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| I just wanted to paint Barbara Fässler, Artist Alex Katz. Landscapes 07.03.–12.05.2013. Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich, Switzerland | |
| Leaving behind questions of figuration and abstraction, passing by issues of innovation and tradition, skipping over the struggles be- tween constructivism and realism, Alex Katz (b. 1927) investigates painting matters from the inside of their materiality. Independent from the decision of dimension or the choice of colour, these paintings testify an uncommon density of energy, a rare mental concentration translated in metaphysical vibrations through physical strength. Surfaces to get drowned in. Brushstrokes to get hit by. Colour fields in which to get lost. Landscapes in which to get wrapped. | |
 Alex Katz. 2013 Photo: Barbara Fässler Publicity photos | |
| Katz defines himself as a post-abstract painter: on the one hand he claims that he “never wanted to paint abstract“, on the other hand, that “the grammar” of his painting “is abstract“. A contradiction? In the catalogue of Alex Katz’s show Landscapes at Haus Konstruktiv in Zürich, the director Dorothea Strauss identifies this specific moment of being suspended in the middle, a “subtle tipping point“ between abstraction and figuration, between construction and sensation, between geometry and floating. Indeed, Alex Katz is discussing painting as a separate matter, rather than thinking about the objects which appear and disappear, which we might believe to perceive. Thematizing painting itself means questioning the status of a picture, of any picture. So, what is a picture? As Magritte teaches us, the picture of a pipe is not the pipe itself, but merely a two-dimensional reproduction of a three-dimensional object we call “pipe“. As pragmatism teaches us, a painting is just made of some colour pigments with binding agents on a surface like paper, canvas or cardboard. And, last but not least, as physics teaches us, a painting is in the end a mass of atoms made up of electrons, protons and neutrons in perpetual movement. All pictures are an illusion, all representation is mere appearance, inviting us to tell stories, to dream, to go on a journey within the imagination. The 85-year old American artist Katz is considered one of the most important painters of our time. He studied between 1946 and 1949 at the Cooper Union School of Art in New York, and later at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Although since then he has handled classical painting themes like portraits, landscapes or still lives, he pushes the treated genre over its own historical border. The genre, and the represented subject as well, are indeed a pretext for the real content of this huge oeuvre to come through: the act and the experience of painting as a continuous practice and learning process. The concentration on creative production itself leads to a very particular understanding and translation of the issue of “landscape” in Alex Katz’ oeuvre: the viewer finds themself confronted with huge surfaces of clean and clear flat colours, painted all over the gigantic art pieces, following their precise geometric composition. The landscapes reach human size, are able to wrap the viewers, to involve them with their entire body. The concept of “land-scape” goes back here to its original meaning: land-shape, the form of the land, especially in the perception of an observer. In the European Landscape Convention, we read the following definition: “Landscape means an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors”. By definition, landscape is not just a given object that exists by itself, but rather a subject born out of human observation and perception. It’s a cultural construction. Landscape only exists through our gaze, the concept born at a precise historic moment, in concomitance with the first autonomous Dutch landscape paintings at the end of the 16th century, while before that, during the Renaissance, the painted countryside was limited to an existence of being the background for theological representations. The word landscape was born with the depicted representation of the farmers’ outside space, with the image of a framed Nature scene, when the gaze of the artists descended from the sky to the earth, from the Divine to the sensory world, where the mortals’ daily life takes place – only from this moment on considered to be worth existing in art. In that sense landscape becomes a sort of metaphor for the viewing process itself. As Alex Katz states in an interview with the Austrian Standard: “seeing is culturally defined” and on the Swiss radio SRF 2 he adds, “you think that what you see with your eyes is real, but it is culturally built.” This means that when we admire the real countryside present before our eyes, we see through the glasses of the whole landscape tradition, starting with pre-Renaissance Giotto, through Renaissance Leonardo da Vinci, 16th century Dutch art, the Romantics Corot, Constable or Turner, up to Impressionism and Post-impressionism with Monet and Cezanne. | |
