Leslie Wayne is known for the vivid density and colorful materiality of her work, most recently a collection of what she called “paint rags” which hang from the wall, and are actually made of many layers of paint. Her latest work, on show at Jack Shainman Gallery through October 21, has undergone a marked change: there’s larger scale of image and an intensified playfulness with modes of representation and with process.

ELENA SISTO: I love the way humor is fore-fronted in this new work. You’ve scaled up your subject, slowed it down and gone directly for the comedic instead of sleight-of-hand.

LESLIE WAYNE: I’m told that I was the family clown as a child. I do love making people laugh and I am mad for puns. Having said that, I can’t claim that I decided in advance to make funny paintings. Perception has been at the crux of my thinking about this work, trying to dislodge the viewer from their expectations. Humor is just one tool among many, but it’s a seductive one and I love using it.

I enjoy playing with the relationship between language and the conceptual core of the painting. For example, in (W)resting Robert I’ve painted an image of a metal chair in my studio which takes up the entire space of the panel, making the panel in effect the chair itself. Then, draped over the back of the panel/chair are various sheets of paint that resemble fabric, the most prominent being a copy of an early Robert Ryman painting. I’ve wrested his painting from my pantheon of idols and laid it to rest on the back of my studio chair. I’ve moved on!

I like words that function as both adjective and verb. For instance, the word free in Free Experience functions that way. Or I’ll play with a word as it relates to an idea in a painting. It might sound like it could be the subject of the painting if you hadn’t read it. Would for example begs the question–would water really come out of a fence like that? But it also sounds like the word “wood.” That’s funny to me.

Is the humor a purely personal development? Or are you responding to politics? You have one painting of a window through which I see what looks like a melting atmosphere. Does it relate to climate change?

You’re talking about Snowmageddon. That painting started out as an homage to the Ukiyo-e prints of Hokusai. I happened to finish it right after the last major snowstorm of the winter, hence the title. I am keenly aware of our environmental crisis, but that is as political as my work gets. At one time I worked with an ocean conservation group and my paintings during that period dealt with issues of sustainability and climate change. It’s never far from my mind, however it’s not really the focus of this body of work. But who could possibly ignore the politics of this moment in time?! It’s insane!

What are some of the other tools you might use to dislodge the expectations of the viewer? And why is that important to you?

Using trompe l’œil and abstraction alongside dimensional verisimilitude is pretty interesting – mixing it all up, like in the piece entitled Wood. I wondered how many different ways I could describe a subject in one painting. I wanted to surprise myself as well as the viewer. That was important to me – to free up the experience for both of us.

It’s important to be surprised and delighted by something visual in the real world, as opposed to the virtual or the digital world. Painting has the power to do that – to make you see something you think you know in a completely new way.

You’ve been working and showing for quite a few years. Have you been involved with any long-term underlying themes?

The two consistent driving forces in my work have been nature and perception. The subject of nature has to do with my having grown up in California-its particular sense of color and light, and a specific relationship to the landscape and geology: earthquakes, giant Sequoias, the desert and the Pacific. There’s also a kinship with craft and materiality that is uniquely West Coast. Even the most conceptually driven work of many West Coast artists has been grounded in phenomenological experience rather than theory. Robert Irwin is a great example. Maybe that’s where part of my interest in perception comes from. One of my favorite books of all time is Lawrence Weschler’s “Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.” I want my paintings to make you forget language, even while I’m punning!

Do I see intimations of Léger, Guston, Oldenburg? Are the paintings more Pop?

Guston, yes, but Pop is not a reference, unless you’re talking about Duchamp as the forefather of Pop. He was a driving force in my last body of work. Guston gives everyone permission to move from abstraction to figuration. I studied painting and drawing in a traditional manner. I’ve been trying to bring that deeply satisfying activity of observational image making back into my work, in a way that makes sense given my very peculiar process.

Your process is unique. The only person I can think of who has used paint similarly to you is Scott Richter, in his older work. How do you make a piece?

