Andrew Christofides on his 2018 exhibition, Reason and Intuition
First published at visualartcanberra.com in August 2018.
Reason and Intuition. By Andrew Christofides. Nancy Sever Gallery, Gorman Arts Centre, 55 Ainslie Ave, Braddon. 25 July to 19 August 2018.
Andrew Christofides is one of Australia’s leading abstract artists. Since completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Chelsea School of Art in London in 1978, he has explored geometric abstraction over four decades. He was the Head of Drawing at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney before retiring from academia in 2012.
His current solo exhibition, Reason and Intuition, at Nancy Sever Gallery shows how his rational-focused practice has grown over the past five years through the addition of romantic elements such as depth and gestural mark making. This visual language of intuition has given Christofides more means to understand and articulate his relationships with the world around him and the way in which it has meaning and value.
We met Christofides at his exhibition and wanted to know more about the growing presence of intuition in his work.
Does the title of your exhibition refer to the combination of ‘reason’–a defining aspect of your painting–and ‘intuition,’ which is a relatively recent development.
The title refers to the fact that over the years I have moved from a studio practice that has been largely reliant on a rational, systematic and numeric based process for generating images and pictorial compositions towards one that is more intuitive. In the early 1970s, I came into contact with the early European Utopian movements such as De Stijl, Suprematism and Constructivism. I was really taken by the idealism of these ‘purist’ movements and wanted to introduce some of this idealism into my own work. I wanted to make work that used pictorial elements that did not come from the appearances of the visible world. I wanted these works to be about themselves and not about something external to them. In other words, I wanted people to look at these works for what they were rather that for what they described.
Through travel I also came into contact with, and fell under the spell of, the ‘old masters’ particularly those of the Italian Renaissance. My passion for these works continues till today when I travel regularly in order to see and re-experience these works.
I have always tried to marry the monumentalism and substance of these early renaissance artists with the idealism and purity of the Utopian movements. My work has increasingly moved from the early rational works that I produced using number systems (during the 1970s and 1980s) to works that have become increasingly intuitive. In other words I have moved towards incorporating more of my own experiences but without necessarily reverting to images that directly take from the appearances of the observed world.
I suppose that the former work is classical in so far as it was constructed in order to speak as efficiently as possible of some narrative of story. The Utopian movements I see as being romantic because they sought to express the essence of the world through a language that was more pure, perhaps in the same way as music does. These movements wanted to extend meaning in painting through a new language.
The title of this exhibition more specifically refers to the fact that my practice now incorporates both reason and intuition as part of my image making process. Some works, namely the small constructions and the painting (2,3,5) x 17 Rotaions+2, are generated solely by a numerically-based process. Some works, in the exhibition, combine elements that are generated numerically as well as elements that are drawn from imagination and visual experience and other works are generated entirely using intuition, imagination and visual experience.
The first work visitors to the exhibition will see is ‘Iconostasis,’ which you painted in 2016. The large (198x183cm) painting features your long favoured colour palette (primary colours, grey and black) and a check pattern. In the context of bringing together ‘reason’ and ‘intuition’, what does this painting tell us about that particular point in time?
This painting includes all of the elements that you speak of. It originated after I visited Cyprus in 2015 after my father died in 2014. While I was in Cyprus I visited a number of byzantine churches in various parts of Cyprus. Cyprus was a great centre for icon painting and it has many important icons going right back in time. The iconostasis is the screen in Byzantine churches that separates the main part of the church and the sanctuary. It is the screen upon which the icons are hung. The subject of the icons varies from church to church but this iconostasis is an important and integral part of the design of all Byzantine churches.
The painting is an abstraction of the iconostasis and the church. It is not an exact representation but an abstraction that I have altered in order to generate an overall image that I felt had some presence and visual significance. What I wanted to create was not a picture of an iconostasis but a painting based on the church, its architectural layout and important features that in the end viewers could contemplate and respond to visually.
I was in Cyprus during Easter of 2015. During Easter the icons are covered in black to signify the death of Christ, hence the number of black gridded elements. I suppose that the chequerboard areas signify floor tiles or pavement areas but there is no intention on my part to be visually specific but rather to use some of these elements as a way of constructing a visually coherent painting that viewers can engage with.
As to its context of bringing together ‘reason’ and ‘intuition’ it is one of those works in the exhibition that is primarily constructed using an intuitive process made up of elements generated via visual observation, imagination and my intuitive judgement.
You painted ‘Towards Intuition’ a few years earlier in 2013. The title suggests it represents an early (if not beginning) stage of adding a more romantic quality to your work. What was the artistic and/or personal context for this work? (*This work was intended to be part of the show, but not shown for pragmatic reasons.)
Actually, you are correct in your assessment of my intentions at the time. I had a work on paper lying around in the studio for many years that was a prelude to this work. I had never made it into a painting and decided in 2013 to use it as a basis for this painting. The drawing included a number of images that I had evolved over time and I simply ordered these from left to right going from the most rational or systematically based on the left to the most gestural and intuitive on the right.
