vincent hawkins portfolio •ev - l’ahah · vincent hawkins portfolio •ev. 2 contents artist...

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Vincent Hawkins Portfolio •EV

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Contents Artist statement

Exhibition and work views

Text

Curriculum Vitae

Publications (selection)

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Artist statement «I began a series of paintings based on my garden. I wanted to make work rooted more in the immediate environment. The garden presented itself as a possibility for exploration, resembling a stage set for acting out ideas. At night with the fall of darkness, It becomes a difficult space to navigate, to move through. It conceals under the cover of night, displacing the mind, forcing you to question your perception and the readable depth of space. What was once visible in day light becomes concealed or cloaked by darkness. Other considerations coincided with this “arrival” of choice. I had been looking at a lot of generic and quite frankly, unfulfilling abstraction which appeared to me as somewhat detached in its nature, and so brought about the need for a more visceral experience in painting. And I was struck by what a fellow artist had said of a lot of painters who discuss painting in formal terms and less with other considerations - metaphor or allegory or just in plain terms of “felt” experiences.

The work has always been in two camps, canvas and paper. Both are essentially related, even though at times I’ve wanted to depart from one for what I considered to be the possible benefit to the other, focusing on just one area only. However,

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the two are inextricably linked. The canvases are very much to do with the limit of the structure as a support, staying the same throughout, meaning that you end up with what you began with, regardless of what has been painted onto it. The folded paper pieces are entirely different in as much as the final ‘form’ they take may come about through the last and final decision I make. The shape of the piece may change from the outset to the finish, and be entirely different, ultimately.

Why work like this ? The wall becomes the frame. You are in and part of it, not outside peering in, which happens when looking through the portal of a painted rectilinear canvas. It allows for ‘play’ to be an integral part of the process and I am more interested in process than product. Interactiveness gives rise to new possibilities and surprises. Discoveries can be made in this continuous installation and on the wall, in a room.

“Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.” — Robert Motherwell.»

— Vincent Hawkins, artist statement, 2019.

Hawkins was born in Hertfordshire in 1959 and studied painting at Maidstone College of Art in Kent in England between 1984/87. He lives in London and makes prints, paintings on canvas paper and card. He has shown extensively in Britain and abroad including solo shows in Chicago and Paris and the south of France in recent years.

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Exhibition views

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Exhibition view, «Night Garden», Sid Motion Gallery, London, 2019

© Luke Fullalove

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Exhibition view, «Night Garden», Sid Motion Gallery, London, 2019

© Luke Fullalove

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Exhibition view, «Say the right things», Galerie Pascaline Mulliez, 2016

© Galerie Pascaline Mulliez

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Exhibition view, «Say the right things», Galerie Pascaline Mulliez, 2016

© Galerie Pascaline Mulliez

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Exhibition «Flying Suit», Devening Projects, Chicago, 2013

© Devening Projects

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Exhibition view, «Flying Suit», Devening Projects, Chicago, 2013

© Devening Projects

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Studio view, july 2016

Deborah House,London

© Peter Abrahams

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Work views

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Missing, 2016

Gouache on paper 41,5 x 29,5 cm

© Peter Abrahams

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Untitled, 2013

Gouache on paper27 x 20 cm

© Peter Abrahams

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Untitled, 2019

Acrylic on paper152 x 121 cm

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Folded paper, 2019


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Say What You Mean And Mean What You Say, 2019


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Untitled, 2019

Watercolor on paper152 x 121 cm

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Untitled, 2019


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Untitled, 2019


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Folded 2, 2019

Ink on paper, 130 x 79 cm

© Luke Fullalove

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Untitled, 2016

Monotype relief print on paper75 x 55 cm

© Peter Abrahams

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Life Among The Chimney Pots, 2018

Acrylic on canvas30.6 x 25.5 cm

© Luke Fullalove

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Night Garden (Ground), 2019

Acrylic over ink with chinagraph pencil30.6 x 25.5 cm

© Luke Fullalove

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Night Garden, 2019

Acrylic on canvas40 x 31 cm

© Luke Fullalove

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Night Garden (birds), 2018

Acrylic on canvas210 x 170 cm

© Luke Fullalove

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Night Garden (Submerged), 2019

Acrylic on canvas40.9 x 46.2 cm

© Luke Fullalove

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Text Laurent Boudier and Vincent Hawkins, «Fragments of a conversation», july 2016.