Richter was involved with a kind of spectacular accumulation of massive amounts of paint on a surface. Those tables were pretty dazzling. I use what some consider a massive amount of paint, but I’m not interested in the accumulation of it per se. It’s the ways in which the paint can be manipulated to resemble forms in nature that interests me–using paint to create dimension disarms and surprises the viewer, because of the way it mimics the object it represents in the real world. I’ve manhandled paint in many different ways over the years, mostly by building up thin layers of color and then doing things like scoring, peeling, scraping, folding, draping and collaging it. But I’m not interested in describing my process. It’s not that it’s a secret. It just detracts from what I think should be the driving experience of looking at art–being transported.

You mention a West Coast-type phenomenological approach. Could you explain why it’s important? 

Southern California was a magical place to grow up. Blue skies every day, temperature a steady 73°F year round, beach to the West, desert and mountains to the East. Even my most vivid memory of an earthquake is dreamy, as I recall the street I was standing on and the whole neighborhood becoming like the deck of a ship, gently rocking back and forth for several long minutes. My sensibilities were honed on my physical experience of the world, not on ideas. I’m not particularly intellectual, and that plays out in my approach to making art. Having said that, my work is decidedly not about process, it’s more about a desire to make the material connect with the subject in a visceral way.

Who are some of the artists you admire? I see references to different textile traditions–African for one.

I do love textiles and textile designs from around the world. They inform the more decorative aspects of my work. The term decoration has suffered from quite a lot of cultural bias. I don’t see myself as belonging to the Pattern and Decoration school, but I do find that pattern is a universal vehicle that everyone can take deep pleasure in.

Forms in nature have long been a source, but I’m moving away from that now. I’m drawn to a wide gamut of artists who are peculiar and unique in different ways. Right now an image of a beautiful Mamma Andersson painting is informing a new work; also a photograph of Rodney Graham in a tux sitting at a set of drums with a plate of steak and peas, which is hilarious. I often revisit Elizabeth Murray or Martin Puryear for inspiration or look through books of Matisse, Stuart Davis or Charles Burchfield, just to snatch up bits of imagery. There’s no denying a relationship between my work and that of my husband, Don Porcaro. We are in each other’s studios all the time. Mostly I like to see what my colleagues are doing, and what the next generation of artists are making and how they are thinking. On the one hand it’s an embarrassment of riches to have so much to look at. On the other it’s overwhelming to the point of distraction. Then I re-focus in the studio and remember what it is I do best. And that’s all one can do, right?

Do you have any rules for yourself in the studio?

Yes I do actually. Accomplish at least one thing.

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JESSICA HOLMES: Tell me about Melilla.

CARLOS VEGA: I grew up in this little place in North Africa. It’s been a Spanish city since 1497. In order to safeguard the coast of Spain, Queen Isabelle and King Ferdinand took this little piece of land on the Moroccan coast that is next to a natural harbor. Then, at the beginning of the 20th century, it became a hub for mining in the Atlas Mountains, and suddenly became a prosperous place with a multicultural community. A lot of the Sephardim from Morocco and Turkey, who had left 400 years prior, came back to do business, and there was a very wealthy Indian community and of course a very large Muslim community. And I lived there for my first 20 years.

And it’s always been Spanish?

It’s been Spanish for 500 years, and my family has been living there for 100-plus years. Growing up, I had friends who were Muslims, who were Jews, who were Christians, and in a funny way I was not aware of how unique this was because that was my reality. When you come to New York, you find that’s common in American metropolises, but it’s very unusual in a city of 60,000 people.

Can you talk about the historical moment that inspired this body of work?

While studying the history of Spain I learned about the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who was a theologian, a doctor, an astronomer, a religious mystic—

He was radical in his time, wasn’t he?

