Unlike normal absorption pigments which are themselves intrinsically, permanently “coloured” in their material substance and transfer their colour immediately to the painted surface these “interference” pigments are in fact white powders in their normal state: they are not themselves coloured, they produce colour.
Because I effectively make monochromes which do not have a singular unique invariable colour I say they are “monochromes”.
Like all works in the monochrome tradition my works renounce representation, they give up on compositional or perspectival complexity in favour of an “all-over” application of material on a surface of some sort: the major difference with my work recently is that because of the large number of separate layers applied I can sand through the layers on the edges revealing other things underneath the surface.
Interestingly the monochrome started out as a joke and has kept for the public a whiff of the comic or the absurd (if not for artists - most monochrome artists I have encountered are deadly serious).
In Lawrence Stern’s Tristram Shandy a completely black page jokingly represents the melancholy of the eponymous hero but the earliest monochrome paintings were in fact jokes produced by a group of proto-Dadaists who called themselves Les Incoherents in late 19th century Paris.
In the early 1880's a member of the group, Alphonse Allais, exhibited a piece of stretched red fabric entitled Apopleptic Cardinals Harvesting Tomatoes by the Edge of the Red Sea, a work that makes its point by identifying a verbal description sufficient to conjure up the concept of “red” in both imaginary figure and fictive background.
The jocular title works to identify the possible sensation of red with both figure and ground, works by effectively saying "red figures on red background", hence denying the possibility of distinguishing between figure and ground, and works in addition by coupling this conceptual identification of figure and ground with a visual presentation of red material (originally red cloth) without giving this presentation any obvious internal relationships at all other than those forced upon it by the title.
What is so interesting to me about these early "joke" monochromes is that they explicitly identify the monochrome project with the avoidance of figure/ground relationships and the identification of part and whole.
In a recent issue of Tate Etc there was a short text about an Yves Klein IKB monochrome. A small enlarged detail was provided as an illustration but ended up looking like the whole: a blue field of a certain size and proportion.
The fact that a part can not only resemble but effectively stand in for, supplant or replace the whole means that the monochrome can always be taken as its own repetition.
. . . the repetition that forms the work itself is a kind of temporalising, spatialising difference machine that congeals time in layers.
By incessantly repeating the origin of painting, incessantly re-founding or re-grounding the project of painting by stripping painting back to its bare fundamentals, the monochrome at the same time opens up possibilities only made visible by the attention to the most minimal factors of the production of the painting.
For some artists and writers (and arguably this is why the monochrome can appear as something historical in the sense of something already achieved) the monochrome can appear as the end of painting: the blank impotence of a dead end.
. . . as a monochrome painter one effectively uses an impersonal visual language, any monochrome looks at first much like any other, any monochrome at first glance is the repetition of all other monochromes.
It is precisely this emptying out of "signification" which means that each new work is also, at the same time, a new beginning, open onto an unforeseeable future.
Nuance is all when everything has been reduced to the minimum and if painting survives today it is because painting is above all else the art of nuance.
I find this concentration on minimal details, on the bare materials and processes of painting something rewarding myself, something that has trained my eye now to focus on precisely those details of seeing perhaps because the only marker of spatial relation or scale in the monochrome tradition is that of texture.
Texture, in the sense of the grain, the felt materiality of the work and micro-perceptual details effectively reward the vigilance of the extended gaze: these works take time.
My works appear as "monochromes" strictly speaking only when photographed: they are monochromes without the "mono" or where they are so only in an ironic sense.
Take for example the work photographed here called Topos (from the Ancient Greek word for “place”) where the violet that is seen in the photograph is not violet pigment, not a violet substance intrinsically that colour but violet light and this light can be seen shining, in its fleeting insubstantiality, onto the chair in front of the work. The violet is seen only from the front and from approximately 45 degrees to either side the violet changes to silver, to a greenish gold and to a deep turquoise from the most oblique angle. The pigment that produces these effects transmits coloured light in shifting frequencies by means of phase-shifting of light striking thin platelets of borosilicate coated with a microscopic layer of titanium dioxide, still the most ubiquitous of white pigments, the whitewash of last century.
Just as each grain of interference pigment is in fact a complex, reflective, translucent laminate each of my “monochromes” is a similar laminate repeated at a much larger scale, made of multiple transparent layers over a black or neutral ground.
As the viewer moves in the hemispherical space around the work this movement causes what is seen to change in a manner that sometimes suggests the work is “aware” of the viewer, “reacting” to the viewer in the space they momentarily share: arguably the work on the wall, held there silent and unmoving, is merely a pretext for the unpredictable movements the viewer makes in space, a movement provoked by colour and light as if space itself were coloured.
At my last exhibition a friend found himself rocking back and forth and walking from side to side and became very aware of his feet and where he was moving: he became aware of a whole choreography of space opened up by the work.
It is precisely this consciousness of the viewer’s embodied, situated, lived experience relative to the work, that sense of “seeing oneself” in the act of seeing, that I want to encourage.
I want viewers to question what they see, how and from where they see: not because there is too little to see (a conventional criticism of the monochrome) but because there is too much perceivable for any sort of totalising synthesis.
Most works of art, especially painting, remain in thrall to the idea of a single viewpoint, ideally right in front, from where the multiplicity of impressions are meant to cohere into a single image: the “image” presented by most painting is able to be captured in photographic reproduction, is something non-temporal but instantaneous, can be seen all at once and does not change significantly when viewed from an oblique angle.
My work intends to reward the view from an oblique position: certain things are only visible from the sides.
With photographic reproduction pervasive and the world seemingly dedicated to the mindless consumption of images, the image presented by the work of art, in general, is now that which can be duplicated in a photograph: it is in this sense that what is essential about my work is what cannot be seen all at once, what takes time and space to unfold, what changes when the direction and colour of light changes, what requires you to move to become visible.
So colours play and flash across the surface of the work as if the work were a screen, through highly reflective varnish that provides in addition a reflection of the viewer in their act of viewing — but what is reflected back to the viewer is nothing more than the contingency and partiality of viewing itself.
My works are an attempt to clear a space, to make a clearing in which unpredictable things might come to pass, especially as a viewer passes in front of the work or moves around it: my goal, were I able to put it simply, is to make a place, a place where seeing itself is what comes to be seen in all its randomness, fluctuation and unpredictability.
