Matisse: The Cut-Outs at Tate Modern

Responding to the restrictions of illness, Henri Matisse found a means to return art to the line, not a drawn line but a cut one. Simply manipulating scissors and painted papers, Matisse radically evolved a technique that expressed elemental qualities of shape, colour and silhouette. Tate Modern’s exhibition manages to elevate these humble Cut-Outs to pre-eminent importance. Long overlooked in favour of Matisse’s paintings of sensuous interiors and voluptuous nudes, these Cut-Outs leap off the wall in their confident simplicity.

The show starts by illustrating the use of these cut paper forms as designs for still lives. A pin-board holds apples and jugs held in place for their relational effects. Matisse has infinite choices in his arrangement of these forms placed on top of a table in a traditional still-life. Two diagonal pieces of string describe mark out the table's edges. Beside this malleable design is the completed painting characterised by Matisse’s fascination with pattern and texture seen here in some glazed ceramics, fruit, a tablecloth with a cloud-like motif, and the jagged edge of a conch shell. All the elements fall into place but we can see that the cut-out process was a crucial stage in making the painting. In the corner of the exhibition's first room is a tiny, modest lyre made in blue paper, the very first self-sufficient ‘decoupage’. It presents some of the significant ideas that Matisse developed in cut paper: the silhouette and positive form of the object set against the support which acts to pick out the fine strings of the instrument.

 ‘Jazz’, an illuminated book, which Matisse produced from 1943, demonstrates the vitality of these cut papers layered together, colours set against each other, and collage animating the image. The finished, printed plates demonstrate the inherent delicacy of the Cut-Outs. However, they do not reproduce well. The original materiality of the maquettes is diminished in the printing process as the edges, crinkled layering and textures are pushed to a graphic reduction . Matisse accepted that the project was flawed but it alerts us to the potential of this embryonic technique which he was developing in a time of war and occupation.

The Cut-Outs offered Matisse new opportunities particularly when immobilised by ill-health.  They became a private meditation on making images out of humble materials. Collectively they form a ‘poor’ art without the privileged status of oil paint or bronze. As you walk from room to room, you learn how these paper pieces provided private entertainment and a new purpose. They began as single pieces pinned to the wall of the studio where the draughts of air would gently move them. Gradually they would accumulate and became immersive ‘installations’ determined by architectural dimensions and the method of their production.

Perhaps the greatest work in the exhibition is the ‘Parakeet and the Mermaid’. Foliage here moves and flows as if shaped by breezes and currents embodying both the sea and the shore. What’s so artful is the choreography of the fronds in varying colours, directions and sizes. Matisse imagined bringing the increasingly inaccessible garden ‘inside’ in the manner of his paintings which connect the domestic interior to the surrounding environment through open windows and doors. We can see in a surviving photograph how this piece evolved in scale so that it began to turn corners at 90 degrees, as if growing naturally. Matisse deploys colour strategically here so that hot pinks and oranges project forward while cooler greens and blues recede until the eye eventually sees the ripe, blue pomegranates swaying in the gaps.

 ‘Work with Two Masks’ is a pronounced contrast because this piece originated out of a commission for a tiled mural in Los Angeles. Here Matisse begins a dialogue between symmetrical, repeating motifs, which subtly vary because they are individually hand-made. Blue neo-classical columns stand sentry at each end and a central band resembling embroidered flowers slices the work into two. This enormous assemblage of cut petals and seeds fluctuates between order and chance. In the penultimate gallery you can see the final, approved design for the mural project where Matisse dispenses with any symmetry and employs a set of fronds in balanced colours that rise up organically out the ground, as if a living plant.

The Chapel of the Rosary in Vence presented the greatest challenge to the cut paper technique. Matisse called the project the summation of his life’s work. While it largely avoids biblical references aside from a Madonna and Child, the composite elements combine to celebrate life and Meditterranean fecundity in the sunlight. Despite Picasso’s contempt for its religious purpose informed, no doubt,  by a twinge of jealousy, Matisse triumphantly deploys his cut-papers to conceive a Provencal ‘total artwork.’

Why is this show so successful and popular? I think the vitality of these works lies in their direct authenticity. They return us to childhood and the early exploration of the world through sight and touch. While we cannot handle the Cut-Outs, we can imagine the satisfying playfulness of holding the brightly painted paper while taking a pair of scissors on a meandering journey of description. As Matisse cuts, so he draws. The Cut-Outs dispense with any pre-conceived design and become assertively material, almost sculptural. Matisse creates fantasies out of painted papers without hiding the journey required to make them. What’s fundamentally entrancing about these Cut-Outs is that they manage to be miraculously both an object and an image.

