Ignacio Valdes, Mike Shaw and Richard Salmon in conversation, 2009
Ignacio Valdes, Mike Shaw and Richard Salmon in conversation
Tooting Bec Lido, London
Sunday, 15 March 2009
IV …sketch books, black and white.
RS When did you do these?
IV This year I think - January or February at the National Gallery.
RS They smudge on the page opposite…
IV …with charcoal. What I like about charcoal is that you can play with lines and produce a scene, either from the imagination or from works of art that interest you, instinctively. Which can emerge later in the painting...but directly from imagination.
MS I am intrigued by the use of line and tone together. As someone who draws too,
I love drawing and thus the idea of marks and mark- making. I haven't experienced drawings like these in a way that has meant so much- I can only describe them as air, air making a kind of space across the page.
RS They are spacious aren't they?
MS Yes, very spacious and you see this in some of the other sketchbooks. A very brave, particular, use of line.
IV I tend to produce a kind of cloud, then elements and lines, with the total composition emerging, suggesting directions and figurative meanings.
RS How quickly are they made?
IV Very quickly. I do the whole in one go, so the lines keep some freshness. As Cocteau said, “the line must always be in a life-threatening situation”. And things emerge from the process: Michelangelo’s way of working was to observe the stone and from the stone emerged the figure that was inside it- more a dialogue with, than imposing your ideas on, the stone.
RS I think you are not intending especially to draw the figure because your figure is quite stylized, with the emphasis on where it is and what it is doing.
IV That comes completely from the same sort of drawing. With a few lines added to the very minimal composition you see that this can be a figure running, or a figure, you know, with a horse; or a kind of attitude, very simple.
RS An attitude?
IV Attitudes - asking, running, escaping, or static maybe- that are ambiguous and suggestive and pictorial between what the figures are and what they strive to become.
MS I mean it’s interesting that these images begin to emerge and an idea or theme, if you like, begins to develop consequently from page to page- variations on a theme. It’s very musical, an interesting way to put it is ‘is one searching or is one finding?’ and that’s the kind of thing that comes from looking at the whole scene if you want. You are kind of searching….
IV …for the theme of what is going on in the composition. Because then I think the person that is looking can interpret in a way that’s very free and very new, never having an idea imposed as in an illustration. I try to avoid my drawing becoming illustration, i.e. making the drawing obvious and losing the mystery.
The spectator has to meet the work halfway, and work himself to give it meaning.
RS So are you saying that the figure permits the viewer to put into the image whatever emotion?
IV Exactly.
RS Both figure and viewer are feeling in time with each other. I see these figures standing in a state of isolation, isolated and searching. That sense is very strong for me in the paintings as well.
MS I think that is in the paintings as well, this idea of the material: charcoal circles, marks, translated into painting. As if you draw something out. Maybe I’m not interpreting it in the right way, I don’t know, but you draw something out of the surface of your painting. One of the amazing things I think -I don’t know whether it’s the South American sort of sensibility- is that you very often draw out of the very earth: look at the colours in some of your paintings. They’re very much like the earth.
You know I remember going to see the Goya, the Third of May in the Prado and I was staggered actually by how much it was really blacks and whites which floated over this mood, a scene of Madrid. It’s just so powerful that your mind is doing some extraordinary trips between something that’s actually fundamentally interior and something that’s a visual sort of sensation, and a narrative of course.
IV Also I studied as a sculptor and I kept this feeling of something solid and three dimensional; I don’t think we can talk about painting only in two dimensions as it is also three dimensional. The third dimension is almost nothing, you have the feeling that you can really touch it, which is a very sensitive situation. As Rodin said, sculpture is the science of bump and hollow. But after some years I started to paint and maybe what interested me was how figures depended on the light and their surroundings, volumes and simulations, reality becoming uncertain: the material and the immaterial. The gestures also allow you to discover mysterious forms and
the fragility of its compositions attracted me from the beginning.
RS Looking at the figure from every point of view.
MS It is interesting, the painting, for me, because I think you and I work in a very different way. I suppose people might say I work in projections and relationships, (some relationships over positions in space), to find a position in space. One hopes to build a kind of echo of that. But you seem to build in two-dimensional surfaces so when I look at your paintings you are going in and out all the time. They project forwards but they also project back. Its not just about fixed positions- it’s more fluid than that.
IV It is like a continuous game, different explanations, different reflections of things, it’s not one solid point of view.
RS Is your point of view as much from the inside vision, the inner vision about how it feels to be in the predicament of existing every day, as much as the artist reporting what he sees from the outside? Do you think it’s a combination of these two things- your trying to convey something about how you feel as an individual- or are you just trying to show something as you see it from the outside?
IV I think it’s probably both. An action, and also a response from the painting that it gives you after, it’s a very intimate expression, but you also have this automatic mechanism to give some objective meaning to what is going on, in a way, on the surface. In that way it’s like an expression and also the response of the expression, making it understandable and universal. In Madrid I was exhibiting, and one of the paintings, for me, was simply a composition of figures; but some people saw, through their point of view, things like bull- fighting, you know, completely different things to what I would ever imagine. The painting consisted of quite simple forms but they immediately associated that with something very deep in their culture. There is both action and reaction in the painting- an automatic mechanism that clashes with symbolic language.
RS So there’s a sort of mirroring process taking place. You look at the figure in one of your paintings and start wondering what it might be like to be in that predicament or to remember the predicament.
MS I think that’s very interesting. I was wondering how much the role of memory plays in your constructions. There is another sketch book which is labelled ‘Vienna’ which I presume it’s very much to do with being in a place.
IV Exactly.
MS I wonder if the images, and these studies that Richard’s holding there, have got a great sense of, I don’t know, is it a memory? Are you pulling something from some of the places that you go and other things that you see? Are you trying to bring that into an image...?
IV Those sketches in Vienna were sketches from the Museum, so they were all ideas taken from paintings, and mainly sculptures which I was most interested in. I see more things when I see the sculptures in the museum, the classics, the Greeks, I see these natural attractions of forms and I would like that to translate into painting maybe. But in the case of Vienna, they were sketches of that museum, where they have big Roman and Egyptian collections. I think it’s like the raw material for my paintings.
MS How do you work between painting and sculpture- do you find that you begin a series of sculptures and you become immersed in them, or do you work between painting and sculpture?
IV Mainly between.
MS So one feeds the other- is it a reaction?
IV Yes I think it’s a reaction and also, well, sometimes you need to change. Traditionally, switching from oil painting to pastel was a way to change. And they used to use other mediums to make a break, some drawing for a while, then painting, then some clay modelling and big scale oil painting later in the day.
Every day is different, I reach something different every day. You need to change the mood in painting, for instance sometimes I am fixed with a detail of a face and after that I would make a big gesture, out of control. It’s an action-reaction process, quite unconscious. I work in cycles. I need to forget the work and after some weeks work on it again and continue in a very different way, turning it upside-down sometimes.
RS Were you deliberately doing that, going from one to the next?
IV Yes.
RS So you might reluctantly start to sculpt something because you’ve been too long on the painting or drawing? Why is that?
IV I don’t know, I’m always scared or feel apprehension about developing too much in one sense, one area.
With too much developing, painting becomes a monotonous thing, I like to keep them fresh; to keep the impact, the air of the minute. I think painting problems have to be addressed from as many angles as possible: sometimes it is eye and hand; another time, it is like a distant critic, very objective; and another, it can be inventing and designing.
