Steve Locke:  It’s weird because I knew you before I knew your work.  I think it was the Yvonne Rainer/Rob Storr talk at BU.  Afterwards, we had a bit of a chat and you told me about PAPER MONUMENT and were sweet enough to send me a few copies.  Because of that, I thought of you as a critical theory/curatorial sort of voice and this got reinforced when we (with Colleen Asper, Anoka Faruqee, and William Villalongo) worked together to create a response to the writings of Ken Johnson in the NYTimes.  I didn’t really know you as a painter until your project at the deCordova Biennial with Roger White.  It was the first time I had seen one of the Plaid Paintings, and I really responded to the way it troubled some of the ideas I had been fed about abstract painting.  I spent a lot of time looking at them and I could not figure out why they were so potent and so humble at the same time.  They so clearly have these references to domestic things like tablecloths (that I think you enhance by not stretching them).  They made me think of Mary Heilman where she presents something that looks mundane and upon closer inspection reveals a complex series of decisions that belie the simplicity of the image.  Like her paintings, the Plaids are really matter-of-fact and directly painted.  They don’t have pretensions of heroism and they completely deflate the notion of the “gestalt” that is promised by Modernist Painting and in this way, they start to tackle some of the same territory as Daniel Buren and some of the other artists in the Supports-Surfaces movement in France.  But beyond that moment, your paintings seem to be engaged in something much deeper that the limits of what painting can (and should) do.   I see tensions through out the work (between public/private; modest/heroic; institutional/domestic).  Which leads me to my question:

How does conflict play a role in what appears to be a deeply structured practice in the Plaid Paintings and how does it inform decisions about the separate but conjoined acts of painting and presentation?

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Dear Steve,

Plaid , 2013, acrylic on acrylic, 18×42″

I’m so glad you asked me about conflict in the plaids! At first I thought that was too strong a word, but you’re right—the various conflicts are always there.

Of course, on a material level, plaid emphasizes the interweaving of warp and weft, so in this sense it renders the conflict/confluence of fabric visible. This is what I like when I’m looking at plaid. Each area of color emerges from the two sets of threads, so any adjacent hues are of necessity half the same, half different. For me these ramifications are interesting precisely because the rule is always explicit, inherent in how the thing is made. The pattern is surprising because it’s programmatic. I read every plaid I see like a vernacular Sol Lewitt.

And then with plaid there are also the interwoven, so to speak, questions of location and origin, issues that occur in a different register of intersections and coordinates but are nevertheless part of the pattern. Many fabrics reference or evoke a place, but plaid is a special case because it is both so ubiquitous and so commonly associated with “clans”—Scottish and otherwise. Actually, the earliest known examples of plaid are from 3500 BC China, but most people think plaid comes from Scotland, so that is itself notable. And the Scottish part of the story is complex because the famous tartans came to prominence as part of a (ongoing) conflict with England. At the same time, plaid became such a dispersed pattern because the Scots helped colonize India, where cotton “madras” plaids were produced for distribution throughout the British Empire. And of course now we live in a global age where plaids are made all over the world and depending on the context and their particular qualities can reference a range of places from honky-tonks, country clubs, grunge shows, the board room—all the while signaling membership in various groups. So the conflicts present at that level interest me, too.

I came to Ohio from Ecuador at the age of six, so for me the encounter with plaids is bound up with realizing that it was a prep-school pattern. My mom taught second grade at a private school, and I got a lot of my clothes from the thrift store there, and I think it was a way for me to fit in with kids that had a lot more money than we did. Wearing the right plaids was a way to disguise both my foreignness and my relative poverty, so I experience plaid as a kind of camouflage as well, a way of fitting in. So the pattern carries all those conflicts for me—of class, of origin, of group membership and assimilation—in a personal way. Over the years, I amassed a large collection of plaid shirts, not all of them preppy, and came to wear the pattern almost exclusively, but for decades I was merely a collector, a self-taught connoisseur.

