HIRAETHIC PAINTINGS
David Risley
I’ve just got home from a disastrous holiday. We’d swapped our apartment in Copenhagen for a large house in the countryside. Within minutes of entering the home that we had borrowed for two weeks we knew we had to leave. I put out an SOS to friends and family and found another house we could move to the following day. What gave us such a strong reaction that we couldn’t stay in this house, for free? Were there rat droppings, cat hair and dust? No, the place was spotlessly clean. The offence was caused by pictures, images and texts. There were family photographs everywhere. Large, framed studio shots in black and white of the mum and three kids dancing. Snapshots printed out and tacked to the walls. Every wall featured an aphorism – printed and framed, as handwritten notes or written in marker pen directly onto the wall: If you want to fly give up everything that weighs you down. Love many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe. Chocolate doesn’t ask silly questions, Chocolate UNDERSTANDS. Live WELL, Laugh OFTEN, Love MUCH. It felt like a command. It felt like being in an awful family therapy session. It was all so immediate that it made the place uncomfortable. Slowly accrued over the years, a framed pearl of wisdom given for a birthday present, a photo of a school sports day, last-minute gifts still there years later, now invisible to the usual residents of the home. Imagery silting up the house like layers of sediment. I also felt guilty and self- conscious. Who was I to judge another person’s pictorial decisions, in their own home?
We had swapped houses, so as we entered their home, they entered ours. We wondered what they would think of the images we lived with. Would they think we don’t care about kids because we don’t have photos of them everywhere? After a lifetime spent with artists, personally and professionally, our walls are covered with their art. We imagined our visitors would hate it. The things they had on their walls told you what they were and what to think of them. Their visual display fitted the new language of symbolism evident everywhere from TV baking shows to tattoos. So, tell us Leslie, what does your Victoria sponge symbolise?
I spend my life looking at images. Judging, critiquing, valuing, appraising, comparing, celebrating, loathing other people’s pictures. Almost every penny I have ever earned has been based on this knowledge. It’s the reason I’ve been asked to write this text. What use is that lifetime of study in the wild? In the real world, outside of galleries, museums and artists’ studios. How do people live with pictures and how does their meanings shift with changes of context?
This is the territory William Roberts recent paintings operate in. He seemingly* finds pictures in domestic settings and lovingly recreates them. Not the image but the whole object. The wooden frame and the border are all recreated, physically in paint. The paint shifts language within each piece, playing different roles, taking on different functions. In part his paintings are describing 3D objects in 2D. In other ways it is built up sculpturally to mimic the referent three-dimensionally. *Seemingly? He had me fooled. These paintings are not copies. These objects don’t exist. They never existed. Roberts calls them ‘False Objects’. They’re simulacra, exact replicas of an original that never existed. The paintings Roberts makes exist in a parallel space, like narratives in a fiction: we can believe in them, enter their truth and follow their rules while we are in their presence. He says that he paints them in the third person. I’m still unsure whether he’s the author or a character in the fiction he produces. The objects are created in fiction but are accessible within our reality. He uses sophisticated if disarmingly simple painterly techniques to hold them in their own time and space. The light that hits them isn’t the light in the room with us as we view them nor even the light in the studio as he made them.
There are contemporary models for this type of painting. Allan McCollum’s Surrogate Paintings (1978–ongoing) are plaster casts of small framed pictures, with a blank, black rectangle taking the place of the picture, and are usually hung in anonymous clusters. These surrogates mimic the groups of framed family photos, certificates and pictures found in domestic hallways and above sofas. Canadian artist Rodney Graham has created a fictional 1950s amateur abstract painter. Graham builds elaborate sets and dons convincing period costume to make large photographs of the character at home, in his studio, drinking beer alone in an artist’s bar. He also makes and exhibits his persona’s paintings. Ryan Gander has a cast of fictional artist characters who make a range of work from 1970s Conceptualism to abstract paintings. Graham and Gander seem to use these strate- gies to legitimately make paintings within their practice as serious conceptual artists. Roberts’s approach is different. He is already a painter. He is not creating a character to make a series of paintings. Each painting in the series is made by a different person. The object engenders the character. They have common traits. They are all amateurs, hobbyists. The objects these characters make are for personal, domestic pleasure, either for their own walls or as gifts for friends and family.
For all the naive, simple, domestic, amateur appearance of Roberts’s recent paintings they are complex, twisting, joyous headfucks. They remind me of artist Bertrand Lavier’s ontologically complex paint-lathered objects: they are simultaneously the thing and a representation of the thing, at the same time and in the same space. Roberts’s paintings have the same energy but without a truth at the core. Unless that core is a kind of paint-smothered ‘hiraeth’, a yearning for a past time or place which possibly never existed.