The title of the work, Towards Intuition, suggests a gradual shift in my working process over time. The numerically generated image on the left has no gesture to suggest any emotion and the colours are greys, black and white, colours I associate with the rational. As the images move from left to right, they include more colour and gradually more evidence of gesture, albeit subtle. I suppose as you suggest it does imply a shift from the rational to the more romantic.
The most recent work on show is Between Faith and Reason, which you painted this year. I’m interested in the reference to ‘faith’ (which appears in one other work on show, Acts of Faith, 2013). What is the importance of faith here and how does it relate to reason and intuition?
I have used the word ‘faith’ a fair bit over the past five years or so. This is because faith is one of the means by which we, as humans, determine our behaviour. The painting Acts of Faith is divided vertically. On the left is a numerically derived field that is made up of greys, black and white. This suggests the rational and in this case, for me, represents ‘Science’ which acts on rational logic. On the left the field is made up of a common pattern seen on the vestments of priests and saints in the Byzantine church and in icons. It is a stylised pattern based on a ‘cross’ motif. This field suggests ‘Religion’ which acts on belief. I see both science and religion as being different forms of faith, one having faith in reason and the other in belief. Hence the title ‘Acts of Faith’.
In Between Faith and Reason there are essentially three vertical fields. The one on the left is an abstracted floor plan of a church. The one on the left is a numerically generated field and the one in the middle is an open field that contains numerous small ovals. This suggests that ‘We’, in the middle, are constantly moving between faith (represented by the church motif on the left) and reason (represented by the numerically derived motif on the right).
Two personal favourites are Parallel Universes, 2012 and Fading, 2012. Why did you choose to include these two pieces?
I included these two because they are also favourites of mine and they fitted within the context of this exhibition. Parallel Universes is a small painting divided vertically into two parts. On the left hand side the two geometric elements are crisply painted and lie within a symmetrically gridded field. They have a certainty about them. On the right is a leaning elongated oval within a slightly blurred and softly gridded field of warm yellow. Both the oval and the background field are less certain than the elements and field on the left. I have used the elongated oval in the past to suggest the human form. In its leaning state I would like to suggest a sense of doubt or uncertainty.
The painting is, in essence, the existence of certainty and doubt that coexist within the human condition at any one time. In other words these states exist within parallel universes and are ever present within each individual and the human condition in general.
Also the use of blue and yellow as the background field colours emphasise the opposite states of certainty and doubt: blue and yellow orange being colour opposites.
Fading is a painting that evolved out of an artist book that I made in 2005. The book was titled Passage and was made up of eight images responding to essays in a book by the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz titled Echoes of an Autobiography. The eight images each respond to eight different stages in the cycle of human life from birth to death. Fading was the seventh stage of old age when the human spirit begins to fade, hence the ovals fading from dark to light as they move upwards, perhaps towards death. The painting and the original image in the artist book were arrived at after various versions all intuitively resolved. The gallery has two copies of the book in stock.
Your exhibition includes a small section of constructions made between 2010 and 2016. How do these works relate to your paintings?
As previously stated the constructions are works that are entirely generated using a numerically derived system. They are on the extreme end of the Reason–Intuition spectrum. They are made with no sense of intended meaning in mind and are intended to exist as unique, pure, non-objective forms. They have no meaning beyond themselves. They are discrete object without any external emotive input. Any meaning that is possibly seen in these will be brought in by the viewer and does not exist within the work. Also I have, since 1976, continued to make three dimensional constructions. They are an integral part of my studio practice.
What is the future direction of your work?
This is a really difficult question to answer in so far as I simply do not know how, and in what direction, my work will go. In the artist statement that I did for this exhibition I suggested that my studio practice for the past forty years or so has been an ongoing investigation into the various languages of abstraction, and in particular those of geometric abstraction. In particular I have been interested, over the past twenty or so years, in extending the visual vocabulary and subtlety of my pictorial language so as to provide my practice with a greater ability to express the values and relationships that I have with world. This is a broad but continuing ambition and so I expect that my work will continue to evolve in order to achieve this. Of course, given that my work does move between the rational and the intuitive and is increasingly more open to take in new ideas then I can see my work becoming more directly referential and related to my experiences. I am more open to change now than I was say twenty years ago.
Given my long term interests I imagine that my work will always incorporate the grid to some degree and will have a strong geometric order to it but with an increasing hint of the ‘self’. By ‘self’, I don’t mean self indulgence but rather the self that makes itself manifest through a singular or distinct voice.
See also:
Sasha Grishin’s review, Geometric abstraction with spiritual and emotional content, The Canberra Times
Julie Karabenick’s 2008 interview, An Interview with Artist Andrew Christofides, geoform.net