Plaid, 2015, acrylic on acrylic, 18×24″

So I had developed a certain expertise, but deciding to paint plaids didn’t come from that so much as from sensing that there was a kind of joke in it, something funny about a painting that was plainly abstract but also utterly recognizable. I enjoy the category conflict. Somehow if you go from monochrome to stripe to plaid, even though the progression makes perfect sense, plaid ends up being the punch line. If you picture it with Buren, and he is repeatedly calling “scene!” with the stripes, I just keep going, adding stripes in the other direction.

And I like how the representation doesn’t function in a straightforward way either: Is this plaid a painting of something? An artist I admire—someone who doesn’t associate his name with his work—was making copies of Mondrian paintings, after Mondrian had died, arguing that paintings of abstractions could not be abstractions themselves. As I did with Buren’s stripes, I wanted to take that question to a different place, to where it involved patterns from everyday life.

In terms of re-presentation, which was how my teacher Robert Reed insisted on pronouncing it, the painted plaid is a peculiar thing. You can’t actually interweave the paint, so the illusion of plaid involves layering, transparency, and a lot of guile in the way you choose and organize the colors. Eliminating the canvas was essential to this, as it allowed the paint itself to serve as its own ground. All my plaids are acrylic on acrylic, and I paint them front to back, so the first things I put down are the first things you see, and the gesso goes on last, to seal the back. (The reverse of conventional painting, where you cover things up as you go and the last thing you put down sits on top.) There is a tricky illusionistic system at play, but it’s also just overlapping paint presented directly, where everything I do is evident in the final result. So here too, in the process, I think the conflict between illusion and material reality is the generative force.

Works in the studio of Dushko Petrovich

Born in Quito, Ecuador, Dushko Petrovich is a New York-based artist, writer, editor, and teacher. He received his B.A. from Yale University and his M.F.A. from Boston University before going on to serve as the Starr Scholar (Artist-in-Residence) at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He has exhibited his work at venues including the deCordova Museum, in Boston; Rachel Uffner Gallery, in New York; the Suburban, in Chicago; and the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen.

His writing has appeared in periodicals such as Bookforum, Slate, Modern Painters, and the Boston Globe, among others. Petrovich is a co-founder of Paper Monument, where he has co-edited many publications, including I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette and Draw It with Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment. He also chaired the n+1 Foundation’s board of directors from 2013 to 2015. Petrovich currently teaches at Boston University, RISD, NYU, and Yale. His newest project, Adjunct Commuter Weekly, made its debut at ICA Boston in July.

Anthony Palocci, Jr. Looking Up, 2015, oil on canvas, 60×96 inches. Studio view.

Steve Locke:  I think you are making some very challenging and gorgeous paintings, they were a high point of the last DeCordova Biennial. The ones that Lexi Lee Sullivan chose for that show married a haptic and almost brutal paint handling to elegant and bravura drawing. The result was spell binding. Like Vija Celmins, you managed to imbue everyday objects with an interior life. And at the same time, there was an assertion of modernist flatness and vivid surface that referenced Jasper Johns. Even the picture that Robert Moeller included in his pop up show, Yeah You Missed It, contained this dichotomy between the depicted and the felt.

My question is how does the idea of restraint inform your selection of imagery, your approach to color, and practice as a painter?

Anthony Palocci, Jr.:  It’s kind of funny for me to think about restraint. I haven’t thought about that in such depth until this question…

The first restraint I may have set up for myself was that whatever I painted must be manufactured. Whatever I paint cannot be organic or naturally occurring, it has to have been manipulated somehow. Whether it was built in a factory, sent through a meat grinder, or put through a mill, it’s got to be assembled by some form of fabrication. I think this focus stems from wanting to talk about people. I decided that I could say a lot more about people by painting images of the objects they created rather than depicting the people as themselves…

I used to paint a lot of people as people but there was a conflict of interest there because I didn’t want to talk about the individual. The individual was a very messy idea for me, something too complicated as one gets wrapped up in their story…Seeing someone in a painting, one identifies with that person as being of the same form and therefore empathizes with them; whoever they are, as they are depicted. At that point you’re too far into the painting for me…I needed to keep more of a distance between the painting and myself/the viewer/my audience…