Today he is a pillar of Judaism, but in his time his own people persecuted him. Then there was Averroes, to whom we owe the proliferation of Aristotelian thinking, and the idea of achieving the knowledge of God through reason. Then, King Alphonse the Wise had the idea of creating this encyclopedic compendium of all the knowledge of the world. It was a time of prosperity, and they all got along together more or less, though there is a lot of myth about that. This opening lasted only briefly and then the world collapsed from within. Feudal mentality allowed that you were only as powerful as your land holdings were big, and how much you had inherited. Today, it feels like we are in the same crossroads — what to do with our future.

Your materials even seem to have a historical bent. How did you come to use lead in so much of your work?

I think that we humans have been in love with lead for thousands of years because it’s soft, easy to melt, easy to carve.

Lead has such a specific feel to it. 

Doesn’t it? It has that coolness, that pliability. I think the idea of alchemy still plays on lead. By applying color to it, by puncturing it, it’s an act of enriching the lead, in a metaphorical way. I find it very satisfying. There is that contemporary wariness about lead because of danger of poison but growing up I used to melt lead pellets with my brother and then pour the liquid in a sink filled with water and watch the beautiful flowers and explosions erupt.

How long does one of your lead-based works take to complete?

I approach like an engraver. Because although you can fix your first imprint, once you subtract material you’ve already done injury to the virgin lead plate. Sometimes things are very fluid or very organic, but because of this profound idea of permanence or precision it takes time for me to find the courage to begin. I have worked on pieces for up to two years. I don’t have a large production; I don’t do more than 15 to 20 pieces a year. And with the best of my abilities I try to impregnate those works with a whisper to the viewer, to make them a vessel for thought.

What has drawn you to using postage stamps?

My feeling is that we are better people than our parents, our grandparents, and our great-grandparents. We are more compassionate and more accepting of difference. I use the stamps as a reference because stamps make a quotation between today and the 175 years since they first came into use. You can see how the stamps evolve from Queen Victoria, kaisers and kings to social ideas and aspirations, humanitarian causes, popular culture, the arts. And although they are so humble, stamps are really ambassadors of our aspirations and hopes; and at the same time they are becoming extinct.

I think they are beautiful time capsules, and it sounds funny but I spend hours in front of them just trying to make connections. I find them in the flea market, on eBay, or friends give them to me. I rarely pursue them in a scholarly way. I think it would take away some of the ludic act of the collage, putting one next to the other, playing with color, playing with genders, playing with random association of ideas. I want to leave that story untold, so the viewer has that act of discovery.

How much do you plan out a work, or is it an intuitive process?

When I approach something representational normally it’s very meditative. I need to gather courage, or do a bunch of studies and transfer the drawings to the lead. I’m still learning how to attack, and am trying to be looser and more spontaneous because sometimes it places me in a very uncomfortable psychological place. The act of creation sometimes makes me question everything. In a funny way, this exhibition is one where I feel that I am freer and more accepting of my limitations, embracing accidents and playing with chance. I think what’s happening in this show is a large step forward because there is not only lead, and the stamps, there is work on paper, there is canvas, there are freestanding pieces. It’s been a year and a half of personal growth and planning what I want to be when I grow up, as an artist. How much suffering I want to do, and I want to stop suffering.

I don’t blame you for that. When you are working on a piece for so long, how do you know when it’s finished? Or do you know?

That’s where the suffering comes in!

[laughs]

Has spending time with, and meditating on this intersection of Alphonse, Averroes and Maimonides influenced your own spirituality? 

I think that now I’m at a point where the big question is the survival of consciousness, of awareness. It’s an important part of what I’m searching for in my dialogue through art. How can it be done without being preachy? Are we done when we die or does the soul, our self inside of us, survive? But I think that’s the ultimate, eternal question — the last frontier.

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February 2015: Vincent Katz, Martha Schwendener and Christopher Stackhouse

Joining Moderator David Cohen February 13, 2015, at the National Academy Museum, the panelists reviewed exhibitions of Mamma Andersson at David Zwirner, Merlin James at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., Titus Kaphar at Jack Shainman Gallery, and Heidi Howard at Nancy Margolis Gallery.