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I was making paintings where the images were made up of layers, a build-up. Over time, I started simplifying them, paring them down to the essential, removing the excess. I don’t know exactly when there was the decision to move fromthe canvas to the wall. Of course, in the studio, there are always little bits of paper and pieces of packaging card lying around. Actually, technically, it comes from my painting - I would put the painting on the ground, and use a piece of card that I would place on the canvas, to paint around. And one day, I looked at the card with its marks of colour around the edges and its slightly scruffy traces of drawing, and it was almost more interesting to me than the painting! There was nothing too fussy, or studied, over-worked. In these remnants of paintings I saw a result that was humble, modest and very immediate. It was also quite simply also a question of economy, I didn’t have too much money to buy tubes of paint and I wanted to do something that didn’t cost a lot. I first of all bought a book of coloured paper in an art supply store. I started experimenting with assembling them on the wall. Then very quickly I thought - why not use the pieces of card that I found so much more immediate?

I don’t really know what to call these wall pieces. I quite simply call them wall constructions. I don’t really know how to define them beyond that, as they are precisely in that space in between painting, drawing and sculpture. In the studio, I fix the papers on a large wall as I go along, and look at them as a group, looking for dialogues, conversations between each one. It’s always a surprise and it’s constantly changing. It’s like a game: how do you look at them? Do you consider them in a constrained space or outside of a frame? It interests me to see that when you take a form out of the frame of a painting and free it up in space, it changes our relationship to that very particular distance that the image installs. In such a way that when I free up these shapes, I’d like them to be seen differently too. In that way, I’m conscious

Fragments of a conversation

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that I should probably use the word “sculptures”, in quotes! But I can’t quite resolve myself to that, I still see them as drawings and paintings on the wall. Not really giving them a definition leaves me more freedom in these new works.

I’ve always been interested in collages. The advantage of collage is that you can use things that you have previously destroyed. When, about four or five years ago, I started folding these papers and pieces of card, I enjoyed the fact that it’s a very flexible, and playful, way of working, that I can change around at will, making and un-making or re-arranging in a different way.

When I was in my late teens, I worked for five years in a textile factory, in Buckinghamshire, before going to art school. I worked printing fabrics that were used to make dresses and furnishings, but also for flags. We also printeddressmakers’ patterns for flying suits, for pilots. These patterns were large prints on cotton made of up to eight silk-screens to make a single design or piece. They were quite complex, mysterious and unfathomable abstract lines in black ink; you couldn’t really figure out what they were to be exactly. They looked like a rudimentary train map, both fascinating and intriguing. The experience of these times always comes back to me when I work with these paper forms. It’s like the flat patterns to be sewn together into work clothes, creating a three dimensional piece of clothing, it gives me a similar sense of creating work where I don’t seeor perceive the final form.

These days I use a bit of all sorts of things. Fedex packaging or cardboard boxes from the supermarket that I gesso and put some paint on. Or cards, re-used from their former life as paintings, and others again that I paint specially, in the same way as prints on paper, monotypes more precisely, made with water-based inks: I draw with a paint-brush on foam, it’s very quick, much more practical than wood, and I can re-work the drawing and the print the next day if necessary; and then I cut out the paper to begin the volumes. Sometimes

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Stuio view, 2013, London

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I also use fabric or wood. I never have a preconceived idea in advance. I start by working on a shape and I begin to add things. I put several of them up on the wall, and I give myself the freedom to explore. By keeping them on the wall, I keep the sense of seeing them as painting. But very recently I have also placeda few on the floor, almost balancing at the corner of wall and floor. That’s at a very experimental stage for the moment.

I don’t know if you can really talk about irony in these folded papers. Humour, certainly. I often know that the work is finished when I burst out laughing on my own in the studio. When it works, it’s moment of pure joy, a small miracle.

I love the fact that the works come about by successive folds and that inevitably, in these folds, by the right-angles and creases, there are always bits that are hidden from view. Or at least parts that aren’t completely revealed. It’s a delicate tightrope between what is concealed and revealed.

