The Body in the Work
Séraphine Pick’s paintings represent heightened states of consciousness and uneasy conditions of unconsciousness. The overriding impression is one of transformation. She translates the experiences of revellers and ravers―intoxicated, euphoric, mesmerised―and of intrepid explorers of technologically enhanced landscapes and forms of communication. Her own work can be characterised in terms of rapid changes, between different styles and structures, and unsettling disruptions, exerted on images and on the sensibilities of viewers. Pick studied at the Canterbury School of Fine Arts in Christchurch, graduating in 1987, and gained recognition initially for her ‘white paintings’ of the 1990s, with floating images of fragmentary memories. Increasingly intricately surreal dreamscapes followed, but Pick has also, since the early 2000s, worked with source images that evince the weirdness of everyday realities, or at least of the mediated ‘real’ or the ‘hyper-real’. However, the paintings in her 2019 show, Corporeal, which showed at Brett McDowell Gallery in Dunedin, represented something of a return to nature, with predominantly female figures in pastoral settings.
Edward Hanfling: Although the Corporeal paintings look distinctly Séraphine Pick in manner and mood, I am struck by the way you are, quite deliberately, it seems, trying on different historical styles for size― fauvism, symbolism, Edvard Munch, the Nabis. You have done something of the sort before (such as your Raymond McIntyre phase of a decade or more ago). Can you explain why you ‘channel’ other artists in this way?
Séraphine Pick: This show was an exploratory set of works, which began in earlier ones shown at the 2019 Auckland Art Fair called New Behaviours.
Both grew from at Michael Lett in 2018, referencing the development of VR (virtual reality) and other digital technologies, along with a 2016 show of watercolours, , at Station Gallery, Melbourne, dealing with robotics, AI (artificial intelligence), uncertainty and loss of body, as well as exploring the world through screens. We are experiencing a kind of hyper-reality, as VR, AI and AR (augmented reality) and algorithms colonise our senses to a point referred to the body and human evolution as we move towards a virtual world (now rapidly becoming the everyday in this lockdown we are in). I think I’m beginning to focus more on feeling with the body as I paint, using post-impressionist, fauvist and expressionist styles (mostly by male artists, but also females like Mary Cassatt, Frances Hodgkins and Paula Modersohn-Becker), as a way of connecting with the materiality of painting. I wanted to first explore colour by premixing it, and applying it directly, creating a sense of light and movement, a fractured environment, and merging the figure with the ground and with paint itself. To explore sensation and the tactile, I’m using paint more gesturally. It will be interesting to see how it translates to a bigger scale.
