I met with Jonathan Lasker, controversial abstract artist at Timothy Gallery, Bond Street, to talk about his exhibition Studies for Paintings 1986-2006, that will be showing until the 16th June.
He arrives holding a take away cup of coffee and a warm smile. We sit down in the middle of the gallery and he questions me on my not-quite Red Neck look. He’s a short mature man with a charming bright nature, he’s polite and exudes an air of confidence as well as coming across as being humble. He loves London and feels very proud of his honorary title as a visiting professor at the London Institute. He says he’s very happy to be doing this show, “it’s a chance to do a small retrospective of the oil studies on paper that I do”. The show here in London is related to a show in Munich that will exhibit a retrospective of drawings from 1979 to 2007.
BCR: So how did you start this work?
JL: I think of it as being a continuous body of work that started in 1977. If you look at the early paintings from then you will see some things that will look somewhat different from what we have now. The basic yellowness of figure, ground, and line, are three consistent formal elements in the work and they’ve been a formal interplay since that time. You can see certain constituent aspects of the work that are constant from then till now.
It started as a response towards minimalism and the position that painting found itself in at the end of the 70s, which was a situation where on the one hand you had conceptual artists who opposed painting altogether and thought painting was thoroughly dead; and on the other the last really successful body of painters that almost declared they had ended painting. They painted the last possible most reduced painting you can make which would be a minimal painting, the flat surface. So to me as an artist was like how do you reinvest the picture plane with metaphor, maybe narrative or maybe not narrative, to talk about picture making and put it in the way that shows the consciousness of the elements of making a painting, and that’s how I began this body of work.
BCR: What made you change the colour structure over time?
JL: Initially there was always very strong background colouration and now the fundamental colour from which I’m starting tends to be white in the recent paintings for the most part. There is no programmatic reason for that, it just sort of slowly happens that way.
BCR: Do you think the reason you are turning towards white is to do with the fact that unconsciously you are turning towards a minimalist side of abstract after playing around for so many years?
JL: White is a traditional ground colour where you normally start a picture. My first paintings I started with a pattern painting in the background and then one day I decided to take these black and white drawings, these biomorphic shapes I was doing on newsprint paper. I was just playing with it, and I thought to myself what if I painted those shapes on top of these multicoloured pattern things, and make those the background and the white shapes would the foreground. I did that and then drew off register a black line into those forms, and that created a resonance with the figure and the ground and the drawing which became the body of work. One of the things that I thought I was doing that was the most important at that time was reversing the background as being relatively naked space and the foreground figures being active space. Because on those paintings the background was very active and the foreground was black and white, I thought that was kind of interesting initially and I started with that but then bit by bit I came full circle. Now the foreground figures are kind of discreet objects in relationship to the black and white background. Initially something I was very involved with, was trying to create a light, a resonance in the colours. I often tended towards complementary colours which were a little bit dull a little bit off, like a pink against a greyish green instead of a red and green which are two complementary colours, things like that, and they would generate an optical light which may be even related to impressionists colour systems.
BCR: Is there a symbolism behind your work?
JL: No, you can sort of say that these elements in my work, these gestures in the paintings break down into signs - you can say that. There are a lot of elements that are signs that we learn to know in abstract painting. But they are not quotes.
BCR: You said that you see your art as an image kit, can you explain what you mean by this.
JL: That was a little brief essay that I wrote for a book that came out on artists in the 80s that was called Beyond Boundaries. I was talking about how the paintings give you a lot of the elements of the picture like figure, background and they give you queues to spatial readings and you know these horizon lines in many of the paintings suggest a deep space, but doesn’t quite go in the way you normally go in. So you have all the components for construing an image in your mind, you have a kit, like an image kit. The idea is to make the viewer see him or herself looking at the picture, forming a picture. Because when we look at a picture we are always forming it in our minds, we are just looking at the flat marks on the canvas and not looking at the actual landscape. So these paintings are suppose to show people how they see a picture
BCR: So the viewer just looks at the work and constructs his own landscape?
JL: Yes. I think any abstract painting is dependent upon the viewer having certain amount of pre-knowledge of painting and the history of modern art. So you're working with that basic acceptance. The average viewer will look at these pictures and not usually see a picture because they don’t see recognisable forms. But I think when I suggested to them that these lines are forms, they seem to go back in space. I start pointing that out to them, I think they see it, I think they read it very easily, sometimes, in most of the pictures. They can see a disjunction between the figure and the background, they can see forms that appear to be floating, they take this role response to the pictures in that way.
