#painter interview

In honor of the final days of Tala Madani exhibition, “Smiley Has No Nose”, at David Kordansky, here’s an interview from a couple years ago for Frieze. 

The following is a reprint of an interview with Christian Bazant-Hegemark, accompanying the July 2013 Wolfram Residency in Seattle, WA. The residency included a solo show, and was organized by Siolo Thompson

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Siolo Thompson for WOLFRAM: Your recent work exhibits a range of symbolism that seems fairly specific to our current time and place. When using symbols in painting though, how much can they ever be ‘yours’, versus when will the work become ‘theirs’? Let’s talk about authorship and appropriation.

Christian Bazant-Hegemark: I understand symbols as results of canonization dynamics continuously established throughout art history. The various ciphers within the canvas space and beyond - objects, logos, gestures etc. receive transmedial ascriptions that have an impact on how things are perceived on both individual and socio-cultural levels. This ongoing process of canonizations creates symbolic/metaphoric/iconic/archetypal meaning, resulting in reception no longer being open or undefined, but rather pre-defined, pre-thought. As a species, we need this for information to be processed efficiently, but in the context of Art it can lead to problems; one obvious side effect is the creation of cliché - things getting locked into meanings that are nearly impossible to subvert or transcend.

Surrealism tried experimenting with shifting contexts, but as we now know, these shiftings themselves have been canonized - so it’s not only the canonizations that can’t be overcome, it’s the process of it happening as well. Working in any field of visual aesthetics, you have to be aware of that.

Thompson: Are there canonization dynamics specific to our time?

Bazant-Hegemark: Living in a globalized age we’re offered a huge quantity and diversity of imagery from all sorts of sources. With canonization ignoring man-made/theoretical borders between different media, it doesn’t matter whether visual stimuli initially appear in movies or comics, in results from image processing or paintings, or in newer sub-media like Youtube or 4chan. High and low all get interwoven into generic visual stimuli that are then subjected to implicit canonization dynamics, working transmedially - think Lars van Trier’s Manderlay or specific contemporary opera stage sets; we inherently quantize our inputs, readily making it the new de facto standard in any other media, already at a subconscious level. This also happens on a purely individual, pre-societal level, from just one painting to the next - these dynamics somehow feedback from the societal to the individual level. I’d say this makes our globalized world’s canonization dynamics radically different to those in place 10, 15 years ago.

Kingdom, 2013 Oil on canvas 200 x 200cm | 78.7 x 78.7in

Thompson: What implications does this have on contemporary painting?

Bazant-Hegemark: To start with, I’d say that the contexts embedding contemporary painting have to deal with a lot more stimuli than just the intellectualized art historic plain taught to generations. In addition, they have to somehow incorporate an awareness of its surrounding media and times, as well as that time’s conditions. They have to reflect society as a whole, including politics and the various social agendas in order to embrace, reflect and potentially enhance contemporary painting strategies.

What I’m talking about is the opposite of the notion of the artist in their ivory tower, stuffed with nude women waiting to be projected onto their canvases. Instead of continuing the norm of making use of the objectified e.g. reclining female, it can be worthwhile to objectify what seems unobjectifiable yet: state terror through red tape, anti-government raids, the Prism program, Turkey’s police violence, rape of men, Steubenville - as long as the the victims aren’t yet again objectified through or because of your work.

When painting used to be the medium of choice to propagandize the illiterate, contemporary painting can become a sort of countermovement acting in the tradition of civil disobedience. It’s a challenge with quite a bit of potential intellectual pitfalls, where some leaning out of one’s comfort zone might be required. Imagine challenging yourself by trying to create a painting including a perfectly rendered femen activist in a way that doesn’t make inadequate use of her bodies’ torso - catching the essence of their beliefs, without yet again inadequately using the female form as ornament.

Thompson: Up until recently your paintings focused on strongly committed emotive compositions, using detailed figurations within somewhat minimalistic settings. With your more recent work you seem to steer away from that, opening up both palette and formal vocabulary. There are more layers, more intense colors - what happened? Can you speak to the process that lead to these changes?