MS Your sculptures are very like that. I mean they feel like a material that is being worked on. That’s why I mention Modigliani, with this kind of process developing towards an excavation of something. Whereas your sculptures are very spontaneous- they seem to be almost as direct as the drawing.
IV Its the sketch of the minute with the hand. It’s mainly the structure, the texture, you can play with the figures and suddenly there is something, something new, very fresh and……
RS …immediate
IV …because it happens also with painting - you start to overwork it and it becomes something, you know, that loses the first energy. That’s why I like to change; to make a break and work in that way.
RS Are your emotions entering when you are doing that; do you feel angry when you are painting some figure that maybe comes from a place of pain or something?
IV Yes, I think so, you change moods all the time, probably one painting involves different feelings, one to start, another to develop, another to continue, so it’s like a lecture of different thoughts and feelings that go through the painting, and that gives vigour and drama to the work, building and destroying and becoming, eventually, an implacable critic. That’s why it’s never like the abstract expression, in one go, one input.
RS So it's really a bit like getting through the day and living a life, could we describe it?
MS It is a wonderful way of working, I have to say, it is something which is very new to me, it’s very different to my English sort of education in painting that seeks, strives for a particular kind of idea. But the notion of the canvas being literally that, a vehicle for your changing moods, there is freedom in that which I absolutely admire.
IV Like the opposite mood, from one extreme to the other, giving a feeling that it is to be continued.
MS You go through that whole emotional sort of vocabulary? It’s extraordinary.
IV Sometimes you are more sensitive to colour, for example. You develop the colour, and you can put the general composition face down. You have to make it work again but I like the different stages, some parts remain, you can feel that the painting is in a certain process- it’s not completely static, perfect, or finished. So you have a feeling of ‘maybe I can continue this? Maybe it has this other explanation?’ To feel the process, and to give the idea that the process has to be, in a way, continued by the spectator, to make them participate.
RS So, Ignacio, these marvellous small abstract studies in this sketchbook, are they nothing less than a way of making more facile your ability to portray a figure or a feeling or a mood or a passing emotion, or are they something more than that, something separate – a narrative?
IV Well, as we were saying, I never make a proper study, everything has its moment, its like a second; they were probably made in a few minutes,
RS These ones?
IV Yes. So it’s never expected to be more than what it is, but also, it’s an expression. I think I consider them interesting as long as they have some paradox, a visual paradox, intriguing and unresolved- perhaps figurative, perhaps narrative, or as mere forms or composition.
RS Well it’s certainly a methodology, it’s intriguing, these are amazing studies of surface and the medium you’re using which looks like paint or is it pastel?
IV No, its paint – oil paint, made with a knife, I use the knife a lot because it’s more direct, the spatula and the small scale make them intimate and very synthetic, they are instant. So of course, many of them I would discard, you know, they’re not very interesting. I never experiment in order to get to something, or try to develop something here that maybe later I will use. As we were saying about Albers, he did experiments that he never wanted to show.
RS That have just been discovered since his death?
MS Yes, the director of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, Nick Weber, had to decide whether these paintings should stay private. As Gauguin said, “my drawings are my private space, you can buy my paintings but you will never get my drawings”.
RS Are we going to be allowed to look at the Albers experiments?
MS Yes, they have exhibited some of them. Like the way that you’re working, Ignacio, Josef Albers is someone who was experimental. The signature works, ‘The Homage to the Square’ series, became something very refined in completion. The experiments are very physical. The finished paintings are worked with a knife. But with the experimental paintings, a bit like a rehearsal process, juxtaposed impasto relationships search intensely for colour chords. Many of these run across the surface creating an experimental, and beautiful, matiere.
RS With Albers you would expect those experiments to be about how do you lay down colour, if you like, in blocks, in a very consistent way because that was after all what he was doing. And when I saw these I thought are these studies, or are they ways of laying on painting to see how you get effects when you are making a painting? Or they are just sort of joy of the whole process of the surface, and making a picture because they certainly have a kind of authority even though they’re rather small. Don't you think?
MS I do. I think you are absolutely right, they have a scale which is not small.
RS Exactly.
MS They take on a kind of monumentality.
RS They live on once you’ve done with them.
IV I always feel I come from an Expressionist school: you are always ‘expressing’. So for me this Gauguin or Albers idea of making a separation between what is public- what is to be shown- and something which is only a study or experiment: I don’t have that separation. For me a line can be something, one moment of your life that you want to fix.
RS So it can be seen.
IV Afterwards of course you make selections and you think some things are better than others. But I don’t think, “this is something I will use for later for a bigger work”. In this way everything remains in the ‘now’.
RS Everything is in the ‘now’.
IV Yes, I sometimes think: “this can be, it’s already a little maquette in its own right”.
RS That’s what some of these sketchbook drawings feel like.
IV Maybe they are made as an exercise but always with this definitive thing in mind: that I always feel painting is a way to stop time! ‘Today didn’t just go by- I made this’. I stop……
RS …like you’ve stopped the clock…
IV …like I can make something concrete with the time, and later I will probably go back and say, ‘that day I did that’. Because it’s always like an anguish of time flowing away, flows by, and this way you fix this- you stop it.
RS Almost like a horror vacui, with you attempting to stop emptiness, stop time.
IV Which is an illusion of course. In the end it’s not really so.
MS I understand implicitly what you mean by a moment in time. Each moment completely different from the last.
IV Probably. There can be a certain mood, and the light too affects the mood and the technique. Technical accidents happen- and then you decide which way to go.
RS But you know, you steer completely clear of abstract painting; all your paintings, that I know, are figurative, quite stylized. One can expect to see an isolated figure in some kind of physical manifestation and also an emotional manifestation. That figure might feel ok, might feel isolated, might feel uncomfortable with these very rich, if you like, abstract environments in which the painted figures sit or stand or lie in uncomfortable positions, even looking as if they’re about to slide off the surface of the paintings sometimes. Whereas these very beautiful studies tend to be very complete-looking: almost as if you are looking for some kind of room in which to place the figure.
IV For me they still have some figurative connotation or illusion.
RS Three dimensional spaces?
IV Yes, but I always need the presence of a figure or something like it, because it’s like the relationship with the public, something you can associate with, to communicate. I don’t believe in these completely abstract things, very subjective and individualistic.
RS So this placing of the figure on an abstract painting is a more self-conscious thing than I’d expected you to admit to.
IV ...yes...haha...
RS Or do you see whatever is surrounding the figures in the painting, as a kind of environment or interior which suits the mood of the figure; suits the message?
IV I don’t have a clear idea. Yes, sometimes it’s like a reflection, or sometimes it’s the game between the figure and the space, and sometimes it’s on the border of something, on the edge, falling onto something..
MS When you are working on the paintings, Richard’s made a very good point, there’s idea that you are, if you like, reconciling this abstract mood interior by resolving it with some figurative note, or, some human figurative presence within it. So that resolution; when you bring the two together, that’s when you know that the painting is successful?
––SPLASHHH––
IV Yes. I think it’s like a dialogue, like the philosopher said – ‘a man is a man and his surroundings’, it’s never the man alone, but him and his circumstances.
RS Could this extend to saying we are really victims of our own DNA? In reality we are really just wedded to this concrete, this railway line, this swimming pool.
