Friday, September 5, 2014, Future Tenant had an opening reception for Paul Chidester's solo exhibition "Tectonica". In the duration of this show, Visual Programming Manager Kate Lin interviewed the artist for an in-depth look at the artist and his work.
Paul Chidester, the artist behind "Tectonica"
Who and what are some of your early artistic influences?
Paul: My great-grandfather was a painter who attended the Maryland Institute in the late 19th century. Growing up outside Baltimore, the family house was filled with his landscape paintings and charcoal drawings of still life and portraits. They had a profound impact on my way of experiencing the world through images. Later on, the Chicago Imagists were an influence, as were De Chirico, Guston, Smithson (particularly his photographs), and the Scottish concrete poet/gardener Ian Hamilton Finlay.
Can you describe your choice of subjects for your paintings? How does your creative process influence the elements you use?
Paul: I’ve always identified with the idea of landscape in one way or another. After my daughter was born, I began taking her for walks around the block where we lived in Chicago’s west loop area. I began to see a new “landscape” from a couple of feet above ground level. Within the frontier of a single, weedy city block, I began to see a new kind of horizon. Since then, I’ve taken many walks into similarly prosaic “landscapes” in order to find forms and spaces that might characterize the world out there now, however obliquely.
How long does it take to create one your works?
Paul: I start with a couple of ideas, and then rely on the process of drawing to conjure particular kinds of surprises. I’m not interested in most work that offers specific kinds of critical reflections on the world because that kind of work relies on the reiteration of personally held beliefs, something that’s already known. Poet Louise Gluck writes in her book of essays titled, “Proofs and Theories” that she has come to seek - through the process of writing - a kind of illumination. By that she means a jolt that is felt by the writer (and then by the reader when the poem is read). This happens for me in each painting that survives the process of its creation. It has to surprise me and come to a kind of internal coherence. I hope that feeling is experienced by the viewer. So, I work slowly. A painting can take many months to complete.
Paul Chidester. Meteor. 2011
You mentioned that this series is based upon J.G. Ballard’s work “visual poetry of ruin”. What about Ballard’s work appealed to you?
Paul: A number of poets and writers have influenced my work.
Along with Ballard, I would also include Russell Edson and Jonathan Williams. I wouldn’t say that my work is based on any of theirs, but the influence is there. In J.G. Ballard’s case, he is an incredibly visual writer who gives shape to imagined worlds that feel uncannily already known. Many passages in his stories describe the edges of towns, out where airport onramps endlessly circle anonymous high-rise hotels, etc. Sometimes there are the faded remains of resorts, industrial ephemera, or backyards, but something unexpected is always just around the corner. When I take walks in these kinds of spaces, the same is true. There is an element of danger to them, and drastic transformation. The visual description of such spaces has led to strategies that, for me, have nothing to do with what has come to be referred to as “ruins porn”.
On your website, you described the recent painting as “synthesiz(ing) a variety of topographical with figural and architectural novelties that have been collected through time.” What were the qualities you were looking for in collecting architectural objects? Do those objects/qualities have any connections to past memories or personal preferences?
Paul: For many years, I divided my time between Pennsylvania and Ireland. Teaching opportunities in Italy afforded me the opportunity to spend a fair bit of time there as well. During that time, my subject matter among these places began to blend. I became aware of how old-world architectural monuments, ruins, follies, gardens, etc. evoked feelings quite different from their new-world equivalents. I began to wonder what kind of pictorial tensions might be evoked by rendering a new world “folly” in a way that signified something else? As a result, I gravitated stylistically toward works that carved out a mythic space (like Sienese painting) rather than a straightforwardly naturalistic one. This series of paintings began during an extended stay in Siena. So, the Romanesque stripes in the paintings come from there, but seem to evoke a very different kind of feeling. Some kind of malevolence animates the striped forms/spaces that complements the WWII era dazzle painting camouflage motifs in other paintings from the same series. Ultimately, the subjects coalesce into arrangements that come to form a new, anachronistic world.
Paul Chidester. Nocturne. 2013
I understand this series was started during an extended stay in central Italy. How did the Italian countryside and culture affect your goals and creative process for this series?
Paul: Before travelling, I attended a lecture by the author Toni Morrison. She brought up the prevalence of social barriers in our time (no less than more traditional notions of “walls” that can still be seen in medieval cities like those in central Italy). So, while walking around the towns I visited, the ubiquitous walls of hill towns became interesting for their massive, picturesque beauty, but also for the darker aspects the Morrison evoked in my response to them in the 21st in the notion of the military fortifications, not for their familiar picturesque qualities, but for the new ways I began to see them. Back in the studio here, I knew that I needed a surface/support system that would enable me to reference the walls and forms in my sketchbook and photographs. So, I chose a surface that is a construction grade material used for exterior walls/buildings/etc., applied over rigid foam panels that are supported and cradled in a welded aluminum frame. Rather than being an unrelated, added “frame”, the aluminum serves as an integral element to the support and surface of the paintings. Finally, of course, I fell in love with the colors of the wall paintings there and chose flashe paint as a way to evoke the cooler fresco palette and matte surface.
One thing I noticed about this series is the varying perspectives. They range from holistic overviews to close-up details in this continuous space that you’ve created. They feel like connected snapshots of a full world, like a documentary of this imaginary land. How would you describe the style and what is your role in documenting this world?
Paul: Part of style has to do with choice, and part doesn’t. I do construct my paintings from a variety of images both drawn and photographic. I think of myself at heart as a collagist, rather than as a “painter’s painter”. One of the things that draws me to the more mythic spaces of the Sienese painters is the use of pattern to describe unknown places (or for visual pleasure). In both cases, a purely practical sense of naturalistic depiction is not the highest priority. In my case, I attempt a merger of various points of view, but nurture (and make space for) the way my own perspectival shortcomings serve the overriding interest of authoring my own version of a fictitious space, born out of synthesis and process.
Paul Chidester's solo exhibition "Tectonica" is on display at Future Tenant from September 5th, 2014 to October 4th, 2014.