Bazant-Hegemark: Over time, the specific way I approached each new painting became formulaic to a limiting extent, so I began reevaluating various aspects of the process, ultimately discarding the somewhat static up-front decision making leading to each composition. Instead I now engage in a more dynamic interaction with the unfinished canvas’ perpetual discrete states of evolution. I try not to feel committed to previous choices within a canvas anymore, and avoid previous choices’ results from becoming a burden to the finished piece. You can see it as a form of artistic dictatorship: the visual elements lost all of their rights, and now enjoy temporary privileges at best. That’s how creativity usually works, but we tend to forget about it once we get afraid of losing purported progress.

Birth of Gravity, 2011 Oil on canvas 300 x 200cm | 118 x 78.7in

Thompson: To what degree does the described process get erratic or even random? This seems, to some extent, to imply a sort of couldn’t-care-less attitude defying humanistic ideals of authorship.

Bazant-Hegemark: I wonder whether this kind of attitude might not actually be essential to dealing with figuration in painting. Without a laissez-faire approach of some sort, don’t paintings get overly burdened with a certain intellectual hedonism? There is an assertive decadence in western civilization’s cultivation of thought that I’d very much like to extend through intuitively caused chaos, at least within the safe boundaries of the canvas’ surface.

I understand the usage of the term ‘erratic’ when comparing the current approach to the specific previously used process. In general though, the space for randomness within any artistic process has clear limitations because of the many ways of post-authoring. Where previously I’d do most headwork regarding the composition up-front, I now constantly evaluate the canvas both intellectually and emotionally. This creates pieces that seem more personal to me, with a huge part of conscious mental control now initially being sidestepped - while still using it at a different stage though. The paintings still care a lot about their conception, but in a more open way - the portrayed drama now is enhanced by erratic tendencies, diminishing uber-pathos by way of randomness. I rely on craft, art history, emotion and brain in a way that I previously wouldn’t have had the balls to. When you work for 10+ hours on a painting, fatigue will create an unwillingness to care that I welcome. Maybe it can be understood as an authorship that puts trust in its own power and instinct, instead of making sure that it won’t need to. Think of it as curating a painting as it emerges - there’s a more natural flow to that.

Fog, 2013 Oil on canvas 130 x 170cm | 51.1x 66.9in

Thompson: In some of the more recent pieces it gets hard to focus because of the many layers leading up to a painting, to the point where it’s unclear what’s going on. Are you trying to prevent a clear view, to prevent us from actually seeing your work?

Bazant-Hegemark: The multiple fragments within a canvas make so much more sense once you are willing to spend time for the painting to unfold its potential. Imagine a book’s full emotional force to hit you just by reading its abstract - it’s unlikely to happen. Once you think about complex paintings as similar to dreams or movies, experiencing them could even be understood as an emancipatory step away from mainstream media, since most viewing parameters - angle, distance, speed, direction etc. are still governed by the viewer. Paintings like to rest. They don't object to waiting for someone to resuscitate them into awareness, they won't pressure anyone by force-offering a sixty frames-per-second experience including a soundtrack played at full volume in some multiplexed dark wide space. Paintings at their best are intimate pandorian boxes, silent until opened.

There’s a variety of reasons though for paintings to become fuzzy or diffuse; for one thing, some of life’s affairs simply are ontologically complex to the extent that depicting them in a visually ‘complex’ scenery can be understood as a rather literal translation of that, expressing a certain multitude of mental layering that I care about.

Another aspect is the one of surprise - I like them in a painting the same way I appreciate being surprised by someone else's work’s unusual visual or visceral approach - it’s such a volatile experience. I enjoy developing work that manages to create an implicit three dimensional reception space, where the viewer’s specific distance and viewing angles change the information they receive. Pushing the medium by breaking visual habits, one small step after the other.

Pandora, 2012 Oil on canvas 300 x 200cm | 118 x 78.7in

Thompson: How do these thoughts apply to your current paintings?

Bazant-Hegemark: I employ a variety of gradually extending painting ciphers to work my way through the kind of jungle that figuration has transmogrified into. Some of these include a rather uber-saturated palette, depth effects to create areas of attention and higher frequency countered by areas that let eyes and mind rest. I fragment the canvas-space with latent information overload without exclusively focusing on a high level of perfection within the segments of figuration, and in general try to understand the retinal data stored on the canvas without some kind of inherent inner hierarchy. I try to believe a brushstroke’s gesture to have the same impact as, for example, a perfectly rendered face. Although I think in graded categorizations of figures, objects, strokes etc, I try to not feel that way. Because of this, I understand the current body of work at times to be post-figurative, which I believe to be the result of one way of trying to digest both the medium’s history and its current place in time.