--TRAIN DRIVES PAST THE POOL--
IV Yes, but it’s a mixture. For me it’s like a dialogue: it’s the accident; the figure that’s born out of this accident and the accident of the space or surroundings. Suddenly you have this presence - the presence, and the echo too.
MS I was going to use the word ‘mirror’ -the paintings as mirrors of the human condition. We project, we see visual suggestions or echoes, as you use the word, which trigger things inside the viewer. Your paintings are very much released…
--SPLASHHHH--
…into the consciousness, as well as being visually beautiful.
IV And the colour plays a role there, in the sense that it comes naturally as an expression.
RS How is that? In what way?
IV I think it’s very, for me, automatic, a natural way of expressing things. I never had a plan, ‘these colours will suit this figure’. Colour is part of, is one of the ingredients of this game and then, when it fights with this figure and then through different actions, accidental things occur.
MS There are two paintings you have on the wall at home which really give a very different sensation because they are on wood. The paint is matt and absorbs the light in a very different way to the canvases and also the drawing is more dramatic and contrasting, are you aware of that? And it is because you are working on this different surface I imagine.
RS The grain of wood is very linear, more than the natural substance of the canvas.
MS Wood resists. When you make a mark on wood it’s a different touch, maybe the toughness of the drawing in those pieces derives from that.
IV Exactly.
MS Scale is to me an important factor in your work. I was wondering whether in fact you actually approach the canvas always in the same dimension, or you do you ever turn the canvas?
IV Yes sometimes I turn it.
MS And is that to do with scale- I mean when you turn sometimes things find a resolution or stability? A stability from which you can then build? As a painter myself I always approach the canvas consistently as a given rectangle, my process is about trying to push something…..
RS ...to stabilise the scale of that space?
MS Yes, somehow to push it. It’s still open to change. Even though it's still figurative, all the process is abstract to me. All painting is abstract. There is a misconception in modern teaching at the moment whereby students are told that ‘your painting is to do with people’ and then, somebody else’s work is abstract. In fact the whole process is abstract.
IV Yes of course, you can’t be a good figurative painter without being a good abstract painter.
MS I think that’s absolutely true: they both have to work like that.
IV I remember in the '80s and '90s I used to work like this, turning the canvas around because I was discovering new things. I would turn the canvas upside down in order to make the composition work better and be more dynamic. Otherwise you get to a certain point which works, leaving nothing anywhere else. When you turn the canvas upside down, you discover a new thing. I was working in a very direct way, where some paintings can be turned two or three times revealing different meanings which can work one way and the other way as well.
RS Yes I noticed the other night that you were pretty much indifferent to which way around the painting is being seen -suggesting the artist was doing whatever is needed to do in two planes not just one.
MS Again this is part of the language which you strive for, I think, and which can be seen in great painting. It’s what I call punctuation, the ‘spark-plug’ which ignites all kinds of visual dialogue. It’s what I love about your painting. You use a big vocabulary, and punctuation too.
IV Do you mean it’s like a rhythm that you want to communicate so the image can be questioned? When Robert Hughes talks in general about the media-led propaganda or the commercial idea, and the imposing or commanding you to do this, or do that -with your focus on one thing- like giving you orders…..
RS …for example: “write out the cheque”…
--LAUGHTER--
IV …so then your focus is not just on one thing, which would allow you to really play. It becomes not very clear, not a clear solution, not a command, it’s like a suggestion. Maybe the painting doesn’t work unless the spectator makes an effort. An effort to understand, to give the spectator something. Maybe it’s a reaction also to the world, that is imposing things- you must do this, you must think that. This is like giving you different possibilities.
RS It is an impossible task really to make paintings in 2009. I suppose in 1509 it was an impossible task to make paintings - what is it that you really are trying to do?
One point where I find Robert Hughes misleading in his very entertaining programme and writing is about the subject of artists whose work reflects a very limited, very greedy, very money-minded society. He proposes I think correctly that a purpose of art at any time in history is to reflect that time, socially or whatever it is, to show future generations what it was actually like to be around then.
And then he complains bitterly about the work of people like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, when, because they occupy themselves with one single camera angle, as it were, they succeed in doing just that- reflecting society back to us. So in that way I think they have been successful but if you want to actually examine the whole process of painting, think about it and give expression to those contradictions that we inherited, trying to make a three-dimensional situation on a bit of flat wood or canvas then you are going to appeal more to Robert Hughes and less to the market place and this may also count for why artists of great importance and great interest are sometimes isolated a long time after they have been doing their work. That market-driven notion, the ‘best artist is a dead artist’, is about how once the artist is out of the way you can really start to look at the work, and that is possibly as true today as it ever was.
MS Yes, I think the interesting point you make, that art reflects the time it is made in, is not something one thinks consciously about, but…
RS …and that which is thought to be immense in its range and importance today may be revealed to be exceedingly trite in fifty years time…
MS …I think so. And also, Richard, makes them the Academics of their day.
IV Academics?
MS Yes because if you actually look at the Academics, the ones who set out to portray their time, their work never transcends that time. They stay in the past.
IV They do.
RS Sort of ‘camp’.
IV Exactly.
RS And I can see Damien Hirst’s work being seen as very camp in quite a short amount of time. In his case it won’t take that long to get to the bottom of it. Some of his early work was magnificent I believe, but the sediment, you know, is already settling shallow.
MS Yes that’s right.
RS With Koons there are all sorts of very interesting problems which will take much longer to get understood and actually to be seen.
IV Yes much more interpreting their time.
RS Self consciously doing so?
IV Making a portrait of the time. And it’s very obvious in a way, via the impact and the language. Like a flash, in a more superficial or stereotypical way, making you blind for one second or one minute before you see reality again. It’s like an impact, a very strong impact.
MS Art which can be described… I mean you can describe a shark in a tank, verbally, and the title tells you about that idea, and you can think that idea; the actual process of seeing the work becomes almost…
IV Academic, literary also, its like a literary thing when you can really explain it.
MS With painting, Richard is quite right, we still are unravelling images made many, many years ago. Look at what Picasso said about cave art: ‘it doesn’t get better than that’. I use this phrase with the students, and this: ‘It’s what only painting can do’. I think there are things that painting can do which go so deep not in a self-conscious or contrived way but in a way that is always in the present, exercising you.
RS Mmmmm.
MS Its not slipping into the past.
IV Like a renovation of something.
MS Yes. There is a very good piece written by a tutor of mine, talking about the difference between when you look at a photograph of people wearing top hats you are
immediately thinking of the past and what strange clothes they wore; whereas if you look at a Van Gogh drawing of a man wearing a top hat its like the guy’s in front of you, he’s there within the present. And he was using the analogy with Kodak, which then had the slogan ‘Memories are made of this’
RS What at that time, turn of the century?
IV Its like a magic thing. Van Gogh can make it alive, a touch of vitality to the work, the drawing.
RS It’s alive…
IV …it’s alive - it’s not a document. You don’t think of it’s history. That photograph shows a reality whereas the drawing shows truth. Which in the case of Van Gogh is something narrower, almost like a deep well.