There is always a back to the work, that the visitor in a gallery can’t ever see, but that I know is there, and is almost as important in terms of both intention and quality. In those hidden parts, only I know what is inside. I can put something in there and no one else will ever know! Of course, visitors, in a gallery or a museum, aren’t allowed to touch or handle them. It draws you in, tempts you, but you’re not allowed to…People could, it wouldn’t bother me too much, but it might be a problem in terms of conservation (laughter)… In the first works, I used quite a lot of folded papers, with hidden sides and a lot of different papers mixed together. These days, I’m moving towards a greater simplicity, with sometimes just one very light line of fold or a tiny small piece of paper unfolding from it. Ever more fragile, and I like the randomness of them: the tiny piece of paper is almost alive in an independent way; it’s like a small comma, throwing a slight shadow on the wall. Even if it’s not the most important thing, I am attentive to the play of shadows when the light changes. I never make work in order to create the shadow effects, but I do

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welcome them, they accompany all my paintings in the ghost of the light. Come to that, I sometimes work with artificial light, in winter or in the evening, without really worrying about the play of shadows. In fact, I discover them, in general, on looking at them in the studio,once they’re finished.

The white is an essential element. I rather see it as a negative or absent space. The question is always there: what is positive? What is negative? I like that the white of the paper is different from the white of the wall. And that the coloured papers, by their shapes, their colours and the relationship between their different colours, require this white space to express themselves. Is it the white of the wall that defines them? Or the coloured papers that define the blank space? This socalled negative space is always obtained by the way in which I have previously fixed and arranged the the shapes on the wall. And it’s the space between them that makes the works dialogue amongst themselves, side by side, and all together on the wall. But they aren’t just parts of a whole. If they are seen on their own, each one is already in a conversation with the wall.Their modesty comes first and foremost from the format. I have tried to make bigger pieces in paper, but I realized that the paper didn’t hold well. And I like that paper is a very modest material. It’s almost political, in the sense of proletarian!For me it’s a way of creating, with very basic means, something of beauty. I suppose you could say there is some relation to the minimalist movement, which used a wall, floor, or the gallery space. I remember, a long time ago, seeing works by Carl André at the Saatchi Gallery, that impressed me hugely by the simplicity of the materials, the wood, and the arrangement of the works in the space. But I can’t really claim a filiation with minimal artists who work with raw materials, with the essence of the wood or metal, as for me the material, in this instance paper, is more a starting point for a transformation.

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I’m very interested in things that seem to be on the point of collapse. Often, a piece that is only held up by one or two drawing pins can easily just fall apart. In truth, I’m always looking for a precarious equilibrium. Not just in terms of the construction, but also the materials. For example, the papers, being covered in gouache, are fragile when you handle them, they are sensitive to damp, and all of that increases, it seems to me, the aspect of the desired fragility. This modesty, small things that might seem to be barely finished, all of that, in my eyes, goes against the grain of an art that one would consider precious, in terms of high aesthetic qualities. In the studio, I often wonder about the question of what is finished and unfinished. Sometimes I add a piece of paper or two to see if something can go further. And usually I find I have to take them off again, that it’s too much. Sometimes I even end up taking off a lot of pieces and keep only a very few, and simple ones. By this paring down, I arrive at something that feels right. It is a difficult question for all artists, deciding when something is finished.There is something instinctive that can’t really be explained. That’s probably

part of the beauty of it, for the the person doing it.

The folded papers have changed my painting. In my most recent paintings, for example this one, called “Flat form about to enter from the left”, I proceeded almost in the same way as with the papers. I used the pieces of foam that I cut out and placed directly onto the canvas to obtain the outlines on the canvas. That comes directly from working with the papers, and the manipulation of these cutouts placed on the canvas helps me to keep a distance. It creates a

remove, and allows me, in the process, not to be drawn in too quickly by what’s happening in the painting. I try to keep a sense of humour while I’m painting, working very much with the hands. Everything goes through the drawing. Nearly every day, I fill up pages and pages of drawings, with ink, in small notebooks, and there are piles of them that I keep here in a cupboard.

