
Exhibition at Stone Space gallery. London, 2024
1. Elsewhere
The paintings that comprise ‘Works on Paper’ are part of a series begun in the summer of 2020, living under the pandemic restrictions at the time. Working from photographs already taken, that is, not taken specifically to provide the subject matter for a painting, when putting together this exhibition–and selecting a set of paintings which had some coherence from the larger series–it was clear that many of the paintings were based on photographs taken while travelling abroad. The desire to be elsewhere, to be in a different place–and a different time–emerges, which I don’t necessarily think was a conscious rationale for what I was painting (indeed, these paintings began as several discrete thematic ‘sets’, usually of five paintings, such as a set on shadows, or on reflections, for example), but one that reflects the time under which these paintings were made.
The approach taken to making these paintings relates to earlier work, numerous small paintings the size and shape of a picture postcard. These did broadly play on the idea of the postcard, often representative of place, and their function in transmitting the image of place from one location to another. These new paintings work in a similar fashion: a patch of afternoon sunlight cast between houses on a suburban street, a large puddle behind an apartment block, a hoarding around a building site underdeveloped for years, a decades-old mural slowly disappearing behind graffiti. All these speak more of place than what might typically comprise a picture postcard.
There’s a passage in Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces, too long to quote here, attuned to the particularities of place which begins “To cover the world, to cross it in every direction, will only ever be to know a few square metres of it, a few acres, tiny incursions into disembodied vestiges, small, incidental excitements…” and lists some of those particularities, very much like the descriptions offered above, which is, for Perec, about understanding “the sense of the world’s concreteness”, being brought closer to us, not as acquisition or consumption, but as a rediscovery of meaning.
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2. Materialities
The use of monochrome in painting has a long history. Before photography, aside from the grisaille study or trompe l’oeil sculptural relief, paintings in European art were made in black and white to look like ink drawings or prints: painting’s capaciousness means that it can encompass the photographic, and, paradoxically perhaps, the use of a limited black and white palette itself invites this as much as–if not more than–the use of colour. Seen at a distance (and, with The Stone Space, seen at a distance through glass from the street), the black and white paintings in ‘Works on Paper’ have a superficial appearance to photographs, an initial misrecognition which is an invitation to the viewer to look closer (of course, the paintings themselves are never intended to fool the eye entirely–like any good trompe l’oeil, a moment of perceptual uncertainty is sufficient–the moment it convinces the viewer that it is not what it in fact is, it stops being a work of art).
This is also reinforced by the materiality of the paintings: painted on paper, with an integral painted white border and hung (apart from the corridor space) unframed; they share much with the condition of the photographic print–and treated as such. The integral white border is both a framing and a distancing device, insisting on the status of the image, image-as-image, not image as analogon for a perceptual experience mediated through painting, but a meditation on an already-existing image. The use of paper and the unframed hang, the bulldog clips gripping the work, the grain of the paper being affected by humidity, their intimate size and scale, all factors which emphasise the fragile nature of these paintings then works against this distancing to a degree, insisting on the paintings’ presence within the same physical space as the viewer, of which a digital image is but a poor relation.
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3. The Frustrated View
One of the pleasures of looking at landscape painting is the ability of the viewer to imagine entering the pictorial space of the picture as it recedes from foreground to background. In the genre of landscape as it emerged and developed in European art from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the position of the viewer (and the viewer’s mastery of the scene) was placed through the use of linear and aerial perspective, and theories of composition. Some paintings in ‘Works on Paper’ align with this: Curving Road, the Alleyway paintings, for example.
The two framed works that greet the viewer entering the exhibition, Concrete Blocks and Broken Rails, announce a contrasting counter-theme, that of the frustrated view. This is an approach that Joseph Leo Koerner identifies in Caspar David Friedrich’s work, reacting against the prevailing orthodoxy of landscape at the time (and, implicitly, genre hierarchies), best exemplified by Hill and Ploughed Field near Dresden, c.1824, in which the view of the city is obscured by and pushed to either side of the low hill which occupies the centre of the painting. This was very much in my mind with Landscape with Hill and Railway Station (based on a photograph taken from a train journey to Dresden itself, and seeing that particular Friedrich painting, among others), in which the canopy over the platforms largely occludes the hill–particularly its summit–of the title.
In a number of the paintings in the show, beyond the literal concrete blocks, there are screening motifs parallel to the picture plane which deny or arrest the viewer’s exploration of space, insisting on the painting as surface, despite its illusionistic qualities, the painting-as-window which stops short (indeed, some of these are pictures of windows themselves). It may be too much to ask to see this motif or compositional strategy as a metaphor for the experience of the contemporary image, largely consumed digitally, ubiquitous, inviting the viewer in while simultaneously withholding or pushing away, yet every representation, by its nature, is a form of displacement.
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4. Mise-en-scène
The definition of the term 'mise-en-scène', originally theatrical, now more widely applied to film, is “cinema’s grand undefined term”, according to Brian Henderson. Its literal translation from the French is ’to put in place’ and it’s usually used to describe the design of everything that appears in front of the camera. One can think of mise-en-scène as the conditions that allow something to happen thus.