RS As if it is the preoccupations with which the artist makes the painting he’s making that are very very important. One needs to know what his intentions are because it’s the statement that surrounds the work of art, both with figurative art and with conceptual art -although these two ideas won’t remain separate forever,
possibly- that gives the viewer a way into knowing what it is they are supposed to be looking at. For example if we were, right now, in a new wing of the Tate gallery in the middle of the country, that's just been opened by the Queen and we were down here making a film and we were looking around, you could say this is Jeff Koons’, or Damien Hirst’s, greatest work, it’s called 'Swimming Pool!’ And what is it? A swimming pool with wonderful cabins with different coloured doors, and so on and so forth and then you think oh this is an amazing- I’ve never seen a sculptural installation quite so impressive and amazing as this; even the weather is playing its part, and it’s a superb thing, and Damien Hirst is a very very great artist! And it is identical in every way to this place we are standing in now- except we would not be allowed to stand in it.
IV Nothing is pure.
RS Nothing is pure.
IV Nothing is absolute. All depends on the context. We were talking about this figure and space. The reality and also what surrounds it; its circumstances……
RS Does what you want, what you want of us as we’re looking at the painting, play a part? Whereas Van Gogh was just really giving us his interpretation of what he saw at that one moment, with no additional interpretations available, although people thought they were a complete joke when they actually were painted.
MS For example the cypresses, the twisting, turning cypresses, he saw those as an allegory of the human spirit, he mentions something of the finality of life in his letters. That painting has a punctuation in the landscape which is something in his mind, something absolutely stunningly beautiful but also troubled. So he could be called a conceptual artist in that sense and these things colour the picture, so to speak. When you read the letters, then return to the painting, you certainly see something from a slightly different point of view but it doesn’t colour the whole picture. It can enhance it, the experience of it, but it will never stand for the painting because the painting is so many other things.
IV But I think in those days, until now, art was like a certain pure activity. Now it becomes the opposite of pure, everything now has to be in a context, everything now depends on the context. If you see something in an important gallery, maybe it doesn’t need many things, it doesn’t need to be good, because it all depends on the surroundings of the work of art.
RS To the extent that maybe the only reason why it is good is that it is in a gallery.
MS I think presentation is a big part of the young British artists thing. I mean presentation is everything. Saatchi was breaking his neck to get that work in the RA because it gave him certain kudos. It gave it some “provenance” and you wouldn’t expect anything different from a guy who made his millions from advertising.
IV It’s inevitable. Maybe social recognition is part of normal evolution.
RS It doesn't matter how these things get celebrated or thought about, it’s what they do- it’s different for each generation.
MS The one thing, though, that is for sure is that there were Damien Hirsts in the 1930s and there were Damien Hirsts in the 1940s
RS Who were they?
MS I can't name them, but they were doing or trying to do their publicity thing. Every sort of era has had its performers I suppose and it’s like Richard was saying-
when it settles you will see it, and it will slip again into its own art history. Whether it’s going to live in the present? I’m not sure, it’s very hard to know.
RS But certain mistakes have been made. Certain works of art which have been hung in museums as being works of great art, great beauty, significance and importance will be derided with gales of laughter in a hundred years time. We know enough about laws of possibility to know that will be certain -and the other way around too. Though the artist, if you like, needn’t concern himself with posterity, which is not the issue: it’s what you’re up to, it’s the compulsion to make the art that matters.
IV Maybe unconsciously you have this idea to make something for posterity. I think maybe that’s why we are always inspired by the old masters, like an ancient fountain of fresh water. Their sense of harmony, still keeping their freedom and independence- Rembrandt, Velazquez or the Classic Greeks...
RS You’re looking at them to try to find out what is in those artists’ works which make them last?
IV Maybe unconsciously we wish to make something so solid yet fragile, so fascinating...
MS I think that’s true for me: not a seeking of posterity but certainly a case of what are you looking for...
IV …for truth…
MS …yea, that’s it.
IV These sculptures that we’ve seen for two thousand years, two thousand five hundred years- there’s some truth there, truth which keeps its secrets. Very different to something which appears very important now. Like a new wine which may or may not be good later. For example a Damien Hirst, which is a moment thing, without maturity.
MS That’s true. But there is some ballast in these paintings, some recognition we experience that strikes a chord, and I suppose that is truth. I think it reaches out and you are overwhelmed, overtaken, and that is something magical.
RS In the case of Ignacio’s paintings I always feel that there are figures which represent or contain different emotions. But since human emotions always come from the same place, the heart and the mind of an individual, you can't necessarily identify what those emotions are in the figures. There is an ambiguity in the figures in the work but identifiable, somehow, at the same time as being ambiguous and empathic: they recognize the terrible predicament in which we all find ourselves. There is the component of hope as well as some truth.
MS Again you go back for more, and that’s one thing –a very beautiful thing– there’s something else you always want to go back for, there’s something more that’s there. I think that’s my relationship with your art.
IV I think that’s what’s so attractive too. The process which is unfinished.
MS We come back to the principle thing, the principle issue, which is that they are expressions of your changing and continual sense of feeling... you’re travelling in a kind of space, an interior, and you’re trying to navigate your way through it, but it’s more deep and complex than some of this more contemporary stuff that we were talking about – coming back to that phrase, it’s what only painting can do.
RS Which is what?
MS I don't know what it is but it can come from a lot of things that we have talked about. I can't say it’s definable.
IV It is reinventing, it used to be more of a register of things, it wasn’t something that photography could take the place of. Now maybe it’s changed to being a different kind of registration…..
RS ……an inner register in your case? Is that a part of it?
MS I think the key word is empathy that's what your work can bring you to a state of, a kind of empathy. It’s sometimes troubled, it's not always easy, the emotional range is very wide with all the vocabulary that you use.
IV Any mood can be used constructively, it’s the listening that counts.
RS Hearing one’s mood, what’s inside one’s head, hearing one’s mood! Pretty good advice across the board, isn’t it! Instead of being frightened when one is angry, to be simply observing one’s feelings instead. And to translate that onto the canvas…..
IV …..keeping to the natural process, the organic way, in one’s work.
MS I think there is a kind of analogy with great writing, isn’t there? It is an extraordinary experience to go and see the working manuscript of Ulysses by James Joyce and finding that it is as visual as it is: it’s as much a visual experience as it is a literary experience, because it’s full of crushing red marks cancelling out, re-writing, reshaping, re-cutting down or amplifying, and it’s almost, like drawing, a drawing process of arriving at some finished work.
RS But it's symbolic whether a novel or a picture. Symbolizing, in whatever medium, those feelings. Transcending the medium, the feeling is there, be it a manuscript or a picture. What you are saying, interpreted…..
MS It’s a travelling…….
RS But what conceptual art gives us is a label about what that work of art is, or what the artist tells you it is. He informs us of what is going on in his painting so we will make judgements according to what the view of the artist declares it to be about.
IV Very literary.
RS Well, many artists make absolutely certain they don't say anything at all about their work in case we discover what they believe about their work is so in opposition to what we always thought it was that it ceases to have meaning to us. I'm not suggesting that the artist has an obligation to talk about his work but the extent to which an artist does so allows us to maybe interpret it from that angle. But whatever it is, it is incredibly brave to bring all these considerations into the light: I think you show a great and compelling certainty Ignacio in your debate. The effect of what you do may come from a kind of ‘magic’ or ‘alchemy’ but you are not afraid to join us in trying to define what is behind your work; your openness makes a strange contrast to a sense of mystery in the painting- what are these figures doing? What are they there for?
IV It has to produce a debate. We can always talk after, b
ut you want to leave the hands alone to produce the work freely.