 View from the exhibition. 2013 Photo: Stefan Altenburger Publicity photos Courtesy of the ProLitteris, Zurich | |
| In the following conversation, Alex Katz reveals his relations, his techniques, his convictions, his struggles and his doubts: having fun, apparently... Barbara Fässler: Nice to meet you! In the past, you have given interviews to colleagues, for example Francesco Clemente or Richard Prince. How do you relate to other artists? Alex Katz: Well, Clemente is a friend and I thought he was the best thing that came out since De Chirico in Italy. And Richard Prince was a sort of dynamite with words, he came over to talk about my works and so I asked him and we had a great interview. BF: I was wondering about this choice, because I imagine the work of a painter as a very solitary situation. AK: No it's not, you just do it alone, but it's a social activity, basically. BF: In this show, there is an Homage to Monet. And it is the only explicit quotation or relation to another artist’s work, but when I see your paintings, I have continuous moments of enlightenment, thinking about different stages in art history. Is your oeuvre packed with subtle and implicit allusions, even though it’s unique and original? AK: We live in a postmodern world and you are able to use any source you want. A lot of my work comes from me. I use myself as a source, because I did things forty years ago and they are as interesting as anything else. But that opens up the whole discourse of tradition. I think my paintings look new and at the same time they are traditional. BF: You said somewhere that you don't care to be traditional, but if I look at your work I don't perceive it as a traditional work, I mean it's not because you paint traditional genres like landscapes or portraits that you are necessarily traditional. AK: No, it relates to painting. It's not traditional. It's an idea of making a new painting. BF: Could we affirm that the objects of representation are a pretext to talk about painting itself? AK: Well, of course, it’s about painting, but it is about – like most traditional representational painting looks old – the idea of making one new. I've been influenced by a lot of abstract painting. So, in this sense, it’s a post-abstract painting. BF: Yes, in a video on YouTube you say that the grammar of your painting is abstract. And now we are at Haus Konstruktiv, which is – as all of them – not an innocent place, in a way, the meaning of the context is directing the lecture of the work. AK: Yeah, it fits. They can read the “grammar of the paintings”. BF: I've noticed that your work has a very rational geometric architecture, and the represented figure is something that appears and disappears. AK: It's the point of being, like, what you see is a variable, you know? And it's changing all the time, and I think my paintings look more realistic than Rembrandt. Those paintings don't look realistic to me. They're may be great paintings, but they are not realistic anymore. BF: So, what does “realistic” mean for you? AK: Realistic is when your vision dominates the culture. Then it's realistic. Our culture is dominated primarily by photographs and movies, and I have a dialogue with that, it's to say, well, my paintings are more realistic than a photo. I mean you have more the sensation of seeing something in my paintings than in a photo. A photo looks like a photo and I get more into the immediate present. That's what painting does, actually. BF: We now may talk about the framing of your pictures and their dimensions. Having those huge sizes, the landscapes come into a naturalistic dimension and the viewer gets into it, or better, gets to be even a part of it. AK: That's exactly right. BF: It's not just a gaze on a picture, but the involvement of the viewer. AK: That was exactly the intention: to paint an environment as a landscape, rather than a picture as a hole in the wall. BF: Or a window. AK: Yes, that's not a window, the painting wraps around you. And they need to be a certain size to do so. I try to make them as small as I can, but the size is an important factor. The idea of going figurative by scale has no precedent. It's like going to an unknown area and I didn't know whether it would work out or not. Once it's done and other people adapt things, it doesn't have the initial novelty anymore. BF: I think, to understand your further evolution, the small collages from the 1950s in the show are very illuminating. AK: Well, they set it all up. BF: It's as if they would reveal the origin of your work. AK: That's right. BF: All of sudden you understand why the colours are so flat, why the forms are so clear. For me it was a sort of enlightenment to see them. AK: They say that the scale was really an experiment with the collages, and I brought them into the large paintings. The large paintings were easy, after the collages. BF: Yes, but how can you manage to obtain this great facility, this lightness on this gigantic scale? AK: That's the whole thing. BF: How does that work? AK: Well, that's the thing I'm most proud of, the surface. It's mostly for painters who say - eat your heart out. They’re never going to be able to do it. (Laughs) It started when I decided to try a wet-on-wet technique and I used to go to Madison Square, which was across the way, and I decided to work wet-on-wet. And wet-on-wet is usually for small and bad paintings (Laughs). | |
