Al Dente:
By John Walter
Al Dente is an exhibition about how artists edit their work. The idea for the project has grown out of Shonky: The Aesthetics of Awkwardness an exhibition that I curated for Hayward Gallery Touring Exhibitions. In the catalogue essay I described Louise Fishman’s paintings as “firm to the bite”. Her paintings are not overcooked but neither are they raw or unfinished. So what are they then? What is this quality of freshness they have? They are al dente. This exhibition seeks to further explore the al dente analogy in painting, sculpture and Virtual Reality through conversations with artists Anna Brass, Dominic Dispirito, Edward Kay, Diana Taylor, Jiadong (Pete) Qiang, Michal Raz and Robert Holyhead. In wide ranging conversations we talk about editing as well as the intellectual and craft processes involved in making art, which are rarely documented. Recorded and shared here, with minimal editing, the conversational dead ends reveal as much about us as artists as the passages that flow.
In culinary terms, al dente is used to describe the optimal conditions for cooking, serving and eating pasta. This is a cultural construct – a hierarchy that has evolved over time in order to distinguish right and wrong among pasta cooks. Equivalent cultures of taste and behaviour have been constructed in the art world over time and so Al Dente addresses how artists embrace or challenge the thresholds that they are presented with or have created for themselves in their work. Discussions about patterns abound in the conversations that form Al Dente – patterns in Gothic Revival, sewing and also behaviour and how one can trick oneself out of one’s habits. What emerged for me during the course of curating the exhibition was an understanding that the al dente courts being underdone as opposed to being abandoned. The al dente is the offspring of the unfinished but it is distinct from it.
I began by considering this distinction between the al dente and the unfinished in relation to my own artistic practice. A good example of this is a recent series of 20 paintings (working title Brexit Gothic) that I began in May 2018 by laying down coloured grounds and painting a different image on each canvas traced from a projection. These initial painting statements were fresh and unfussy but they were not complete. I knew that I wasn’t going to act on these painting immediately or react to the initial statement. Instead I left the paintings for approximately nine months knowing that I would subsequently return to them and resolve them but not knowing how or when. Other projects came and went and my frame of reference shifted. This is key to my notion of the al dente – that time becomes an editing tool. I returned to the series in January 2019 and resolved them by painting a different Gothic Revival pattern by Augustus Pugin on each as a background – again traced from a projection. The means were similar in both painting sessions but the mentality was different as was the imagery.
This juxtaposition in time is a good starting point for thinking about what al dente is in art making. The process of looking at one’s initial statements – painted, drawn, written, filmed, photographed, sculpted or other – and getting used to them, adjusting to them under different temporal, intellectual, critical, historical and emotional circumstances – and then intervening in them once a shift has occurred is core to the al dente methodology. Certain disciplines are more familiar with this way of working than others. Music has the demo tape, which is not intended to be the final form but is always available to be used for that purpose if deemed fit (see Kate Bush’s King of the Mountain). Writers sometimes speak of shelving a script or draft and returning to it refreshed. Effectively this shelving process can be thought of in terms of another cooking analogy – that of proving in baking – resting the artwork and allowing the freshness of the gestures to take on new meaning when they are viewed afresh at a later date.
I selected the artists for Al Dente for very different reasons:
Robert Holyhead starts from a glossy, titanium white filled oil primer ground on pristine large canvases that line his studio in North Greenwich. When I visited him I found a laboratory-style operation of palettes, brushes and painting mediums in highly organised arrangements. Robert’s precise way of framing his pictorial experiments turns out to be a way of containing and staging the riotous outpouring of marks and gestures that ensue over single, long painting sessions that are a lot like endurance performances. Unlike Michal Robert does not use tape but the gashes of bright white ground that he leaves amidst his monochrome paintings are so straight and geometrically accurate that it’s hard to believe they are not machine made. Photography does not explain how luscious and energetic these paintings are in the flesh and I urge you to see them in person given the opportunity. More than any of the other artists in Al Dente Robert’s work address how painting is a game of playing off good passages against what is good for the picture as a whole. In this sense we got onto my other hobbyhorse, Maximalism, and how his work is a kind of Complex Adaptive System but that’s for another time…
Skelf
17th April - 16th July 2019
Notes from a conversation with the artist, April 2019