MS It’s like arrival before you travel and the travelling is what interests you as a painter
RS Yes, the journey.
Fin
-----
Tooting Bec Lido, London
Sunday, 15 March 2009
IV …sketch books, black and white.
RS When did you do these?
IV This year I think - January or February at the National Gallery.
RS They smudge on the page opposite…
IV …with charcoal. What I like about charcoal is that you can play with lines and produce a scene, either from the imagination or from works of art that interest you, instinctively. Which can emerge later in the painting...but directly from imagination.
MS I am intrigued by the use of line and tone together. As someone who draws too,
I love drawing and thus the idea of marks and mark- making. I haven't experienced drawings like these in a way that has meant so much- I can only describe them as air, air making a kind of space across the page.
RS They are spacious aren't they?
MS Yes, very spacious and you see this in some of the other sketchbooks. A very brave, particular, use of line.
IV I tend to produce a kind of cloud, then elements and lines, with the total composition emerging, suggesting directions and figurative meanings.
RS How quickly are they made?
IV Very quickly. I do the whole in one go, so the lines keep some freshness. As Cocteau said, “the line must always be in a life-threatening situation”. And things emerge from the process: Michelangelo’s way of working was to observe the stone and from the stone emerged the figure that was inside it- more a dialogue with, than imposing your ideas on, the stone.
RS I think you are not intending especially to draw the figure because your figure is quite stylized, with the emphasis on where it is and what it is doing.
IV That comes completely from the same sort of drawing. With a few lines added to the very minimal composition you see that this can be a figure running, or a figure, you know, with a horse; or a kind of attitude, very simple.
RS An attitude?
IV Attitudes - asking, running, escaping, or static maybe- that are ambiguous and suggestive and pictorial between what the figures are and what they strive to become.
MS I mean it’s interesting that these images begin to emerge and an idea or theme, if you like, begins to develop consequently from page to page- variations on a theme. It’s very musical, an interesting way to put it is ‘is one searching or is one finding?’ and that’s the kind of thing that comes from looking at the whole scene if you want. You are kind of searching….
IV …for the theme of what is going on in the composition. Because then I think the person that is looking can interpret in a way that’s very free and very new, never having an idea imposed as in an illustration. I try to avoid my drawing becoming illustration, i.e. making the drawing obvious and losing the mystery.
The spectator has to meet the work halfway, and work himself to give it meaning.
RS So are you saying that the figure permits the viewer to put into the image whatever emotion?
IV Exactly.
RS Both figure and viewer are feeling in time with each other. I see these figures standing in a state of isolation, isolated and searching. That sense is very strong for me in the paintings as well.
MS I think that is in the paintings as well, this idea of the material: charcoal circles, marks, translated into painting. As if you draw something out. Maybe I’m not interpreting it in the right way, I don’t know, but you draw something out of the surface of your painting. One of the amazing things I think -I don’t know whether it’s the South American sort of sensibility- is that you very often draw out of the very earth: look at the colours in some of your paintings. They’re very much like the earth.
You know I remember going to see the Goya, the Third of May in the Prado and I was staggered actually by how much it was really blacks and whites which floated over this mood, a scene of Madrid. It’s just so powerful that your mind is doing some extraordinary trips between something that’s actually fundamentally interior and something that’s a visual sort of sensation, and a narrative of course.
IV Also I studied as a sculptor and I kept this feeling of something solid and three dimensional; I don’t think we can talk about painting only in two dimensions as it is also three dimensional. The third dimension is almost nothing, you have the feeling that you can really touch it, which is a very sensitive situation. As Rodin said, sculpture is the science of bump and hollow. But after some years I started to paint and maybe what interested me was how figures depended on the light and their surroundings, volumes and simulations, reality becoming uncertain: the material and the immaterial. The gestures also allow you to discover mysterious forms and
the fragility of its compositions attracted me from the beginning.
RS Looking at the figure from every point of view.
MS It is interesting, the painting, for me, because I think you and I work in a very different way. I suppose people might say I work in projections and relationships, (some relationships over positions in space), to find a position in space. One hopes to build a kind of echo of that. But you seem to build in two-dimensional surfaces so when I look at your paintings you are going in and out all the time. They project forwards but they also project back. Its not just about fixed positions- it’s more fluid than that.
IV It is like a continuous game, different explanations, different reflections of things, it’s not one solid point of view.
RS Is your point of view as much from the inside vision, the inner vision about how it feels to be in the predicament of existing every day, as much as the artist reporting what he sees from the outside? Do you think it’s a combination of these two things- your trying to convey something about how you feel as an individual- or are you just trying to show something as you see it from the outside?
IV I think it’s probably both. An action, and also a response from the painting that it gives you after, it’s a very intimate expression, but you also have this automatic mechanism to give some objective meaning to what is going on, in a way, on the surface. In that way it’s like an expression and also the response of the expression, making it understandable and universal. In Madrid I was exhibiting, and one of the paintings, for me, was simply a composition of figures; but some people saw, through their point of view, things like bull- fighting, you know, completely different things to what I would ever imagine. The painting consisted of quite simple forms but they immediately associated that with something very deep in their culture. There is both action and reaction in the painting- an automatic mechanism that clashes with symbolic language.
RS So there’s a sort of mirroring process taking place. You look at the figure in one of your paintings and start wondering what it might be like to be in that predicament or to remember the predicament.
MS I think that’s very interesting. I was wondering how much the role of memory plays in your constructions. There is another sketch book which is labelled ‘Vienna’ which I presume it’s very much to do with being in a place.
IV Exactly.
MS I wonder if the images, and these studies that Richard’s holding there, have got a great sense of, I don’t know, is it a memory? Are you pulling something from some of the places that you go and other things that you see? Are you trying to bring that into an image...?
IV Those sketches in Vienna were sketches from the Museum, so they were all ideas taken from paintings, and mainly sculptures which I was most interested in. I see more things when I see the sculptures in the museum, the classics, the Greeks, I see these natural attractions of forms and I would like that to translate into painting maybe. But in the case of Vienna, they were sketches of that museum, where they have big Roman and Egyptian collections. I think it’s like the raw material for my paintings.
MS How do you work between painting and sculpture- do you find that you begin a series of sculptures and you become immersed in them, or do you work between painting and sculpture?
IV Mainly between.
MS So one feeds the other- is it a reaction?
IV Yes I think it’s a reaction and also, well, sometimes you need to change. Traditionally, switching from oil painting to pastel was a way to change. And they used to use other mediums to make a break, some drawing for a while, then painting, then some clay modelling and big scale oil painting later in the day.
Every day is different, I reach something different every day. You need to change the mood in painting, for instance sometimes I am fixed with a detail of a face and after that I would make a big gesture, out of control. It’s an action-reaction process, quite unconscious. I work in cycles. I need to forget the work and after some weeks work on it again and continue in a very different way, turning it upside-down sometimes.
RS Were you deliberately doing that, going from one to the next?
IV Yes.
RS So you might reluctantly start to sculpt something because you’ve been too long on the painting or drawing? Why is that?
IV I don’t know, I’m always scared or feel apprehension about developing too much in one sense, one area.
With too much developing, painting becomes a monotonous thing, I like to keep them fresh; to keep the impact, the air of the minute. I think painting problems have to be addressed from as many angles as possible: sometimes it is eye and hand; another time, it is like a distant critic, very objective; and another, it can be inventing and designing.