 View from the exhibition. 2013 Photo: Stefan Altenburger Publicity photos | |
| BF: Bad painting. AK: Yeah “bad painting” uses wet-on-wet. And it makes a big flowing surface, the wet-on-wet, like the one with the yellow flowers. The whole canvas is painted white and then the paint is put onto the white paint. BF: Like "fresco"? AK: Like "fresco", yes, wet-on-wet and it's tricky stuff, because the underpaint has to be right to receive the top paint, and the top paint has to be put on right, and the inflections make differences. And so you get a lot of multi-tones that way, with the wet-on-wet. I painted the big paintings in five or six hours. BF: Alone or with some help? AK: By myself. BF: All by yourself. AK: The yellow one was about six hours, that's all. BF: Are you doing sports? AK: Yeah, I do a lot of athletics. BF: Because it's physically very tiring. AK: No it's not that tiring, but I do a lot of physical work, yeah. BF: The last question is a little bit personal: how does it feel to have been working on your oeuvre for sixty years, for such a long time? AK: Well, that's the big thing, I was very lucky to paint that long. To be a full-time painter, I paid the price when I was young, but I decided that I will do it. One thing leads to another. It's not a conceptual thing. You have to learn how to draw. Then you have to learn how to draw people, then you have to learn how to paint. You know, it took a long time to learn the techniques. I don't think I was particularly talented. But I was very wilful and I worked hard on them, a lot harder than most painters. I really worked hard to develop the technique. I destroyed a thousand paintings from my twenties. BF: Really? You did that? AK: Yes, really (Laughs). A thousand paintings. I painted every day, and at the end of the month I thought, well, the world doesn't really need these paintings. BF: Why? AK: I just wanted to paint. I was curious about the immediate present and I painted a painting, and then another one, and at the end of two years, it seemed the only thing I was interested in was how much I learned. The painting itself was not interesting. I lived in a place that had no heat, and I just used to bust them up and throw them into the fireplace. BF: So you were clearly more interested in the process than the result. AK: In the learning, yes. Though some of the works survived, for example, the one in the small room in the show. Those are the ones I didn't destroy. BF: How did you choose? AK: I don't know. If they had too much labour in it I maybe threw them away, or if they were just boring. Who knows what I thought. (Laughs). I don't give a damn. BF: That's really strong! AK: It was at the end of that more or less ten year period, I had a very strong technique and you have a lot of audiences for the paintings. You have the man of the street who likes the image. You have the dealer who likes something he can sell. You have the museum’s curator who thinks it's worth hanging in the museum. You have the writer who wants something interesting to write about. And you have the painter who is interested in the actual painting. There are different audiences, who see in the painting different objects. You know, you can never control all five at once. BF: So those contradictory expectations stressed you? Did you want to make a sort of conscious pre-selection of what you expected to be accepted by those audiences and what wouldn’t be? AK: No, I really didn't care. Well, the paintings looked okay when I did them and then, three years later, you get aware that they are not that interesting. (Laughs) I cut some up to use them as corner supports on stretchers. I was moving to new areas. I was doing representational paintings, plein air paintings and I didn't come from an academy where we learned how to do it, so I had to do experiments. When I was making the paintings, I knew that they weren't conventional. For me, the second generation of abstract painters who were from my age were doing beautiful paintings, but they were conventional. BF: You tried a new way. AK: Like Joan Mitchell who is from the same age, she is a very good painter, but her stuff is much more conventional than what I was doing with those collages. So there was no way knowing if they were good enough. I'm very surprised now, because they picked up paintings that I never have imagined hanging on a museum wall. I still feel the same insecurity as when I depicted them… 1 Council of Europe, conventions.coe.int/Treaty/en/Treaties/Html/176.htm | |
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