Mitch Cairns | Man Rose

20 August – 18 September 2010

MITCH CAIRNS IN CONVERSATION
with Agatha Gothe-Snape and Shane Haseman
14 August 2010

 

This show was produced in my home studio. This space became very important to me. I became quite domestic in this time. One week, I was replenishing a vase of flowers, and the flower of choice was kale. The kale was described to me by the florist as being "a man’s rose”. This seemed like a good name for the show.

 

On a simple level the title can be read as "man/woman” and I suppose from that reading there is instantaneously a sexual tension or sexual allusion. The title of the show came after I had completed two distinct suites of painting. One was highly abstracted, but no less suggestive of sex and of the desire to use sex as the content for the show; the other explored the more graphic, legible, highly erotic and perhaps slightly perverted genre of cabinet paintings.

 

The cabinet paintings directly draw on my interest in both the work and life of Richard and Pat Larter. Picabia has always been a big influence on my practice – Picabia’s for all seasons! 

 

That’s true. But the banal or even home-style depictions of sex as depicted by Larter were an honest point of attraction. Richard and Pat Larter present sex as a domestic act. Sure my works aren’t as colourful or decorative as Larter’s, but there is a similar sentiment to do with domesticity and sexuality. 

 

I think the graphic and or illustrative quality of the works allow them an innocence and stop short of them becoming an overtly perverted display of my attraction to the subject. But in short, sex is inherently funny and at times clumsy, and this is what slapstick generally draws on. But these paintings also come from the reverence I have for sex and the figure.

 

Sexuality in general is rarely aired in my milieu of contemporary painting. The private nature of cabinet paintings speaks to this invisibility. Of course sex is no longer taboo, yet it’s interesting that sex has so little currency in certain aspects of contemporary painting. So I guess the use of the word cabinet alludes to this sense that sexuality is still something that is hidden and private in discourses surrounding contemporary painting. But this is by no means my soul motivation for making these figurative works.

 

In these paintings there was a level of trying to unpack the monochrome by making additions to it – what I refer to as "correcting the monochrome”.  I add suggestive shapes, abstracted shapes, actual figures and sexy figures. The monochrome for me is an entirely confronting "image”. Ultimately I am an image-maker and ironically the monochrome is one of many "images" from which I can draw upon. 

 

But also, ultimately, I enjoy a point of inclusion, for my audience and myself. I think whacking a figure into the monochromes lends a sense of accessibility to the painting. If my folks get into this shared space between the monochrome and figurative painting there is a sense of victory. 

 

I found it to be a simple device that allows the figure to not simply float on the ground. The jagged line irritates the eye and points explicitly to this tension I am working with between the figure and the ground. I think it’s making a joke of this whole conundrum – it’s a parody of types. It’s also a self-reflexive joke because I’m always struggling with this relationship. Its an over simplified gesture which at some level makes light of this perceived difficulty that was a major formal concern at the NAS [National Art School]. I’ve lovingly adopted this pictorial conundrum as a point of play.

 

I made a decision some years back as an exercise to work exclusively with tone as a means of developing one aspect of my visual education. Colour is complicated and reducing my painterly practice to tonal problems is useful. It's reductive – I can see a series of problems. It’s also the triumph of limitation – to focus on one thing and by doing so creating a series of further problems.