Once you don’t use the human figure, painting tends to end up way less pathos-laden. But by giving up that element, you also lose an immense amount of potential - that part of canonization that might give a welcome weight or focus to your work’s intention, similar maybe to the usage of tonal scales in music; think about Gérôme’s Consummatum est. Ultimately though, whatever is rare always becomes precious too - which goes for knowledge about and application of craft like figuration, which we enjoy already simply because few people can do it well, as well as a lower frequency of figures within a year's canvases, making for the fewer instances immediately receiving more attention - the matrix of the consequences regarding usage of human figures on canvases really is a rather multidimensional beast, maybe too complex for a painter like me to fully grasp.

Symphony, 2013 Oil on canvas 160 x 200cm | 62.9 x 78.7in

Thompson: Speaking of craft and knowledge in the context of figuration: Aren’t some of the reasons that lead painting to pathos inherent to the process required for figurative painting, with its need for knowledge and control over the craft you just mentioned?

Bazant-Hegemark: There’s definitely a conflict between figurative power used to aid a work’s intention, and figurative ‘power’ that becomes the work’s main focus, that ‘takes over’ the work because of the weighty historic attributes attached to it. Figuration can become the inverse silver bullet - the one hitting the painter.

In general, any kind of craft or formalism can - and will, at one point - overtake your work’s reception, making it empty of statement or, ultimately, artistic value - like a hammer losing its strength because of overuse. Seen this way, craft in the visual arts has a rather inflationary tendency. The more you focus it, the less value it seems to have on its own.

ST: Is this understanding of inflation dynamics why the human figure plays a less central role in your recent paintings, where it used to be in every single one of them?

Bazant-Hegemark: I think it comes rather from the urge to make sensitive use of figuration, to make more appropriate decisions on when to use what tool. It happens more and more often that it feels as if the human figure would be used mainly as ornament, and that simply makes no sense to me with the current paintings. One could truly and openly do that, the way I understand Paul DeFlorian’s work - but that would be a different approach.

Boolean Descent, 2013 Oil on canvas 203.2 x 101.6cm | 80 x 40in

Thompson: So - to extend this thought, would you say that figuration within painting doesn’t work at all anymore today, because of the exigency of craft?

Bazant-Hegemark: At least I’d say that the narcissistic element that seems required for the perfection of any craft is always problematic. Once you see the push for perfection as a mechanism subjected to the dynamics of control and hierarchy, of an inability of letting go, you can’t not see it as some fetishization of formalism. Obviously, everything we do can become fetishized, and I do strongly believe that there’s a specific leaning towards the ‘autistic’ in a non-medical sense, inherent to most creative greatness - but there’s a rather thin line, to be placed individually, for our efforts to become shallow just because of it.

It's for these kind of reasons that I wonder how far painting can get if focusing mostly on mimetic correctness. I believe aesthetics to be of main importance; a human’s appearance is obviously as important in creating their persona as their social environment - upbringing, education etc. But to take all the complexity of these surroundings into account in a painting, the path of mimesis might have to be left from one point onwards.

How to make figuration work beyond narcissism or ego, from a rather pure approach that focuses the medium’s attributes and possibilities, might be one of the unifying efforts regarding contemporary and/or avantgarde figuration.

Thompson: What could ever be meant by ‘avantgarde figuration’? Can a topic as old as figuration ever be considered avantgarde?

Bazant-Hegemark: Probably not. Avantgarde as society’s bleeding edge is subject to the most radical dynamics of inflation - to talk about a craft that’s practiced over millennia makes it somewhat strange to talk about its general avantgarde aspects. Nevertheless, I’d say that to continuously extend forms is one of art's imperatives.

Dénouement, 2012 Oil on canvas 120 x 200cm | 47.2 x 78.7in

Thompson: Coming back to pathos - can it even be avoided? Aren’t painting’s main connotations those of nostalgia and romance, making painting an anachronistic medium anyway? How does this relate to paintings focusing on unfolding of contemporary events, where usually the stronger, pathos-heavier events are chosen?