By this “restraint” as you call it, I have boiled down my big ideas to the essential stuff I want to get at. By making a selection of a larger picture I eliminate everything else I don’t want to paint. I get distracted easily a
nd the world is such a vast place I need to discipline myself to hone in on one thing at a time. It’s really what keeps me grounded, to take one thing out of life and spend time with it. Even these objects have a story though, but it’s less literal than a person’s story because these objects are inanimate. They don’t have brains or blood. They have electricity, oil and motors. For now in my selection of imagery I have solved the first major problem I had as a painter, “What do I paint?”, and now I can get on with it…

Color is a whole other box of rocks. Color is so overwhelming to me now more so than ever because I am teaching color to students. Not only does one have to decide, “What do I paint?” but one must decide, “What Color do I use?” you could also ask, “How do I describe this?” or “Is it invented or observed?” and then there is the “Why then? How come?” to every answer you end up with…

I used to just grab any tube of paint that looked good at the time. Then that became problematic. Color is delicious and it is very easy to overindulge. Color is distracting because it is emotional. I can’t have color break my composure. For me it has always been a balance between the Venetians and the Florentines, Romanticism / Classicism, color / form, and painting / drawing. One can’t look at a form divorced from color. It’s a complicated issue for me.
My solution to this problem right now has been to work within the restraint of chromatic grays. And recently I have been drawn to objects composed of grays with parts made of plastics, metals and wires, so the shoe fits. I mostly work with either a warm or cool mixture of red and green with white added in for the shifts in value. That’s what goes on top. The under-painting is a whole other animal. I started using washy glazes of saturated colors as a ground so that the grays on top didn’t feel so dead (Nat Meade used to pick on my paintings in grad school because the grounds were left white, like the Impressionists). My under-paintings are color coordinated, differentiating the layers of spatial depth. Each painting is different but the most common use of the color is as follows:

Yellow = ground
Green = shadow
Red = light

Sometimes I mess with that, with blue, orange, and sometimes purple, just to see how the gray will behave on top. The same color gray will look different on top of a red than it does to a yellow or green, and in that, the same gray becomes a different gray. There are so many variations within these limits I feel like this is merely the starting point for me in my exploration of color. But for now, this is how I am making sense of things.

As far as my practice is concerned…it comes down to discipline again. I know I have to do certain things before I get down to business and waste a lot of material, so I have to come up with plans before I begin a painting. Every big painting starts off as a series of sketches. They can be formal or informal; on bar napkins or paper, whatever is available when I get an idea for a painting. From that point if I want more from that idea I make a small sized gouache painting and start thinking about how to conceive of the image and what to do with the paint. One thing leads to the next and I decide a size appropriate for the scale of the image and go. A lot of the time the larger paintings lead to smaller works as well. One part might strike me as worthy of more time or a separate canvas, so that spills out onto other surfaces. Keeping this part open for exploration helps me maintain an interest in any given subject. The deeper I can go into one thing, the more I can get out of it, the more I figure out, and all the while I am generating more paintings so I don’t feel like I’m wasting time on a big blow out.

Lately I’ve been returning to the image of the window fan I had hung in DeCordova. I wasn’t satisfied with my depiction of it. For a long time I would try and see how something was made, and then sort of internalize that form and make a painting of it. Now I am trying to keep it more true to what I am looking at, more observation and study of the thing itself. I’ve come to be more invested in the work as a result. Now I feel as though I am manufacturing these things. I observe, disassemble, and reassemble the objects. I’m also becoming interested in the situations one might find these objects in. The painting you cited in Yeah You Missed It is that same fan from the DeCordova but in one point perspective and with a window screen on top of it… The painting fools with perception. When you look at this painting you are looking at a small selection of a scene. Looking up from the ground outside an apartment to the second floor window where the fan is. I’ve cropped out everything but the space with the fan in it. Due to the perspective a lot of the object is obscured by the screen in front of it and the painting starts to take on different roles. It’s an illusion of space and it’s flat, like that Modernist thing you described. The tactility of the paint also helps with that. The painting asks a lot of questions at the same time and contradicts itself.