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These drawings are for me a parallel activity, but that sometimes lead into thepaper cut-outs or paintings. But the paintings or the papers have their own specifictime. What is really new, in the recent paintings, is that the canvas almost becomes the wall. The canvases are much bigger than before, and they let the white surround and define the painted shapes. Yes, it’s funny, I’ve created a new wall… and it’s almost as if I took a permanent shape that I can use in a temporary way in the paintings. On the canvas, something happens that is the contrary to what happens in the paper constructions that I can change around at will: when the shapes are placed on the canvas, they are lasting. But there’s an irony there too, sometimes I change my mind about a shape or a painted line, so I paint over it, I move it, I paint a new line, and they leave sort of ghosts that are still visible on the painting. The very simple shapes that appear are often hybrid. I like to see them as almost the speech-bubbles

in cartoons, bubbles of silent thought that come to bloom on the surface of the painting. You can project what you want onto them, they are open images. It’s very important that the spectator brings his own experience to it, his relationship to time, to space.

I feel I’m in an exciting time now, of freedom in the papers and in the paintings. There’s less worry than I used to have, and it’s all very free.

For me space and time are the same thing. There’s a certain musicality in the works, tones, notes even.

Using just one sheet of paper creates a limit. I start by painting flat on the studio table, I cut out, then I fold and fix to the wall. As soon as the paper is fixed or pinned it starts to come alive. Of course, with experience, over time, working on the table, I already have some idea of what it will give on the wall. Sometimes nothing works. So it can happen that I start over completely, taking down the paper, adding another colour on the table, trying other folds. It fascinates me, that moment when you say ok, that works. And you

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understand that at that moment the work functions. Or again, on the contrary, when it doesn’t. Sometimes when I put two pieces side by side on the wall, I can see straightaway that something is wrong, that they don’t attract between themselves. It’s like a clash between them! Or sometimes, there’s an element that I didn’t think was very important, that begins to hum when it’s next to another, and shows itself to be in exactly the right place. It’s quite strange this sum of decisions and hesitations, of false-starts and small discoveries that establish themselves by contiguity. It’s a bit like an electric current that runs between them. There’s clearly a conversation between the pieces but also between the spaces. All these elements, positive shapes, negative shapes, suddenly produce…music.

The wall has become a blank page that allows me to explore endlessly. For example, that paper there, that I recently did, on the wall – that is covered in paint now -, I almost see it as a “service” piece, it serves to balance out the others, rather than as a final note that completes the composition as a whole. It’s quite democratic, as I said before: from the smallest to the largest piece built, they each have their own dimension and space. But of course it’s not the

wall, and its size, the way it is in my studio, that dictates the way the work is. That tiny piece of paper that is placed there between two big constructions could, tomorrow, very well find itself on its own, different but the same, fixed on a large wall in the gallery. My point is that it’s not the wall that is so defined but rather the flexibility of the page it represents, it’s an homage to the wall, to its possibilities…

I don’t know if I can really talk about intention in terms of colour for each piece. It seems to go by cycles, that subconsciously correspond more or less to seasons. I have noticed that and I suppose it’s not unusual for artists. So in summer, the colour is always brighter and softer. And in winter, it can become harsher, grey and dark. Mood often dictates the choice of colours. In some of the folded papers, it can happen that colour and shape work together. Is one

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part too strong for another? Do the white of the wall and the white of the page create a link between the colours? I’m always looking for images that are clear, simple. Where things happen in the space, within the surface of the wall. Sometimes a plain colour comes in quite simply because it happens to be there and seem appropriate. Or I paint some bits as if they seem to me as fragments of landscapes. I must admit that there’s a sort of filtering, over time, of events, things that have occurred. It isn’t always immediate. Sometimes, the colour comes from a journey. I remember a trip to Normandy that led to the use of colours that had stayed in my mind. It’s always something of a collision of conscious intentions and the spontaneous…There are shapes that are linked to personal experiences. I’m sure it’s my way of making sense of the world around me.

No doubt the paintings can be read as metaphors. Through exploring, there’s a life that builds up. Painting is a mixture of so many sensations, things seen, different directions. Looking at a work is not the same journey as reading a book or listening to music: the time is different, it comes to us through a different chronology.

They are, to be sure, merely pieces of painted paper, free, put together with pins, drawing pins, which give a pressure to the papers on the wall, or with a bit of glue, which means they float slightly away from the wall. But I don’t want to make it problematic for collectors,that they be so fragile that they become temporary, and that it becomes an issue, with pieces needing to be replaced, as is the case in some contemporary works that play on the temporary and volatility.

It’s not like floating pigments with nothing to hold them together! When I install these works in a gallery, I use photographs taken in the studio, it’s quite precise and rigorous, even if I’m open to slight changes. But when I change the direction of one piece, the next piece finds itself changed as well,

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so you have to be attentive to that. That said, I am quite free in playing around with the arrangement of each piece in the exhibition space.