Bazant-Hegemark: I like the idea of using paintings for volatile, yet stable, permanent statements on evolving current affairs - taking in attributes usually attached to blog posts or the daily news. It can be used to reduce the medium’s gravitas without heading into domains of the easy or purportedly naive. Painting as means to commenting the Taksim protests? Why not - reminiscent of Manet’s Execution of Emperor Maximilian, or Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. Work that focuses on what’s going on right now might even benefit from some sort of usage of pre-canonized imagery. Looking at the speed of internet memes makes you understand just how incredibly volatile the pre-canonized state is though, from 2011’s pepper spraying security guard from UC Davis, or this year’s policeman spraying the red-dressed woman on Taksim - everything from outfit to gesture to partial mimics have instantaneously turned iconic.

I believe in making your interests become the core of your artistic endeavours, by creating aesthetic and intellectual translations of your interests that can, at least with the better pieces, stand the test of time and critique. If you fear being anachronistic because of your interest in painting, take time off to cook a soup or bake bread- and feel true anachronism unfold. Afterwards, probably still shellshocked, get back to the studio and continue worrying about the next painting's quality.

Obviously though, with painting being an inherently open medium regarding its reception, verbatim statements are not really an option - definitely not the way words can be used within texts. Paintings need openness - once a painting becomes semantically ‘flat’, too one-dimensional, it becomes some sort of design phantom, fulfilling one purpose only, like a sign yelling an imperative - if it ever leads to imagination, then probably only to the one of subversion. We need to embrace this openness within paintings. I’m interested in understanding a topic both intellectually and emotionally, in order to create pieces that surround this territory of thought-emotion. I like thinking of it as a wave’s topology of concentric circles, emerging around a drop falling into a liquid. There’s a totally obvious pivot, the ‘center of action’ originating the wave dynamics, but what we focus is usually not that pivot - it’s the waves. We see the waves. Maybe good paintings can’t ever be more than these echoes/dynamics surrounding any pivotal event.

Rainbow, 2013 Oil on canvas 162.5 x 101.6cm | 64 x 40in

Thompson: How does one use representations or approximations of strong symbology and avoid the pathos that is a natural extension of those objects? In the work you created in Seattle you have included objects such as the flag, mickey mouse heads, Klan silhouettes, the repeated dove form, also a segment of a Pink Floyd cover. Can representations of ‘significant objects’ ever be stripped of emotional appeal? How can this be accomplished?

Bazant-Hegemark: I’d say the general dynamic is: The more open your forms, the less weight they’ll have to carry, the less cliché your work will become - up to the point of not carrying anything at all. The less pre-thought, pre-experienced your forms are, the higher their potential ‘truth’ value can be. That’s a tricky one though; at the beginning of this residence I thought about scrapping symbols altogether and using intense colors instead to create stringent atmospheres, since even the most extreme colors don’t ever seem to get close to the tiniest symbols’ potential of overburdening pathos.

But quite obviously, I didn’t follow through on that one; instead of leaving the figurative/symbolistic, I tried getting the paintings to a retinal level where the canvas’ wealth of stimuli prevents any single piece from standing out too much, hoping that this holds the latent pathos in balance that can emerge from figurative and symbolistic weight. This allows me to still make specific statements about a topic - like the mailboxes loosely linking to mythics of Pandora’s box - while that really is just one of the many things potentially experienced or associated by the viewer. The paintings become less like singleminded vectors, and more of multifaceted, multilayered contexts of implemented thought and feeling - like movies or dreams maybe.

Mandala, 2013 Oil on canvas 127 x 167.6cm | 50 x 66in

Thompson: When paintings are understood as unclear, open systems though, what happens when they try focusing complex topics? There are things a novel can do with apparent ease, where I wonder whether paintings, by showing such tiny visual amounts of things, can ever translate - even when using the layering of semantics you mentioned.

Bazant-Hegemark: I don’t know. Loss is inherent to translation between media. The possibilities within painting, disregarding any kind of translation dynamics, keep me wondering. Are portraits the best use of the medium? Or surrealistic subjects? I don’t know how to answer this one. I guess all emerging work transmedially put together might be a good approach of an age’s collective, subconscious answer to your question. A single piece of art, or any single person’s body of work probably can’t achieve what a generation, understood as loosely connected organism, might do with ease.

Rainbow, 2013 Oil on canvas 160 x 120cm | 62.9 x 47.2in