Paul Winstanley In which the artist considers the process of thinking about and making work Ben Street |
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In the British artist Paul Winstanley's book, paintings made from the late 1980's to the present day are arranged alphabetcally by title, as though to overturn any notion of artistic progress. It's a fair enough assertion for most artists , but perhaps especially so for Winstanley, who's work's choice of subject is as narrow as anything by his declared heros Giorgio Morandi or Vilhelm Hammershoi , and as rich for it. His vocabulary of interstitial spaces - lobbies, corridors, parks, and so on- is painted with a kind of indistinct naturalism that both points to its photographic source and holds it at arms length. For Winstanley, the photograph stands not as a code for mediated experience, as it so often does in photo-based painting; it's a means by which painting can assert its independence from given reality and enter a new space of thought. Painting and writing are natural bedfellows. Renaissance theorists understood painting as a uniquely intellectual art, and one tied to the revitalized art of classical rhetoric. Mathematical perspective is, after all, a means of organizing time as well as space, much as a writen sentence is. When the eye sinks into the depths of Winstanley's paintings, a temporal space, a little like a memory, opens up inside the viewer's head.The vernacular post-war modernism of the artist's visual language is part of this fixation on the passing, but it also provides the means to generate deep space, just as classical architecture did for Renaissance painters. The centralized depictions of the pedestrian bridge in 'Night Walkway 3' (2005) and the graffitied underpass in 'Walkway (Grey)' (1995) are structured in response to the painted surface, so that the rectangle of the canvas recedes, echo like, into fictive distance. Because Winstanley's paintings behave like language, it's small wonder that when figures do appear, they often turn their backs on us, caught in an absorption that's very like reading. Any reader of Van Gogh's letters, or Gerhard Richter's essays, will gladly reject the old saw that artists shouldn't write about their work. As with these exemplars, Winstanley stands somewhere between actor and audience, providing technical insights rarely discussed in academic writing while shrugging along with the reader at the complexities of a painting's meaning. Winstanley's is a self-refective practice - his bleak waiting rooms acting as funhouse mirrors of the gallery interior - but even when he gestures toward interpretation, he pauses at the brink of revelation. "The completion of the image, the sense to be made of it, is an offer the painting makes to the viewer": this book is a reminder of the generosity and compexity of that offer. |
Times Literary Suplement, September 27, 2018. |