Installation view of Yeah, You Missed It, curated by Robert Moeller, at the Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the arts.
On wall: Palocci’s Looking Up. (Sculpture by Antoniadis and Stone.)

The restraints of this one object lead me to this strange selection of that scene and it is leading to even more. Restraints aren’t really restricting. I feel that restriction can be liberating, as it forces one into focus. It just takes a while to find that focus.

Talk soon,

Tony

Matthew Gamber, Blue Birds Exhibit, Gelatin silver print, 2010 from the series Any Color You Like

SL: I was a big fan of the work you had at the previous deCordova Biennial.  That work, titled Any Color You Like, did something so immediate and captivating that I am still thinking about it. You hear a lot of talk about audience engagement and interactivity in contemporary art but in all honestly, I am always wary of an artist that tries to involve me in their work.  The current vein of participatory/relational art seems oddly about spectacle and distraction (I think of Carsten Holler’s Experience at the New Museum).  But your work involved me in a visceral way.  I found myself really engaging and imagining what the situation posited in the photographs would be in “reality.”  I was determined to understand what had been lost in these images, namely, their color.  I got tremendously invested in what I thought I was seeing and what I was claiming and naming, so much so that I was completely dumbstruck that someone else had a completely different understanding of what was being imaged.  I could not recall the last time an artwork sparked this kind of internal and external disagreement about what it clearly pictured.  I remember thinking that I was more involved with what I was looking at than I had been in a long time.  It was really satisfying.

The current work requires that same attention from me.  Presented with all of photography’s indexical power, the photos seem to be empirical, almost like data.  But in the looking they unravel and unfold into a larger, less stable proposition.  They use presence AND absence to do this and that leads me to my question:

How do the poetics of loss, the nature of objects, and implications of nostalgia inform your photographic practice?

MG:  When someone asks me what my photography is, my best (and most unsure) answer is academic photography. My interest lies in trying to understand how camera technology led to certain conventions in seeing—a history of photographic methodologies. The best way for me to participate in this discussion is to make artwork that probes these conventions through a series of orthodox methods (utilizing processes faithfully, but in way that would be incorrect).

A black-and-white photograph is a signifier of data, information, and history (including mystery and drama). It is also a signifier of the past, and more potently, a site for nostalgia. Marshall McLuhan described nostalgia as a loss of identity—defining the present as reenactment of past forms. Are notions of photographic truth fueled by uncertainty within the present tense? Is it possible to create a black-and-white photograph today whose value is not based in latent nostalgia?

The photographs of Any Color You Like require interaction with a viewer’s own expectations. Is it possible to describe color verbally? Does it require prior knowledge of color to be able to describe it? These images involve language to reconcile the missing content within the pictures. The desire for color creates vacuum in which one seeks to restore any of the possible colors missing in the photographs. Historical color is imaginary.

Matthew Gamber’s work is on view in a two-person exhibition at the Hagedorn Foundation Gallery, in Atlanta, Georgia.  The show, also featuring Peter Bahouth, is called New Takes and is on view from November 13, 2014–January 10, 2015.  

Dushko Petrovich, Plaid, 2013. Courtesy of the artist. Roger White, Lobster, 2013. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Emily Evans.

January 25, 2014, 2—3 pm

Ever wonder why people write about art, how they form their opinions, or how art writing ultimately shapes the viewer’s thinking about contemporary art? What does it mean to be a regional artist and what does it mean to be a regional art critic?

If you are perplexed or intrigued by these questions, join The 2013 deCordova Biennial artists Dushko Petrovich and Roger White with Boston-area art critics to discuss current art writing tactics. As publishers of the contemporary art journal Paper Monument and residents of New England, Petovich and White are invested in the literary contributions of the art world.

Guest speakers:

• Stephanie Cardon, editor at Big Red and Shiny
• Steve Locke, artist and Associate Professor at MassArt
• Lori Cole, Charlotte Zysman Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities and Lecturer in Fine Arts at Brandeis University
• Jenn Liese, Director of the Writing Center at Rhode Island School of Design