MS Your sculptures are very like that. I mean they feel like a material that is being worked on. That’s why I mention Modigliani, with this kind of process developing towards an excavation of something. Whereas your sculptures are very spontaneous- they seem to be almost as direct as the drawing.
IV Its the sketch of the minute with the hand. It’s mainly the structure, the texture, you can play with the figures and suddenly there is something, something new, very fresh and……
RS …immediate
IV …because it happens also with painting - you start to overwork it and it becomes something, you know, that loses the first energy. That’s why I like to change; to make a break and work in that way.
RS Are your emotions entering when you are doing that; do you feel angry when you are painting some figure that maybe comes from a place of pain or something?
IV Yes, I think so, you change moods all the time, probably one painting involves different feelings, one to start, another to develop, another to continue, so it’s like a lecture of different thoughts and feelings that go through the painting, and that gives vigour and drama to the work, building and destroying and becoming, eventually, an implacable critic. That’s why it’s never like the abstract expression, in one go, one input.
RS So it's really a bit like getting through the day and living a life, could we describe it?
MS It is a wonderful way of working, I have to say, it is something which is very new to me, it’s very different to my English sort of education in painting that seeks, strives for a particular kind of idea. But the notion of the canvas being literally that, a vehicle for your changing moods, there is freedom in that which I absolutely admire.
IV Like the opposite mood, from one extreme to the other, giving a feeling that it is to be continued.
MS You go through that whole emotional sort of vocabulary? It’s extraordinary.
IV Sometimes you are more sensitive to colour, for example. You develop the colour, and you can put the general composition face down. You have to make it work again but I like the different stages, some parts remain, you can feel that the painting is in a certain process- it’s not completely static, perfect, or finished. So you have a feeling of ‘maybe I can continue this? Maybe it has this other explanation?’ To feel the process, and to give the idea that the process has to be, in a way, continued by the spectator, to make them participate.
RS So, Ignacio, these marvellous small abstract studies in this sketchbook, are they nothing less than a way of making more facile your ability to portray a figure or a feeling or a mood or a passing emotion, or are they something more than that, something separate – a narrative?
IV Well, as we were saying, I never make a proper study, everything has its moment, its like a second; they were probably made in a few minutes,
RS These ones?
IV Yes. So it’s never expected to be more than what it is, but also, it’s an expression. I think I consider them interesting as long as they have some paradox, a visual paradox, intriguing and unresolved- perhaps figurative, perhaps narrative, or as mere forms or composition.
RS Well it’s certainly a methodology, it’s intriguing, these are amazing studies of surface and the medium you’re using which looks like paint or is it pastel?
IV No, its paint – oil paint, made with a knife, I use the knife a lot because it’s more direct, the spatula and the small scale make them intimate and very synthetic, they are instant. So of course, many of them I would discard, you know, they’re not very interesting. I never experiment in order to get to something, or try to develop something here that maybe later I will use. As we were saying about Albers, he did experiments that he never wanted to show.
RS That have just been discovered since his death?
MS Yes, the director of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, Nick Weber, had to decide whether these paintings should stay private. As Gauguin said, “my drawings are my private space, you can buy my paintings but you will never get my drawings”.
RS Are we going to be allowed to look at the Albers experiments?
MS Yes, they have exhibited some of them. Like the way that you’re working, Ignacio, Josef Albers is someone who was experimental. The signature works, ‘The Homage to the Square’ series, became something very refined in completion. The experiments are very physical. The finished paintings are worked with a knife. But with the experimental paintings, a bit like a rehearsal process, juxtaposed impasto relationships search intensely for colour chords. Many of these run across the surface creating an experimental, and beautiful, matiere.
RS With Albers you would expect those experiments to be about how do you lay down colour, if you like, in blocks, in a very consistent way because that was after all what he was doing. And when I saw these I thought are these studies, or are they ways of laying on painting to see how you get effects when you are making a painting? Or they are just sort of joy of the whole process of the surface, and making a picture because they certainly have a kind of authority even though they’re rather small. Don't you think?
MS I do. I think you are absolutely right, they have a scale which is not small.
RS Exactly.
MS They take on a kind of monumentality.
RS They live on once you’ve done with them.
IV I always feel I come from an Expressionist school: you are always ‘expressing’. So for me this Gauguin or Albers idea of making a separation between what is public- what is to be shown- and something which is only a study or experiment: I don’t have that separation. For me a line can be something, one moment of your life that you want to fix.
RS So it can be seen.
IV Afterwards of course you make selections and you think some things are better than others. But I don’t think, “this is something I will use for later for a bigger work”. In this way everything remains in the ‘now’.
RS Everything is in the ‘now’.
IV Yes, I sometimes think: “this can be, it’s already a little maquette in its own right”.
RS That’s what some of these sketchbook drawings feel like.
IV Maybe they are made as an exercise but always with this definitive thing in mind: that I always feel painting is a way to stop time! ‘Today didn’t just go by- I made this’. I stop……
RS …like you’ve stopped the clock…
IV …like I can make something concrete with the time, and later I will probably go back and say, ‘that day I did that’. Because it’s always like an anguish of time flowing away, flows by, and this way you fix this- you stop it.
RS Almost like a horror vacui, with you attempting to stop emptiness, stop time.
IV Which is an illusion of course. In the end it’s not really so.
MS I understand implicitly what you mean by a moment in time. Each moment completely different from the last.
IV Probably. There can be a certain mood, and the light too affects the mood and the technique. Technical accidents happen- and then you decide which way to go.
RS But you know, you steer completely clear of abstract painting; all your paintings, that I know, are figurative, quite stylized. One can expect to see an isolated figure in some kind of physical manifestation and also an emotional manifestation. That figure might feel ok, might feel isolated, might feel uncomfortable with these very rich, if you like, abstract environments in which the painted figures sit or stand or lie in uncomfortable positions, even looking as if they’re about to slide off the surface of the paintings sometimes. Whereas these very beautiful studies tend to be very complete-looking: almost as if you are looking for some kind of room in which to place the figure.
IV For me they still have some figurative connotation or illusion.
RS Three dimensional spaces?
IV Yes, but I always need the presence of a figure or something like it, because it’s like the relationship with the public, something you can associate with, to communicate. I don’t believe in these completely abstract things, very subjective and individualistic.
RS So this placing of the figure on an abstract painting is a more self-conscious thing than I’d expected you to admit to.
IV ...yes...haha...
RS Or do you see whatever is surrounding the figures in the painting, as a kind of environment or interior which suits the mood of the figure; suits the message?
IV I don’t have a clear idea. Yes, sometimes it’s like a reflection, or sometimes it’s the game between the figure and the space, and sometimes it’s on the border of something, on the edge, falling onto something..
MS When you are working on the paintings, Richard’s made a very good point, there’s idea that you are, if you like, reconciling this abstract mood interior by resolving it with some figurative note, or, some human figurative presence within it. So that resolution; when you bring the two together, that’s when you know that the painting is successful?
––SPLASHHH––
IV Yes. I think it’s like a dialogue, like the philosopher said – ‘a man is a man and his surroundings’, it’s never the man alone, but him and his circumstances.
RS Could this extend to saying we are really victims of our own DNA? In reality we are really just wedded to this concrete, this railway line, this swimming pool.
