You briefly touched on the unevenness of the plaster and the surface that you were confronted with, because I know you’ve created many other site specific works in the past, but at the same time much of your work is based on the smoothness and the flatness of a canvas. So I was wondering from a more technical point of view, how you approached that parameter?
Christopher Page: Yeah, I didn’t know that it would actually be possible because of how thick the plaster is on the walls. They were quite daunting. So I had to do a test and sand the hell out of them. I had to attack the walls to force them into something that would be paintable. It was a technical challenge. Because of that real impasto texture of those walls, there is a texture that remains underneath my wall painting. It’s not as smooth as my usual wall paintings, but I like that. I keep going back to Roman wall painting, but it almost looks like some of the wall paintings you see in Pompeii; having been covered in lava, the frescoed walls have this slight distortion, this movement and the surface, which I really like because it is in tension with the painted illusion. The ground of my painting has that kind of movement in it, and the cloud painted on top has a different movement, and the two movements speak to one another. Having different smoothness and roughness is something I’m interested in, and how that works with the eye, what feels more real and less real.
How do you approach the actual physicality of such a surface and create all those minute effects that are so important to the level of sophistication and subtlety of your painting. Could you explain the airbrushing and the preparation as well?
Christopher Page: Well, it’s a matter of sanding it back as much as I possibly could, and drawing out the frame that I’m going to paint within, taping it off and then filling and smoothing the surface, and painting an undercoat. Then I cover all the walls and make sure I don’t damage any of the surrounding areas or get paint on those beautiful clothes at Blue Mountain School – which was a real worry! Then I begin spraying; I use quite a large air gun, (which I think is mainly used for applying fake tan to people!) Then I just slowly, slowly build up a cloudy surface, and go from dark to light to dark to light, very slowly build up this movement. I stand back and try to take it in, work slowly to build up these layers and layers of cloud form, and make it smooth and dramatic. Then finally I add a painted drop shadow to each of the frames, so it looks like the clouds are slightly set back from the wall. This gives an illusory sense of depth to the painting, but it also creates a contradiction because window frames couldn’t cast shadows on the sky. Clouds are shorthand for deep or infinite space, but then a drop shadow would suggest shallow space. So having deep space and shallow space on top of each other like that creates a visual contradiction.
To that very effect, I was quite interested in the duality of the hanging work between the murals as well. Have you explored that idea in the past? Because of that drop shadow, as you said, there is the evocation of an exterior space and a penetration of the wall that’s not actually happening. And then you have the exact opposite, which is adding a forward-facing element through that octagonal work, which plays on its own level there, because that’s often a signification of a window yet here is a mirror. The octagon adds a church-like architectural element. I was curious whether you’ve played with that idea before and what sort of a statement that is to play with that multiplicity within the installation. To me, it adds the theatricality and that ‘exhibition’ element rather than it just being a simple wall painting or fresco.
Christopher Page: Yes I’ve never produced an exhibition before that has a wall painting and a canvas in such close dialogue. They’ve lived near each other before, but I’ve never created an environment with those elements so integrated. It’s a new thing for me. And I was interested to see how it would work out because a canvas next to a wall painting does all of a sudden take on a new materiality, or presence. It very much feels like a thing in the room. My wall paintings tend to recede and therefore to foreground the wall itself – the wall, which usually disappears behind an artwork, becomes a thing in the room. But then when you have something hanging on the wall, that thing is then foregrounded even more than the wall itself. So you get this layering of space. I think it’s worked well because they’re playing with space in different ways. The mirror which appears to reflect the room is in fact erasing the space, so to speak. The windows look beyond the space, but also bring you back to the space. So it’s done something interesting.
It’s a new, more immediate symbiosis of the different parts of your practice, conversing in close quarters.
Christopher Page: Yes, it really does feel like a stage set, and I suppose what interests me about stage sets is they are the purest entanglement of space and image. Stage sets really are as much images as they are spaces, or they’re images masquerading as space. And I suppose something about the canvas painting hanging on the wall with the wall paintings really starts to make the space feel theatrical in a way that I don’t think I’ve done before.
