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Interview with Louis le Brocquy
Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, 2002Critic, curator, and Lecturer in the Department of Modern Irish (Language and Literature) at University College Dublin
CMGL In recent years you appear to have returned to some of the core concerns and renewed some of the compositional strategies of the 'Presences'. What, in your mind, are the principal similarities as well as the most notable differences, both in terms of form and of content, between these two bodies of work, divided as they are by over a quarter of a century?
LleB Yes, I needed to return to those early 'Presence' paintings to explore that area in greater depth.
In the recent works the subject remains formally the same, based as it is on the image of the human torso. But I think the principal similarity between those recent paintings and the original 'Presences' lies in their content, in an attempt to discover some kind of image of our inner human reality - that impalpable thing we call in turn the spirit, the psyche, consciousness. On the face of it, it's an impossible venture, a painter trying to realise an immaterial entity by the material means of paint on canvas. But then, I am inclined to think of art itself as a visa to the land of the imagination
I suppose the most obvious difference in the new paintings is their abandonment of the white ground or matrix from which the earlier images emerged. In the recent paintings this whiteness was replaced by greyish backgrounds or 'environments', initially composed of minute particles and later by a fractured texture from which the central figure is derived and into which it in turn diffuses in 'a substantial identity of surface and image'.
CMGL Would it be entirely fanciful to think of this difference in painterly execution in terms of a contrast between the analogue and the digital, or between the hand-crafted object and the technologically mediated image? Many contemporary painters have, after all, either consciously or unconsciously, been influenced by the relatively recent proliferation of images made avauable by major technical advances in microscopic and telescopic photography.
LleB An interesting question to which I've no easy response. Consciously I've always depended on the instinctive evolution of 'the hand-crafted object' to learn more of the nature of the image I'm trying to paint. But it's evident that, in trying to realise some sort of image of interiority, I've been drawn to X-ray photography and even, in a vague way, to certain theories involving 'particles' in the composition and inner movement of matter.
CMGL There is a certain vigour and turbulence about the surface of the earlier 'Presences' compared to the generally more subdued, analytic, neo-divisionist or pointillist surfaces of the recent paintings. Despite your evident indifference to passing artistic fashions over the years, does this reflect a difference between works produced in the hey-day of abstract expressionism and the painterly gesture, on the one hand, and works produced in the aftermath of post-modernism, on the other?
LleB When I set out as a painter I was in love with painting, in the application of paint to canvas, in the language of the paint itself as I learned it from the works of Titian, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Goya, Manet. I was not specifically drawn to American abstract expressionism, although 1 admired the painterly works of de Kooning, Johns and Rothko, as well as those of Fautrier in France. Nevertheless, I am interested in your perception that the polarity between the abstract expressionism of the nineteen fifties and subsequent post-modernism might be reflected in the difference between the early and the late 'Presences'. I have not consciously been influenced by post-modernism in any of its forms, but unconscious influence is always mysterious.
I myself tend to think that the change from the charged impasto of the earlier works to the comparative transparence of the recent paintings reflects the inward nature of the search it has now become and the painterly means to realise this.
CMGL How do you yourself perceive the progression of your work from the early 'Presences' onwards?
LleB As I see it, the revelation I witnessed in Spain some fifty years ago - in which light and shadow assumed a new metaphysical meaning for me gave rise to the early 'Presences', in which I tried to evoke 'from the depths of the canvas' a human form, finally surfacing in the corporeal turbulence you mention.
You could say that the subsequent long series of head images continued as further painterly evocations in no way different other than in subject matter.
In returning to the corporeal 'Presences' seven years ago my aim was to reach into their inner being, something merely suggested in the earlier works. From the start these later works appear to have developed a certain granular surface structure covering the entire canvas. This surface suggested particles, which I tended to see as another kind of matrix from which the image might materialise, both in the depths of its shadow and in its emergence to the light. Then, gradually it seems, this granular surface becomes more structured and pervasive, at once composing and disseminating the image within it.
CMGL The early 'Presences' were painted by a man who had just reached the age of 40; the most recent works by a celebrated painter in his mid-80s. How do you think this difference might be reflected in the work?
LleB On a personal level I confess I find myself contending with what Samuel Beckett used to refer to as the eventual 'ruin of the mind' - loss of particular memory and other forms of annoyance. Happily, this scarcely affects me as a painter and I go on for the present as most painters do in old age, their powers if anything enhanced, more radical and uncompromising than ever. And so I've progressed from the early 'Presences' to the further reach of these recent works, stripping back, trying to intensify the image.
CMGL The series of works immediately preceding your return in 1997 to the earlier subject matter of the 'Presences' - what the critic Brian O'Doherty has referred to as the 'Body Parts - were studies of various of the body's orifices isolated in vast, relatively undifferentiated grounds. What exactly does this series of transitions from the 'Heads' to the 'Body Parts' to a 'Return of the Torso'., as it were, reflect in your thinking at the time?