We regret to inform listeners that due to equipment failure the last segment of the event was not recorded; Heidi Howard’s review ends part way through and the audience response to the second half of the program (Kaphar and Howard) was lost. Special thanks to recording engineer Isaac Derfel for defying the odds and saving the bulk of this month’s recording.

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I first met Claude Simard in 1989, a year before I joined the gallery, when it was on the second floor of 560 Broadway. He was a strapping, beautiful and exotic looking man, like some sort of First Nations prince. Over the 24+ years I have known Claude, three qualities have come to identify him most profoundly in my mind: connoisseurship, generosity and passion.

About his connoisseurship. Claude had an extraordinary eye that was supported by a deep intellect, an extremely wide base of knowledge and catholic tastes. He travelled often and far, seeking out art and artifacts for the gallery and for himself, as he was voracious collector of everything from antique Indian jewelry and African mud-cloths, to modern and contemporary art. He and Jack shared a deep love for the formal qualities in a work of art that make it above all, a thing of beauty to behold. As a fine artist, his own work was highly intellectual and conceptually based, but always formally rigorous, exquisitely crafted and beautiful to look at. His eye helped trail-blaze the gallery program, which over the years grew and expanded to reflect a deep appreciation for cultures beyond the Western contemporary cannon, and a preternatural instinct for risks worth taking.

As a person, Claude was exceptionally generous — generous with his time, with his support and with his honesty. Studio visits with him could sometimes be brutal. He was a man of little words, but when he spoke, you knew exactly what he liked and didn’t like. If he knew you were developing a new idea or direction in your work, he would send you a book or give you a piece of art from one of his travels that he thought would inspire you. Some years ago when the Gallery had several artists represented in the Venice Biennale, Claude said to me, “Come with us. You should be part of the ‘international blah blah’.” This cracked me up of course, because it expressed with good humor and clarity his attitude about the contemporary art scene. He knew it was important to be an artist with international reach, but he also understood much of the blah blah that inevitably came with it. I remember being reticent about all the socializing I’d have to do if I went with them, and then being both irritated and greatly relieved when he and Jack went to absolutely no parties. Not out of disdain, but because they worked so hard engaging during the day that all they wanted to do at night was have a good meal and go to bed. On further reflection, this seemed to me an eminently reasonable plan of action.

As for passion, the depth of Claude’s passion seemed almost without bounds. Everything he did was ardent. He took tremendous risks, the limits of which exceeded what most others would consider normal. For the Gallery, those risks more often than not paid off extraordinary dividends. For himself, they seemed driven by an insatiable hunger. When Claude decided to get tattooed, he tattooed his body from heel to neck in virtually one fell swoop. It was an extravagant act that turned his very self into a veritable work of art. His voracious collecting had that same level of hunger and aspect of pathos, almost as if he needed to surround himself with objects that could hold the secret to happiness and fulfillment.

One cannot judge for another what constitutes fulfillment. But I think it’s safe to say that Claude lived a life of extraordinary richness and depth, and that he pursued his passions without reserve. Not many of us can claim that accomplishment, and in that sense his life, while cut short, was well lived. I feel lucky to have known him.

The post The Hungry Connoisseur: Claude Simard, 1956 to 2014 appeared first on artcritical.

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Lance Esplund, Faye Hirsch, and Andrea K. Scott joined David Cohen to discuss Adam Fuss at Cheim & Read, Roman Signer at Swiss Institute, Arlene Shechet at Jack Shainman, and Joan Snyder at Betty Cuningham.

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Carly Berwick, Michèle C. Cone, and Mario Naves joined David Cohen to review El Anatsui at Jack Shainman, Damien Hirst at Gagosian, Yvonne Jacquette at DC Moore, and Tino Sehgal at the Guggenheim.

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Ben Davis, Lance Esplund, and Lilly Wei joined David Cohen to review Tara Donovan at the Met, Anne Harris at Alexandre, Bharti Kher at Jack Shainman, David Reed at Max Protetch, and Zhang Huan at the Asia Society.

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