I wanted to ask about that diametrically-opposed precision and geometry in your work and colour that one may say is so far removed from what one might expect in Blue Mountain School, which is essentially a space dedicated to the borderline of art and craft. It’s very much about the human hand and the rejection of the machine and all that sort of thing, whereas your work at the same time perfectly embodies that. It’s very much your simulation of the machine, but it also includes some of your tools to do that. And so I’m quite interested in that opposition of the perfection that you are simulating and essentially the imperfection that is so entangled in their vision, whether it’s wabi sabi, Japanese artists, whether it’s the clothes hanging downstairs. There’s so many elements, as you said, even the materiality of the space it’s enclosed within has a performative aspect of brutality. So I wanted to see how you thought about being included in that environment and how there must be certain leaps to be made as an artist to see oneself there.
Christopher Page: You know, I hadn’t actually thought about that directly, but it’s bringing lots of thoughts to mind. They do very much focus on the handmade as a kind of rejection of the mass-produced and the machine-produced, alienated production. They’re focusing on handicraft that is less alienated. And that’s definitely something I think about. I am a painter that uses brushes. After all, my paintings are handmade things. Saying that, I try and erase my own hand, which talks to the alienated production of our time. But in erasing my own hand, it does nonetheless bring up the question of the hand. I’m not having my work factory produced, I’m not having things machine produced. They are very much produced by me. I don’t even have an assistant, I produce them entirely myself. And so you might argue that maybe there is a nostalgia for a world of artisanal production in my work. If there is, it would be very subdued and I’d blush to admit it. But perhaps there is. I definitely spend a lot of time worrying about how alienated our world is. So I suppose it would fit in that way. Blue Mountain School is an attempt at a less alienated mode of production that does talk to my work in interesting ways.
I almost find it as interesting as I did in the first interaction I ever had with historical artworks in their space, too. I found it very interesting last year to see a Sicilian terracotta plate or a della Robbia inside Ben Hunter’s terracotta show – it’s just another interesting layer of historical appropriation because you saw artists that are either mimicking, preserving or at least thinking about the techniques of those periods today. Those works are more than anecdotal in that they are speaking to these long traditions and keeping said traditions alive. And then to think about your work as having readings that are so far removed from that, it’s quite fun. I think it’s progressive for Blue Mountain School to be doing this and to be questioning their own space and the aesthetics that have become so attached to that space.
Christopher Page: If there is a nostalgia for some kind of artisanal production of my work, the countervailing thing in my work would be that I think that Roman painting, baroque painting, painting in general – artisanal spectacle, if you like – leads directly to our culture of technological spectacle. So if there is a latent nostalgia, that nostalgia is very much complicated by a feeling that the artisanal world was itself a world of rather alienated spectacle that leads directly to our world. I don’t see our world as wholly different from, let’s say, the Baroque or the Renaissance, which itself was very image-laden.
I imagine that showing your work in the last year or so has had its challenges. As an artist today, how do you approach the fact that quite often your work will be consumed through a screen? Is that problematic for you?
Christopher Page: I definitely dwell on it a lot. It’s a problem, but it’s also something very interesting for me to think about, because we do consume so many things through screens. But I almost see my work as a way of thinking through a society of screens. That’s really what my work is ultimately about; it’s about thinking about a world in which almost everything is mediated by screens. I think the world has been mediated by screens (in the general sense) for a long time – mediated by images, mediated by windows, mediated by mirrors. For whatever reason, humans mediate their experience through flat screens, flat images. But now more than ever. It’s funny because, ideally, people would see my work in the flesh and they would be able to experience the tension between the materiality of the paint and the image that they think they are seeing. That is the tension that’s at the heart of my work, that these are made of thick, viscous liquid on textile – paint on canvas – and yet what you think you’re seeing is a mirror. You think you’re seeing glass or you think you’re seeing a frame, you think you’re seeing a sky. But what you’re actually seeing is a viscous liquid applied to a textile, and that kind of perceptual dissonance is what I’m seeking. And obviously, when that then appears as pixels on a screen, the material encounter is no longer possible. But on the other hand I would hope that the sense of my paintings, of questioning mediation through images, would still translate on a screen and might even encourage people to think about the screen that they’re looking at. Because I suppose my work – rather than focussing on the image that one sees in the frame – focuses on the frame itself, the device that delivers the image, whether that’s the frame of the mirror, the frame of the window etc. Windows frame a view and turn a landscape, let’s say – which is obviously spatial – nto an image. A mirror frames the reflection of a room and turns it, and turns ourselves, into images. So my work focuses on the frame itself, the device that creates the image, that carries the image. That’s why my paintings look blank; I want a confrontation with the framing device rather than with the image itself. I turn the framing device into an image so that it can be seen. There’s definitely a strangeness of seeing my work in digital form. But hopefully, if they are at all successful in what they’re trying to do, perhaps they would highlight to people the framing device, the iPhone, the computer screen – the ‘Windows’ – they’re looking into, and make that just a little bit more visible, even if the material encounter with the painting isn’t possible.