The paintings–not, all, but some at least–in ‘Works on Paper’ owe something to the cinematic: composition, lighting, space, the sense that we are seeing a space in which something will happen–or has happened–a sense heightened thanks to the absence of figures and their specificity. There are two particular paintings which have a direct connection (and emulate something like a camera movement, panning between them): Escalators and Stairs and Vending Machine are based on photographs taken at the S-Bahn station of Schwalbach am Taunus. My sole reason for being there was that Wim Wenders used it for a sequence in his film Falsche Bewegung (Wrong Move, 1974) and I have been undertaking an intermittent project of revisiting the locations of his 1970s ‘road movies’ trilogy; this has often been an occasional feature of some of the travel that a number of these paintings belong to–not least the provocation to go to places that one might have no other reason to so do, and, inadvertently, provide something of a theme to the paintings as a whole: those “tiny incursions” and “small, incidental excitements” that Georges Perec writes about in Species of Spaces.
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5. Throwntogetherness
Doreen Massey, in For Space, uses the railway journey as an example of how place is produced. The train, with Massey as a passenger, is not just travelling through space or across it, it helps alter it, it participates in “its continuing production”: at either end of the journey a new bundle of trajectories is created. For Massey, what is special about place is precisely that ‘throwntogetherness’, the unavoidable of negotiating a here-and-now (itself drawn on a history and a geography of thens and theres) and a negotiation which must take place within and between both human and nonhuman (the nonhuman including the animal world, climate, geology, and so on).
Most of the photographs on which the paintings in ‘Works on Paper' were based came about through railway journeys (two are in fact views from train windows). The experience of travelling to a different place by train is a good antidote to the anomie of the non-place (Marc Augé’s examples including motorways-where one’s attention is on the road, not the scenery–hotel rooms, airports and shopping malls): many of the great railway termini of Europe (Antwerp, Helsinki, Copenhagen) feel very ‘placed’ in comparison, partly due to the specific conjunction of history and architecture, many dating from when the idea of the nation state was in ascendence, and, as a result, have certain distinctive qualities usually quite absent from an airport (if airports were a century older, this might not be the case).
Massey’s ‘throwntogetherness’ is one of the qualities that attracts me to many of the scenes that are the subjects of the paintings in ‘Works on Paper’, those specific trajectories (of history, governance, planning, land use) that creates the character of the built environment in different cities with different qualities, often very hard to define, but felt nonetheless.
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6. Curation
The exhibition ‘Works on Paper’, has been an opportunity for me to show a body of work made over a number of years. In the studio, it’s not possible to see so much work together at once, and in a considered, contemplative way. The choice of a double-height hang allowed for juxtapositions above and below the line; some of the paintings were made in thematic sets, which the hang itself allowed to emerge, often in pairs, but also across pairings, in ways that help to reinforce the subject of the work, what it’s really ‘about’, themes like travel by rail, shadows, reflections, artificially-lit spaces at night, the ‘frustrated view’.
On the end wall facing the window onto the street are a group of four paintings arranged around the theme of images in the environment. Again, these were made over a number of years; what interested me here was the projection of different time registers: projection into the past, with images of the Berlin Wall, or a detail of Vermeer’s Little Street, or a historical city gate (overwritten by projections of the self in the form of graffiti), but also, in the painting Façade, a Janus-like projection. On the wrapping of a classical building, an ideal image is printed life-size, trompe l’oeil-style, presumably a projected-forward image of how the building will look after restoration or refurbishment, returned to its state in the past, a sense of what the building may have originally looked like.
The spaces here contains time in a way that’s less determined in some of the other paintings: the motif of the image within the image places a time register in the painting itself, that each image has its own time. Outside of that is the ever-receding time of the photograph that served as a reference for the painting, and then the time of painting itself, material accumulating during time on a surface to act as illusion. Finally, there is the time that the painting meets its viewer, an ever-continuing always-present encounter.
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7. Painting from Photographs
The paintings in ‘Works on Paper’ all use photographs as source material. As a working method, the photograph is an expedient means of reducing a three-dimensional reality out there in the world to a flat composition on a surface–something achievable with linear perspective, which the camera lens reproduces–but without the mediation of the artist’s hand, which here reappears at a remove, separated from the motif–both in time and space–in a more mediative engagement with it.
The photographic as a visual language is inevitably associated with ‘the real’ or simply naturalised to such a degree that it becomes synonymous with ’realistic’, with the idea of a realistic representation (when photography emerged in the early 19th century, its realism was tempered with any number of examples of how the technology was a distortion from human perception). The act of framing the subject in these paintings is highlighted by the integral painted white borders: the edge of the motif–a representation of the world out there–does not ’naturally’ end at the edge of its support. As a strategy, this suggests something of the the arbitrary cut of the photographic frame, that the world continues out under that frame.
According to Roman Jakobson (‘Two Aspects of Language’), realism is metonymous: Jakobson relates metonymy to contiguity, against which he opposes metaphor and substitution, seeing these, metaphor and metonymy as a symbolic bipolar language structure that extends beyond linguistics. In art, realism depends on this necessary fiction–understood and interpretable through personal experience–that the viewer constructs a contiguous world (and contiguous both spatially and temporally) of which it–the artwork–is but one fragment among many.
Nicholas Middleton 2024