I could put all the paper works in a suitcase. I remember that for an exhibition in the U.S., I took a big plastic sachet with me in which I had (carefully) piled up all the works together. And the lady at customs asked me what I was doing in the U.S., and I told her I was having an exhibition in a gallery in Chicago. “But where are the works?” she asked me, sceptical. I just showed her bag - “it’s all in there, the exhibition!” I love the idea of having work that just fits in a box. I love the freedom that comes from what people take for rubbish or left-overs… the “almost nothing” is so comfortable, and that’s the beauty of art, to do that…

The white shape, that I placed on the floor, I like it. It interests me, the rhythm, the dialogue from the floor to the space. Yes, tomorrow, things could develop onto the ground…

Atelier, Deborah House, London, July 2016

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Vincent Hawkins

Born in 1959. Works and lives in London, United Kingdom.

http://vincenthawkins.blogspot.fr

SOLO SHOWS

2019• Growing a Soul, L’ahah #Moret, Paris• Night Garden, Sid Motion Gallery, London

2016• Say The Right Thing, Galerie Pascaline Mulliez, Paris

2013 • Forget Your Mind, Galerie Vidal St Phalle, Paris• Flying Suit, Dan Devening Projects, Chicago

Curriculum vitae

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GROUP SHOWS

2018• Vis a vis five walls, Melbourne

2017• Composing And Caring, Sid Motion Gallery, London• Carte Blanche, L’Espal, Le Mans • Something And Nothing, Woolwich Studios Gallery, London• GeenTitel/No Title, Ruimte P60, Assen • The Surface of Things, Paper Gallery, Manchester• Shaping The Void, Tannery Arts, London • Lacuna4, Taylor Gallery, Dublin• Visceral, Coates and Scarry, London

2016• A Deceptive Cadence, Phoenix Arts Center, Exeter• What Is It Going To Be ? Sid Motion Gallery, London

2015• Borderlands, Northampton• Seed Of Its Opposite Glasgow• Zappatore, Toscane• Exposition collective, Galerie Vidal St Phalle, Paris• Surface, Surface Gallery, London• So Many Constellations, Mayors Parlour Gallery, London

2014• London Calling, Look& Learn, Saint Chamas• Mind The Gap, Autonomie, Culver City, Los Angeles• Crossing Lines & Model, Leeds

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2013• Exchange Project. A.P.T. Project, Deptford, London• Madam I am Adam, Bloomington Studios, Bloomington, Indiana• Theatrical Dynamics, Torrence Art Museum, Californie

2012• Off Shore Fishing, Rokeby Gallery, London• John Moores Painting Prize (finalist), Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool• Abstrunkt, Watkins Gallery, Winona State University, Minnesota • Doubt, CAS, Riverside, Californie• Moveable Feast, Paris• Five, Gallerie1/52, La Seyne Sur Mer, Toulon• The Perfect Nude, The Phoenix Centre, Exeter, Devon• The Perfect Nude, Wimbledon Space, Wimbledon College of Art

2011• A Sort of Night To The Mind, Artary Galerie, Stuttgart• A Sort of Night To The Mind, Arch 402 Gallery, London

2009• A Sort of Night To The Mind, Herbert Reed Gallery UCA Canterbury• Invisible Cities, Jerwood Space, London

2008• Summer Exhibition Royal, Academy of Arts London

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2007• Oh Deborah, Contemporary Arts Project London• Layer Cake, Fabio Tiboni, Bologne• Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts London

2006• John Moore’s 24 (Minor Prize Winner), Liverpool• Jerwood Drawing Prize (Shortlisted), London

FORMATION

1984-1987Maidstone College of Art, Kent

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Laurent Boudier, Vincent Hawkins, Say The Right Things, Paris : Galerie Pascaline Mulliez, 2016

Martin Holman, Layer Cake, Bologna, 2007

Fabio Tiboni et Marinela Pademi, Terra Celeste, Italia : Ed 124, 2007

Anne Bukantas, Jerwood Prize Catalogue, United Kingdom, 2006

John Moores 24, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 2006

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vincent hawkins portfolio •ev - l’ahah · vincent hawkins portfolio •ev. 2 contents artist...

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