LleB As I see it, those first so-called 'orifice' paintings took place in the ancestral head series from 1970 to 1972. In these earlier images the head image itself was reduced almost to the isolated image of an open mouth and this I saw not as a sort of silent scream, but rather as an opening into the dark space of the interior being. At the same time I saw it ambivalently as an illusory hole in the canvas with spatial implications not altogether unlike those of a physically slashed or punctured work by Lucio Fontana in his 'Concetto Spaziale' series.
About six years ago I felt that I might further develop this idea of the 'holed' canvas, forming the image of an open mouth, to include other points of 'entrance' such as the eye, the ear and the navel. And, finally, the navel in particular - being literally central in the 'Presence' torsos - may well have been a factor in returning me to the earlier 'Presence' paintings.
CMGL You have referred to your painting, most especially the recent work, as a kind of 'layered drawing'. This implies that colour is relatively ancillary for you in these paintings. Is that the case?
LleB Drawing is deeply important. I see it as the underlying thrust of a painting; to which may be added successive layers of paint - and revision.
From the start I've been fascinated by colour in all its aspects, yet somehow bright hues have rarely entered my painting. Maybe this could have something to do with my early love of the so-called 'living greys' in the paintings of Edouard Manet and the great Spaniards, Goya and Velasquez.
CMGL Could you say something about the actual physical process of your painting, i.e. describe the various stages in the elaboration of an individual work?
LleB It's difficult to describe a process that tends to define itself as it moves onward. Broadly speaking, however, in my recent work the image is usually drawn on the primed canvas with the flat of a charcoal stick. This is then 'fixed', when successive layers of very diluted colour glazes are applied one after the other - ultramarine, cadmium red, viridian, etc. - to produce a varied grey tone, from which later white tones can emerge to the surface.
CMGL How important to you is, on the one hand, the scale of the figure, and, on the other hand, the size of the canvas?
LleB To me scale - the size of the canvas - is linked to the size of the image as I conceive it. Generally speaking I follow a certain correspondence to life size, although the human figure may also be regarded in a reduced or 'distant' way. Rarely, as in 'Man' (2002) - the figure is enlarged for emotional or monumental reasons.
CMGL That particular painting, 'Man' was subsequently titled 'Tribute to Michelangelo'(2002). What prompted this explicit invocation of art historical precedent?
LleB Actually, I now think I should revert to the simple title 'Man'. I certainly did not set out with Michelangelo in mind. He crept in, as it were. Maybe this had something to do with the larger-than-life, monumental aspect of the painting, evoking memories of Michelangelo and his great admirer, William Blake.
CMGL Could you comment also on the invocation in the title 'Cúchulainn' (1999) of the hero of the early Irish saga 'The Táin', Thomas Kinsella's English version of which you so memorably illustrated?
LleB The heroic image of Cúchulainn is perhaps most meaningful in his mythic choice not to outlive his significance, but rather to die explosively so that his image might be perceived in perpetual 'fallout'. This was the kind of thing I had in mind.
CMGL I have noticed that in those paintings in which the (often truncated) human torso is floating in a wide expanse one gets a sense of extreme but unbounded isolation, whereas in certain paintings in which the figure extends to the edges of canvas, or by implication beyond, that sense of isolation is combined with a sense of confinement. Is that a conscious distinction?
LleB I understand your alternate impressions of isolation and confinement regarding the figures in their respective backgrounds. I myself tend to see the homogenous background primarily as a matrix from which the image emerges into materiality, whereas I see the more structured background of the very recent works as an environment which enters and composes the image and into which the image in turn extends. Such an environment can certainly be seen to enclose, and therefore confine - the image being merged within it - but I suppose you might agree that we are all enclosed by our environment and - ambivalently - outgoing into it. We are also, as I see it, an intrinsic part of it, as it is a part of us.
CMGL 'Woman in Movement'(1999) seems to me unusual in the degree of torsion and turbulence displayed by the figure, whereas most of your figures tend to be more static, at times almost monumental. Would you agree?
LleB Yes, this painting implies movement. It is something of a development from the 1957 'Woman in Movement', which in turn sprang from the stilled transience of Edgar Degas' women absorbed in their toilette - intimate momentary aspects of being.
CMGL From around 1999 on the undifferentiated granular grounds gradually give way to a more complex structural or cellular patterning. 'Being'(1999) is probably an early example of this development. How do you view this development?
LleB I suppose I've been affected by Cubism recurrently, if indirectly, for virtually all my working life. Sometimes in one way, sometimes another. I think in this instance it may have gently helped me to restructure the human form in the 'cellular patterning' you mention, while maintaining something of the quality of flesh.
CMGL In a number of paintings in recent years you have explicitly revisited specific compositions from the 'Presences' period. What was your thinking in doing so?
LleB I do sometimes return to images that have earlier preoccupied me in my work - images in which I seem to perceive an opening toward further discovery.