Red Tape: Stanley Casselman and Hyo Myoung Kim at Gazelli Art House

Taking up the challenge of the art critic, Jerry Saltz, who called for artists to make affordable artworks in the manner of pieces by Flavin, Hirst and Fontana,  the painter Stanley Casselman has made a series of faux Gerhard Richter paintings, which reproduce the character of the ‘Abstract Painting’ series.  ‘Red Tape’ exhibits some of these examples alongside new media prints by Hyo Myoung Kim in a show investigating old and new processes for making art.

Casselman’s paintings certainly borrow Richter’s method of partially erasing the painted image with the sweeping horizontal strokes of a squeegee across the sticky paint. Layers of colour are revealed through holes appearing out of the dense pigment. The uncanny similarity is achieved in a faithful re-enactment of Richter’s dialogues between control and chance, construction and destruction. By copying the formal qualities of Richter’s paintings, Casselman consciously resurrects familiar debates concerning originality. Through such mimesis, he discards the conceptual foundations of Richter’s paintings.

However, Richter’s paintings largely derive their interest in deconstructing the creative act and leaving a painting hovering between a beginning and a conclusion. Casselman’s work is bereft of enduring interest beyond the skill with which he apes Richter. He can successfully fool the eye like a practised forger, but fails to develop Richter’s more engaging debate about the act of making a painting and its signification. Two of Casselman’s earlier paintings shown here build up an ‘all-over’ effect of smudged points of colour that bleed and blend together to form rich, veils of paint marks. These works from 2011 have an intrinsic logic and coherence missing from the new ‘Inhaling Richter’ series.

Hyo Myoung Kim is also exhibiting a series of digital prints illuminated in light boxes in this show and these feel distanced from Casselman’s quixotic interest in copying. These LED light boxes nicely carry that ‘Richtian’ inconclusiveness between action and completion albeit without intention. Thematically, ‘Red Tape’ aims to set up a dialogue between the techniques of painting and new media but this feels rather unsatisfying in the contrast between two very different bodies of work.

Pamela Golden: ‘Good Morning, Mr Williams!’ at Marlborough Contemporary, London

Pamela Golden’s miniature paintings operate like keyholes, offering voyeuristic access to an imaginary world. She coaxes the viewer into looking intently at tiny, narrative details. The charming effect is accentuated by the use of much larger frames leading the eye gently into a constructed microcosm. In her new show, Golden continues to exhibit these entrancing works, which resemble small, prints from an old-fashioned ‘contact’ sheet. This method is appropriate because these paintings originate out of found photographs commemorating a choir visiting a North Wales seaside resort c. 1912. In ‘Good Morning, Mr Williams’ schoolboys pose in the mouth of a tent, waking up for the new day. Tiny details such as the red poles poking up out of the canvas animate this jaunty Edwardian scene.

Recently adopting an entirely new method, Golden also exhibits five larger paintings using the same photographic source material. They are made with the difficult Sumi watercolour process, requiring the application of a textured pigment much like gold leaf. ‘A Flash Of…’ illustrates faint figures walking through wild flowers in a meadow, in delicate almost forgotten shades of green and yellow. Reaching back across history, Golden, superimposes the old photographs onto her own observation of the same landscape. This achieves a poignant layering of time and place, scrambling photographic and topographical certainties.

Led back across a century to a summer spent by the sea, these paintings address nostalgia for childhood and an elegiac interest in anonymous characters long passed out of memory. The only regret is that the lighting within the gallery rather washes out these remarkable images, but the more enduring effect is the impressive encounter between the estranging impact of time and the universal experience of youth. Accompanying the exhibition is a soundtrack featuring the singer, Roshi Nasehi, and music ranging from Led Zeppelin to Persian nursery rhymes, which reasserts the hybrid roots of the entire project.

Amir Chasson discusses the value of bad reviews, being stubborn and selling artworks for £2.99.

Amir Chasson treats the art critic of the Evening Standard’s lacerating comment about his paintings at the Saatchi Gallery as a triumph. ‘When I knew I was going to be in that Saatchi exhibition, I assumed Brian Sewell would review it and I was worried I wouldn’t be mentioned. He said that my work looked like a Sunday painter’s, an amateur from Ponder’s End. That was great. I didn’t get enough bad reviews. Sewell giving me a bad review is a great accolade. A lot of artists don’t get reviews good or bad, none at all. Indifference is what’s painful. No reaction is what hurts. A bad review is as good as a good review.’ Chasson’s response to such a potentially demoralising comment in print is surprising and almost incredible but he is defiant, translating adversity into advantage, displaying some of Andy Warhol’s inverted logic.