--TRAIN DRIVES PAST THE POOL--
IV Yes, but it’s a mixture. For me it’s like a dialogue: it’s the accident; the figure that’s born out of this accident and the accident of the space or surroundings. Suddenly you have this presence - the presence, and the echo too.
MS I was going to use the word ‘mirror’ -the paintings as mirrors of the human condition. We project, we see visual suggestions or echoes, as you use the word, which trigger things inside the viewer. Your paintings are very much released…
--SPLASHHHH--
…into the consciousness, as well as being visually beautiful.
IV And the colour plays a role there, in the sense that it comes naturally as an expression.
RS How is that? In what way?
IV I think it’s very, for me, automatic, a natural way of expressing things. I never had a plan, ‘these colours will suit this figure’. Colour is part of, is one of the ingredients of this game and then, when it fights with this figure and then through different actions, accidental things occur.
MS There are two paintings you have on the wall at home which really give a very different sensation because they are on wood. The paint is matt and absorbs the light in a very different way to the canvases and also the drawing is more dramatic and contrasting, are you aware of that? And it is because you are working on this different surface I imagine.
RS The grain of wood is very linear, more than the natural substance of the canvas.
MS Wood resists. When you make a mark on wood it’s a different touch, maybe the toughness of the drawing in those pieces derives from that.
IV Exactly.
MS Scale is to me an important factor in your work. I was wondering whether in fact you actually approach the canvas always in the same dimension, or you do you ever turn the canvas?
IV Yes sometimes I turn it.
MS And is that to do with scale- I mean when you turn sometimes things find a resolution or stability? A stability from which you can then build? As a painter myself I always approach the canvas consistently as a given rectangle, my process is about trying to push something…..
RS ...to stabilise the scale of that space?
MS Yes, somehow to push it. It’s still open to change. Even though it's still figurative, all the process is abstract to me. All painting is abstract. There is a misconception in modern teaching at the moment whereby students are told that ‘your painting is to do with people’ and then, somebody else’s work is abstract. In fact the whole process is abstract.
IV Yes of course, you can’t be a good figurative painter without being a good abstract painter.
MS I think that’s absolutely true: they both have to work like that.
IV I remember in the '80s and '90s I used to work like this, turning the canvas around because I was discovering new things. I would turn the canvas upside down in order to make the composition work better and be more dynamic. Otherwise you get to a certain point which works, leaving nothing anywhere else. When you turn the canvas upside down, you discover a new thing. I was working in a very direct way, where some paintings can be turned two or three times revealing different meanings which can work one way and the other way as well.
RS Yes I noticed the other night that you were pretty much indifferent to which way around the painting is being seen -suggesting the artist was doing whatever is needed to do in two planes not just one.
MS Again this is part of the language which you strive for, I think, and which can be seen in great painting. It’s what I call punctuation, the ‘spark-plug’ which ignites all kinds of visual dialogue. It’s what I love about your painting. You use a big vocabulary, and punctuation too.
IV Do you mean it’s like a rhythm that you want to communicate so the image can be questioned? When Robert Hughes talks in general about the media-led propaganda or the commercial idea, and the imposing or commanding you to do this, or do that -with your focus on one thing- like giving you orders…..
RS …for example: “write out the cheque”…
--LAUGHTER--
IV …so then your focus is not just on one thing, which would allow you to really play. It becomes not very clear, not a clear solution, not a command, it’s like a suggestion. Maybe the painting doesn’t work unless the spectator makes an effort. An effort to understand, to give the spectator something. Maybe it’s a reaction also to the world, that is imposing things- you must do this, you must think that. This is like giving you different possibilities.
RS It is an impossible task really to make paintings in 2009. I suppose in 1509 it was an impossible task to make paintings - what is it that you really are trying to do?
One point where I find Robert Hughes misleading in his very entertaining programme and writing is about the subject of artists whose work reflects a very limited, very greedy, very money-minded society. He proposes I think correctly that a purpose of art at any time in history is to reflect that time, socially or whatever it is, to show future generations what it was actually like to be around then.
And then he complains bitterly about the work of people like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, when, because they occupy themselves with one single camera angle, as it were, they succeed in doing just that- reflecting society back to us. So in that way I think they have been successful but if you want to actually examine the whole process of painting, think about it and give expression to those contradictions that we inherited, trying to make a three-dimensional situation on a bit of flat wood or canvas then you are going to appeal more to Robert Hughes and less to the market place and this may also count for why artists of great importance and great interest are sometimes isolated a long time after they have been doing their work. That market-driven notion, the ‘best artist is a dead artist’, is about how once the artist is out of the way you can really start to look at the work, and that is possibly as true today as it ever was.
MS Yes, I think the interesting point you make, that art reflects the time it is made in, is not something one thinks consciously about, but…
RS …and that which is thought to be immense in its range and importance today may be revealed to be exceedingly trite in fifty years time…
MS …I think so. And also, Richard, makes them the Academics of their day.
IV Academics?
MS Yes because if you actually look at the Academics, the ones who set out to portray their time, their work never transcends that time. They stay in the past.
IV They do.
RS Sort of ‘camp’.
IV Exactly.
RS And I can see Damien Hirst’s work being seen as very camp in quite a short amount of time. In his case it won’t take that long to get to the bottom of it. Some of his early work was magnificent I believe, but the sediment, you know, is already settling shallow.
MS Yes that’s right.
RS With Koons there are all sorts of very interesting problems which will take much longer to get understood and actually to be seen.
IV Yes much more interpreting their time.
RS Self consciously doing so?
IV Making a portrait of the time. And it’s very obvious in a way, via the impact and the language. Like a flash, in a more superficial or stereotypical way, making you blind for one second or one minute before you see reality again. It’s like an impact, a very strong impact.
MS Art which can be described… I mean you can describe a shark in a tank, verbally, and the title tells you about that idea, and you can think that idea; the actual process of seeing the work becomes almost…
IV Academic, literary also, its like a literary thing when you can really explain it.
MS With painting, Richard is quite right, we still are unravelling images made many, many years ago. Look at what Picasso said about cave art: ‘it doesn’t get better than that’. I use this phrase with the students, and this: ‘It’s what only painting can do’. I think there are things that painting can do which go so deep not in a self-conscious or contrived way but in a way that is always in the present, exercising you.
RS Mmmmm.
MS Its not slipping into the past.
IV Like a renovation of something.
MS Yes. There is a very good piece written by a tutor of mine, talking about the difference between when you look at a photograph of people wearing top hats you are
immediately thinking of the past and what strange clothes they wore; whereas if you look at a Van Gogh drawing of a man wearing a top hat its like the guy’s in front of you, he’s there within the present. And he was using the analogy with Kodak, which then had the slogan ‘Memories are made of this’
RS What at that time, turn of the century?
IV Its like a magic thing. Van Gogh can make it alive, a touch of vitality to the work, the drawing.
RS It’s alive…
IV …it’s alive - it’s not a document. You don’t think of it’s history. That photograph shows a reality whereas the drawing shows truth. Which in the case of Van Gogh is something narrower, almost like a deep well.