'Woman in Movement', (1957), 'Ecce Homo' (1957) and 'Fallen Man' (1960) are three such works and their recent counterparts maintain the same titles. Furthermore, the head in 'Lazarus' (1954) I regarded as an early 'hole-in-the-canvas' image, which I've conjured up again in some of the recent 'Human Image' paintings.
CMGL The figures in 'Human Image' (No.729) (1999) and 'Human Image' (No.739) (2000), which formally echo the much earlier 'Lazarus' (1954), are more clearly posed as crucified figures. How do you view these paintings' relationship to this central image of Christian iconography?
LleB Even today, I imagine, the image of the Crucifixion remains deep in our consciousness. Each one of us in our Judeo-Christian culture is more or less imprinted by the terrible but sublime death of Christ - marked to some extent by its psychological stigmata. I am no exception in this, but I have no religious purpose in these paintings of 'human images'. Certainly they are in the extended form of crucifixion, but they relate neither to the terrible Crucifixion of Grunewald, nor to Greco's sublime Christ on the Cross. My concern is rather with an ultimate state of being better expressed in a short poem by Richard Ryan, after the seventeenth-century Japanese. I know it by heart: 'My spirit and flesh parting now - /trails of mist here, there,/ dwindling in the bone forest.'
CMGLYet 'Ecce Homo'( 1958 & 2002), too, might understandably be read as referring to the figure of Chirst.
LleB Admittedly, the title is rather ambivalent. My own feeling in this is best translated as 'behold a man', but I am not certain that 'Behold the Man' - the dramatic exposition of Christ - doesn't colour to some extent both the 1958 and the 2002 versions, different as they are.
CMGL It has often been suggested that the images you paint, whether torsos or heads, are ghostly intimations of an afterlife and in some way connected with religious belief. What is your response to such suggestions?
LleB Since the age of eleven I have held no formal religious beliefs. You could say I'm agnostic. I simply do not know.
What concerns me in these paintings is, rather, the state of living, of being. I once came across a Chinese acupuncturist on French television who seemingly could alter the metabolism of a growing lemon as effectively as that of a human being.
I was fascinated. For years I had myself been trying to realise the interiority of lemons and other fruit throughout the 'presence' period and beyond - trying to discover some image of their inner reality. It would seem that life, in its multiplicity of forms, is one.
Q. 36 'Lazarus' (1954) was clearly important enough a painting for you to revisit it more than forty years after it was painted.
LleB Originally I remember being moved by the story of Lazarus as a return - miraculous or otherwise - to a heightened awareness of his own being. I saw his head as a black hole of absence, stooped to regard his renewed physical presence. In retrospect, I think Lazarus points the way into the 'Presence' paintings.
CMGL What is the significance of your recently readdressing the subject of the 'Fallen Man'.
LleB The words 'Fallen Man' may well suggest some moral implication, which I don't intend, but neither do they imply a physical fall. In both the still figure of 1960 and the more kinetic image of 2002 the fall is seen as an interiorised experience of catastrophe.
CMGL In the triptych 'States of Being' (2000) you also revisit a much earlier composition 'States of Being, (1964) in which a centrally placed male torso facing us on a light ground is flanked by two further torsos on much darker grounds ,which face toward the centre panel, and which we view from the side. While the technical rendition of the individual figures in both triptychs is consistent with other contemporaneous paintings, the dynamic of a triptych necessarily affects our perception of these otherwise typically isolated figures.
LleB My own perception in painting those States of Being' was not exactly to paint a relationship or dynamic between three separate figures. It was rather to contrast various states of being within a single being. That they are seen to be quite different shapes and tones might be more comprehensible if we contemplate the utterly different shapes and tones we become to ourselves in the course of twenty four hours. Our immediate subjective image of our daytime self, its shape, its solidity, its pale colour, has little to do with the deep inwardness of self in darkness, an image in which the idea of our centrality can shift from head to heart, to belly, to the very tips of our fingers - to the exclusion of all else. Feeling has no shape.
Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith is a critic, curator, and Lecturer in the Department of Modern Irish (Language and Literature) at University College Dublin. He has published on various aspects of Irish literature, both medieval and modern, as well as on contemporary art. He is the author of Oidheadh Chloinne hUisneach/ The Tragic Death of the Children of Uisneach (Irish Texts Society 1992) and the editor of Cime Mar Chách: Aistí ar Mháirtín Ó Direáin (Coiscéim 1993). His art criticism has appeared in Artforum, Circa, Flash Art, Modern Painters and Parachute. The artists for whom he has written include Richard Billingham, Willie Doherty, Douglas Gordon, Antony Gormley, Callum Innes, Karen Kilimnik, and Niele Toroni. He has also written catalogue essays for exhibitions at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Tate Britain, The Drawing Center, New York, and Berkeley Art Museum, California. In 2000 he co-curated Shifting Ground, a survey of fifty years of Irish art, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. In 2005 he co-judged the Turner Prize, Tate London.