What riled Sewell are Chasson’s imaginary portraits resembling caricatures or cartoons. Exhibited in a show called ‘New Order: British Art Today’, Chasson aligns these exaggerated faces beside diagrams of indeterminate graphs, maps and bar charts. Eyes are lopsided and noses curve out of perspective. They begin to resemble those Victorian heads illustrating the science of phrenology that attempted to reveal intelligence or degeneracy in the shape of a skull. These faces are discomforting in their collapsing details. The simulated diagrams allude to rationality but are paradoxical fictions awkwardly meeting in paint. Chasson seems drawn to that friction between our faith in concrete information and the subjectivity of both making and looking at a painting.

Chasson greets me at his studio in a building run by Acme, offering warm and affordable space to artists, so different from the romantic myth of ramshackle attics.  The studio is surprisingly tidy even though he shares it with another artist. Large canvases from past exhibitions are rolled up inside tubes and several unfinished paintings are hung along the walls. Wearing a pair of modish glasses he has the appearance of an educated, urban professional. He is on a roll now, on the cusp of wider recognition and new opportunities, positioned where every ‘emerging’ artist wants to be, showing work in exhibitions, being reviewed and finding recognition.  

Chasson remembers the process of entering the notorious Saatchi Collection as rather impersonal and never discussed the sale with his influential patron. The ICA, then hosting ‘New Contemporaries’, simply called him and said ‘off the record’ that ‘Charles’ was interested in buying the paintings and would he mind? Being bought and exhibited by Britain’s leading collector of contemporary art, Charles Saatchi, might represent a defining moment in an artist’s career. Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin are proof of that. Amir Chasson demurs but concedes that it’s helpful in getting noticed and reviewed. ‘I don’t know how valuable it is. My initial response was, oh great, I’m going to make some money from that show. I didn’t even know he would show the pictures. I swear I didn’t even look at the Saatchi website. You don’t do that as an artist, you just don’t. You have to keep thinking about the next painting. You can’t keep thinking about what you did before. Your reference points are your friends and colleagues, people you studied with, those you look up to.’ He seems grounded enough not to get carried away by this lucky break, but confesses ambivalence about the process. ‘Sometimes I get this feeling it’s not prestigious anymore to be in the Saatchi, but of course I would be happy to sell more paintings to him.’

This begs the question how comfortable he is with success and what really drives him. He offers that ‘it’s very hard being an artist in London,’ which seems a truism and I press him to elaborate. Does he mean financially, professionally?  ‘Yes, of course, all of that. Financially, you can deal with it by freelancing, sharing a studio, by working from home. The greatest difficulty is the intellectual, psychological challenge of who am I in this crazy, insane, saturated, money-driven world. All the other things, health, money, wellbeing comes later, if at all. Because when you make artwork, all that goes out of the window, none of that matters.  When you are in the ‘zone’, finally in the studio and have ideas and are executing them, then it’s a high, a sort of happiness, it’s where you need to be like being in the womb.’

He talks with animated conviction while his hands appear still and controlled.

After many years working as a graphic designer and teacher in Tel Aviv, he seems to have found his direction and a professional integrity by his mid-40s . Compelled to take an MA in design by the college that employed him, he researched Hebrew typography by distributing questionnaires in the street. Surely, it had a practical application for communications? ‘I hated every minute of it and decided it was pointless but somehow they liked it. It was the equivalent of why English readers might prefer the fonts, Times New Roman or Helvetica.’

Chasson is a curious iconoclast, teasing established orthodoxies from masculinity to the art world itself. He recounts persistent alterations of any commercial brief or syllabus.  ‘I have always had a subversive streak like Marcel Duchamp, one of my heroes at school like many artists nowadays. I was always attracted to how he makes fun of science and makes science ridicule itself.’ In early, animated films, made in Israel, which he now calls ‘a bit silly’, he took risks by satirising military heroes or putting Arab lettering over posters celebrating the anniversary of Israeli independence. Even more provocative was the use of Palestinian propaganda. ‘Guy, my partner and a journalist, used to travel to the West Bank and bring back little postcards that showed ‘shaheeds’ or heroes, which will probably be shocking for some Israelis. They did some horrible things obviously like exploding themselves on buses. But that’s an example of the source material I was using.’ Machismo remains an enduring interest. During his residency in Rome, he made a very large painting merging images of a heavy marble head in the Capitoline museum with muscular actors posing as gladiators outside the Colosseum and young Romans sweating inside Goth clothing on the street.

But how did his finally find his groove and ideas that could engage him? He credits his testing training at Goldsmith’s College, which helped him find a subject and a method, despite his initial fears that the course was too pretentious and reliant on theory. On this point he is emphatic. ‘It was amazing. Studying there put everything in context. I know it sounds ridiculous. But there’s no way you can become an artist without going through an education. Painting at Goldsmiths, the year I was there, was a no-go zone. To use a politically incorrect term, it was ‘retarded’.’ So there was no respect for your roots in drawing or what he wanted to do? ‘I loved being there with all my heart but the approach was to tear down all you knew and build you up by starting again. When I started I was 39 but most were in their twenties. I needed to be more stubborn. Then some drawings got accepted by the Jerwood Prize and Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2009, which was the biggest ‘fuck you’.  I had made a massive drawing called ‘Piss Pants’, a figure with a big stain on a pair of jeans. I was thinking about when people actually piss themselves, when they’re drunk or scared. The tutors gave me an ‘unsatisfactory’ grade. That was good, it pushed me and I started making videos. I resisted but they pushed me really hard and it worked.’