RS As if it is the preoccupations with which the artist makes the painting he’s making that are very very important. One needs to know what his intentions are because it’s the statement that surrounds the work of art, both with figurative art and with conceptual art -although these two ideas won’t remain separate forever,
possibly- that gives the viewer a way into knowing what it is they are supposed to be looking at. For example if we were, right now, in a new wing of the Tate gallery in the middle of the country, that's just been opened by the Queen and we were down here making a film and we were looking around, you could say this is Jeff Koons’, or Damien Hirst’s, greatest work, it’s called 'Swimming Pool!’ And what is it? A swimming pool with wonderful cabins with different coloured doors, and so on and so forth and then you think oh this is an amazing- I’ve never seen a sculptural installation quite so impressive and amazing as this; even the weather is playing its part, and it’s a superb thing, and Damien Hirst is a very very great artist! And it is identical in every way to this place we are standing in now- except we would not be allowed to stand in it.
IV Nothing is pure.
RS Nothing is pure.
IV Nothing is absolute. All depends on the context. We were talking about this figure and space. The reality and also what surrounds it; its circumstances……
RS Does what you want, what you want of us as we’re looking at the painting, play a part? Whereas Van Gogh was just really giving us his interpretation of what he saw at that one moment, with no additional interpretations available, although people thought they were a complete joke when they actually were painted.
MS For example the cypresses, the twisting, turning cypresses, he saw those as an allegory of the human spirit, he mentions something of the finality of life in his letters. That painting has a punctuation in the landscape which is something in his mind, something absolutely stunningly beautiful but also troubled. So he could be called a conceptual artist in that sense and these things colour the picture, so to speak. When you read the letters, then return to the painting, you certainly see something from a slightly different point of view but it doesn’t colour the whole picture. It can enhance it, the experience of it, but it will never stand for the painting because the painting is so many other things.
IV But I think in those days, until now, art was like a certain pure activity. Now it becomes the opposite of pure, everything now has to be in a context, everything now depends on the context. If you see something in an important gallery, maybe it doesn’t need many things, it doesn’t need to be good, because it all depends on the surroundings of the work of art.
RS To the extent that maybe the only reason why it is good is that it is in a gallery.
MS I think presentation is a big part of the young British artists thing. I mean presentation is everything. Saatchi was breaking his neck to get that work in the RA because it gave him certain kudos. It gave it some “provenance” and you wouldn’t expect anything different from a guy who made his millions from advertising.
IV It’s inevitable. Maybe social recognition is part of normal evolution.
RS It doesn't matter how these things get celebrated or thought about, it’s what they do- it’s different for each generation.
MS The one thing, though, that is for sure is that there were Damien Hirsts in the 1930s and there were Damien Hirsts in the 1940s
RS Who were they?
MS I can't name them, but they were doing or trying to do their publicity thing. Every sort of era has had its performers I suppose and it’s like Richard was saying-
when it settles you will see it, and it will slip again into its own art history. Whether it’s going to live in the present? I’m not sure, it’s very hard to know.
RS But certain mistakes have been made. Certain works of art which have been hung in museums as being works of great art, great beauty, significance and importance will be derided with gales of laughter in a hundred years time. We know enough about laws of possibility to know that will be certain -and the other way around too. Though the artist, if you like, needn’t concern himself with posterity, which is not the issue: it’s what you’re up to, it’s the compulsion to make the art that matters.
IV Maybe unconsciously you have this idea to make something for posterity. I think maybe that’s why we are always inspired by the old masters, like an ancient fountain of fresh water. Their sense of harmony, still keeping their freedom and independence- Rembrandt, Velazquez or the Classic Greeks...
RS You’re looking at them to try to find out what is in those artists’ works which make them last?
IV Maybe unconsciously we wish to make something so solid yet fragile, so fascinating...
MS I think that’s true for me: not a seeking of posterity but certainly a case of what are you looking for...
IV …for truth…
MS …yea, that’s it.
IV These sculptures that we’ve seen for two thousand years, two thousand five hundred years- there’s some truth there, truth which keeps its secrets. Very different to something which appears very important now. Like a new wine which may or may not be good later. For example a Damien Hirst, which is a moment thing, without maturity.
MS That’s true. But there is some ballast in these paintings, some recognition we experience that strikes a chord, and I suppose that is truth. I think it reaches out and you are overwhelmed, overtaken, and that is something magical.
RS In the case of Ignacio’s paintings I always feel that there are figures which represent or contain different emotions. But since human emotions always come from the same place, the heart and the mind of an individual, you can't necessarily identify what those emotions are in the figures. There is an ambiguity in the figures in the work but identifiable, somehow, at the same time as being ambiguous and empathic: they recognize the terrible predicament in which we all find ourselves. There is the component of hope as well as some truth.
MS Again you go back for more, and that’s one thing –a very beautiful thing– there’s something else you always want to go back for, there’s something more that’s there. I think that’s my relationship with your art.
IV I think that’s what’s so attractive too. The process which is unfinished.
MS We come back to the principle thing, the principle issue, which is that they are expressions of your changing and continual sense of feeling... you’re travelling in a kind of space, an interior, and you’re trying to navigate your way through it, but it’s more deep and complex than some of this more contemporary stuff that we were talking about – coming back to that phrase, it’s what only painting can do.
RS Which is what?
MS I don't know what it is but it can come from a lot of things that we have talked about. I can't say it’s definable.
IV It is reinventing, it used to be more of a register of things, it wasn’t something that photography could take the place of. Now maybe it’s changed to being a different kind of registration…..
RS ……an inner register in your case? Is that a part of it?
MS I think the key word is empathy that's what your work can bring you to a state of, a kind of empathy. It’s sometimes troubled, it's not always easy, the emotional range is very wide with all the vocabulary that you use.
IV Any mood can be used constructively, it’s the listening that counts.
RS Hearing one’s mood, what’s inside one’s head, hearing one’s mood! Pretty good advice across the board, isn’t it! Instead of being frightened when one is angry, to be simply observing one’s feelings instead. And to translate that onto the canvas…..
IV …..keeping to the natural process, the organic way, in one’s work.
MS I think there is a kind of analogy with great writing, isn’t there? It is an extraordinary experience to go and see the working manuscript of Ulysses by James Joyce and finding that it is as visual as it is: it’s as much a visual experience as it is a literary experience, because it’s full of crushing red marks cancelling out, re-writing, reshaping, re-cutting down or amplifying, and it’s almost, like drawing, a drawing process of arriving at some finished work.
RS But it's symbolic whether a novel or a picture. Symbolizing, in whatever medium, those feelings. Transcending the medium, the feeling is there, be it a manuscript or a picture. What you are saying, interpreted…..
MS It’s a travelling…….
RS But what conceptual art gives us is a label about what that work of art is, or what the artist tells you it is. He informs us of what is going on in his painting so we will make judgements according to what the view of the artist declares it to be about.
IV Very literary.
RS Well, many artists make absolutely certain they don't say anything at all about their work in case we discover what they believe about their work is so in opposition to what we always thought it was that it ceases to have meaning to us. I'm not suggesting that the artist has an obligation to talk about his work but the extent to which an artist does so allows us to maybe interpret it from that angle. But whatever it is, it is incredibly brave to bring all these considerations into the light: I think you show a great and compelling certainty Ignacio in your debate. The effect of what you do may come from a kind of ‘magic’ or ‘alchemy’ but you are not afraid to join us in trying to define what is behind your work; your openness makes a strange contrast to a sense of mystery in the painting- what are these figures doing? What are they there for?
IV It has to produce a debate. We can always talk after, b
ut you want to leave the hands alone to produce the work freely.
MS It’s like arrival before you travel and the travelling is what interests you as a painter
RS Yes, the journey.
Fin
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