Going back to the hanging work framed by the two windows – how did you come upon that particular piece?
Christopher Page: So the octagon painting wasn’t actually at first intended for the exhibition, but when it was finished I immediately knew that it would work really well. I suppose it’s that thing that people say, that a letter always arrives at the destination it was intended for. It really completes the show in a way that perhaps the oval painting didn’t quite. I hadn’t really thought about the octagon beforehand architecturally, but I suppose maybe you’re alluding to rose windows. As soon as I put it up there, all of a sudden there was a church-like quality – it felt like a temple or a church, which was interesting to me. There is nothing I would like more than to bring about a churchly atmosphere! I think church interiors are probably my greatest inspiration besides Roman wall painting. They’re buildings which are designed to direct the gaze towards the altar and the apse. All directed towards the end of the room, and even the rose window there to cast light in that direction – the light of God.
The ‘oculus’.
Christopher Page: Churches are buildings which are so visually charged and stage-managed. Clearly they’re spatial as well, but the way they use images and use apertures to direct our vision and create a certain ambience of reverence is fascinating.
And equally as theatrical.
Christopher Page: So theatrical. I’ve been reading recently about how we don’t even realise how theatrical they were. Cathedrals were spaces of high spectacle in the Baroque. A lot of the openings and architectural features that we just see as formal were actually spaces where angels were supposed to come out of clouds that were rigged up to machines etc. They were really crazy, almost like musical theatre. But now they’re much quieter, more contemplative spaces.
How long did it take you to finish this work?
Christopher Page: I had only a very short amount of time because of childcare demands. I have two kids and I couldn’t leave my partner for too long. So I went to Blue Mountain School to produce the small window painting. That was almost a test to see if it could be done. So that was a day. And then I came down for two full days to produce the two larger window paintings. So two or three full days, morning to night. And then the canvas painting took a period, my paintings take a couple of months or so to produce.
So it’s an assemblage of various time periods that have condensed upon each other then.
Christopher Page: Exactly. And made during a period in which time feels very strange for everyone – lockdown. One reason for this particular work was the period we’re coming out of, the period in which our homes might have started to feel like quite strange spaces, and a time in which the city might feel very ghostly. And so in making an empty, quite ghostly space that’s this entanglement of image and space, I was thinking also about how these cities that we build, which are so imagistic and such entanglements of image and space are also now sort of empty, and these images are all of a sudden speaking to no one. And now we’re coming back out into the city. Something about that ghostly ambiance was borne out of this time period.
I’m glad you added that, because the current context is adding so many new layers of meaning to work. And I’m sure different visitors will take their own levels of sad readings out of it if they want to (laughs).
Christopher Page: I hope that it brings some sort of peculiar joy as well.
Oh, absolutely. But, you know, it’s very easy to look at dark clouds and the ominous mirror with no one behind it – you could totally go there if you wanted to. It’s just a sign of the times.
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‘Interior (Evening)’ by Christopher Page (2021) is on view indefinitely at Blue Mountain School by appointment at 9 Chance Street, Shoreditch, London.
www.bluemountain.school
Photography by Damian Griffiths
Courtesy of Blue Mountain School