How Chasson arrived at making the Saatchi series illustrates the role of chance that characterises any artistic career. Having tried to isolate single words like ‘sameness’ or ‘prolix’ he kept running into the challenge of making a painting that held the viewer’s interest. ‘I thought that people are really indifferent to those words, nobody cares or gets it. Then I realised one of the most attractive things for people that makes them stop is a portrait. The human face is like the colour red, it gets your attention. I thought that’s a great tool for waving the cheese in front of the mouse. I had never painted a portrait before. Then I heard the name ‘Ipswich’ on the radio and not being from this country it sounded ridiculous and I copied a Picasso pencil portrait, as I wasn’t confident enough to work from life. It’s a big responsibility to work with a live model. I put the word Ipswich around it and I knew immediately that it was working. ‘

Later, he would use the same strategy of sampling found images, attributing the portraits to ‘composites like police software faces. I go through magazines or online images. One of the Saatchi paintings has the hair of a pop star, the shirt of a rugby player and one has the face of an Ingres woman. There’s no real balance. God forbid it’s balanced. The dissonance is what I’m after.’  To heighten the alienating effect of these portraits he often introduces the hint of a skin condition. More recently, in a large installation he painted a fictional group of oil and gas executives, suggested by corporate prospectuses of large multinationals.  ‘Corporate people sometimes look crazy – it’s more intense because it’s not normal for them to be in front of the camera, they are usually behind the scenes. They are putting themselves out there.’

This unconventional streak still persists in the artist’s attitude to the art market, which he describes as having become an industry. He shows me a limited edition he made for an exhibition in Norwich made from a cereal packet which unfurls, like a crack in a door, to reveal a middle aged man turning around to admire the back and buttocks of an anonymous, naked man. I glance at the price and see ‘£299’ which seems reasonable. I squint again at the small print and see that each piece actually sold for £2.99 despite the gallery’s misgivings that art was almost being given away for free. Ever the maverick, Chasson insisted that this witty collaging of found material should sell at the cost price of the original cereal on a supermarket shelf.

He makes several references to critical theorists like Derrida and Baudrillard as sources of inspiration but acknowledges that he doesn’t take them too seriously, merely using them as starting points for ideas that he incorporates into artworks.  Does the viewer also need the same kind of education in theory to understand much of contemporary art? ‘No, not necessarily, if the work needs theory from outset then there’s a problem. But if it succeeds then an artwork can sit on a pile of theory without there being a problem. Peter Doig makes good eye candy, it’s great but if you discover there are ideas behind it, what’s wrong with that? The Desmoisselles d’Avignon by Picasso is so brilliant because his process was so random. Most art arrives out of random processes. This is what artists are supposed to do. Picasso creates a picture like a poster, addressing life, death and sex and he needs ambiguity otherwise it becomes like propaganda. Popular culture doesn’t have ambiguity. That’s why I failed as a commercial artist. You’re supposed to feed people a message.’

Possibly breaking the conventions on good journalism, I ask if I could buy a painting. I point enthusiastically to his latest project, an unfinished double panel painting on which the word ‘Gene’ is spelled out in a confectionary colours and bubbles. Gene Clark from the Byrds is placed inexplicably opposite a dinner party hosted by the German revolutionary, Rosa Luxembourg. Chasson starts to shift in his seat and look uneasy for the first time. He doesn’t want to disappoint me. ‘Right now, I need it for some new exhibition proposals. I will keep you in mind.’ I’ve introduced the subject of value into Chasson’s sanctuary, the place where he finds his ‘zone’. Gradually the tension dispels as he shows me other examples of his work in the studio. If paintings don’t sell, he will simply paint over it. Again, it seems rather defiant and practical at the same time.

Before I leave, he offers me shortbread from an unopened packet on the table. ‘I bought it especially for you,’ he says with a smile as I hold the cellophane wrap and feel the sticks inside. I hesitate as I explain that I’ve given up eating wheat but relent to avoid appearing faddish or churlish. Tentatively, I snap off a piece to nibble. He smiles solicitously, eager that I should enjoy myself. I feel naughty breaking the discipline of my diet but fully appreciate the sweet, buttery biscuit. Amir Chasson seems to make breaking rules rewarding and even necessary.

'New Order: British Art Today' runs until January 16, 2014 at the Saatchi Gallery, London.