William Roberts is an artist and painter whose work explores materiality and the boundary between painting and sculpture.
David Risley is an artist, writer and curator.
Written for Aggregate 2022. A publication that reflects upon two years of activity from the second cohort of artists participating in the Freelands Artist Programme (2019-21). Freelands Foundation, London.
A Dream If Ever There Was One
Sam Perry
The concept of time-travel has incarnations within each of the realms of literature, film, science, religion and art. Each speaks with and informs one another, but they invariably disagree with each other due to having varying and desperate approaches to the act of looking forwards and backwards, a familiar family scenario.
It was relatively recently that futuristic time-travel began to be explored in either popular, scientific or religious cultures, the backward kind being metaphysically established long before. In 1770 Louis-Sebastien Mercier had his prophetic novel The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One published, subject to several years of bandying by tentative French publishers. One of the earliest examples of a futuristic consideration in literature, the book chronicles a Parisian man’s experience of falling asleep, having engaged in an animated conversation with a philosopher the night before, to wake up centuries later, in Paris 2440. The hero of the story, surprisingly unalarmed at the situation he has found himself in and with a gung-ho sense of endeavour, sets about wandering the streets, as a colonial explorer would, depicting its people, its institutions and cultural practice with a naïve yet judgemental abandon. One of the first ports of call in his exploration of this familiarly starry-eyed but wholly improved city is the Academy of Painting. As a leftist, he delights at the reformations that have taken place in Paris’ 25th Century way of showing painting. There is no grand celebrations of battles, no portraits of greedy monarchs, no elitist culture of the ‘art connoisseur’ among its people and only morally ‘virtuous’ works are permitted to be exhibited.
This imaginary traversing of time and the re-imagining of painting, its culture and its values is reflective of Will Roberts’ paintings. Himself describing many of his works as ‘painting about painting’, they enquire into the wider realm of the painter’s role in society, the culture surrounding it and to one of the most important aspects of art history, the mythology that surrounds the medium. Mythology in painting is mused upon whilst the inherent way we (or will) produce, present and interact with painting is also explored in Roberts’ works.
The book has been described by the cultural historian Robert Darnton as a ‘guidebook to the future’. Its vision is optimistic, yet cautious and it wants you to take note before embarking upon the future’s cultural terrain. The idea of a guidebook or user’s manual for the future inevitably draws to mind to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 2001: A Space Odyssey and other cult classic literature. Imagining a guidebook for the uncertainties of the future is, again, allegorical to Roberts’ dense body of paintings. I use the term ‘body’ deliberately, I’m talking about a specific post-2011 body. He prepares us for how the industry will operate in the distant future, as absurd as it looks and sounds, how we will interact with painting and the ways in which art will be presented in galleries to come. Significantly more animated than Louis-Sebastien Mercier’s vision, though it is a dream that speaks from a kindred subconscious.
Since 2018 Roberts’ practice has undergone an aesthetically subtle yet conceptually significant change. If you’ve ever seen images of McMurdo Station, Ross Island on the edge of Antarctica, a U.S-governed scientific research base in the midst of a dramatic and elementally hostile landscape, you may have let the imagery of future human colonies on other planets come to your mind. The community is populated largely by people collectively carrying out their ambitions to understand the way the world ticks, or perhaps, is ticking away. Surrounded by melting icebergs, it’s pertinent to imagine a pessimistic outlook on the future of the Earth in the minds of its inhabitants. When viewing images of McMurdo Station you can wistfully imagine their collective emigration an adaptation to other worlds with a similar imagination to Roberts’ paintings.
Roberts references 'Wanderer above the Sea of Fog' by Casper David Friedrich, along with many others and shows an adaptation of the role of the painter in a post-terra era. Roberts gestures to the past and the future of the medium of painting. There has been speculation that Friedrich’s predeceasing painting was a self-depiction, a major clue lying in the fiery red hair of the subject. There are numerous symbols or motifs throughout Roberts’ work that suggest a degree of self-depiction, the most prevalent being a spaceman’s helmet, the classically illustrated kind from cartoons, perfectly rounded with a wide, blackened, shiny visor. The visor, performs a function of concealing the identity of the subject. With this Roberts can continue to offer we viewers the ownership of who it is we are looking at, whether it is Roberts himself, ourselves or our great-grandchildren.
Sam Perry is a curator, artist and writer.