ALEXANDER ROSS | THE BROOKLYN RAIL

Rail: How do you mean taboo?

Ross: Taboo meaning that it’s not always easy to directly touch on these things: there’s a certain kind of irony or borrowing on a meta-level incorporating this imagery, which is all around us and increasingly infiltrating everyone’s lives and minds. It has been for a while, but I think you need to go somewhere new. What have I never seen before, or seen less of in painting?

Rail: When you say something new and meta that’s all around us, looking at children’s books, do you mean the sense of playfulness? Not overtly joyful, but playful? Do you think that’s kind of taboo in contemporary painting and contemporary art?

Ross: It goes in trends. There certainly are artists who are still playful and who are viable, but there are megatrends, there’s a sort of cool abstraction right now and who knows how long that’ll last. If everyone’s being ironic, then being earnest can be interesting. I’m sort of following my own whims and a lot of times it’s not deeply thought about until later. I’ve recently been looking at lots of illustration and album covers, sneaker tread patterns, anything that’s out there, and it’s all filtering through. The next thing I know, I’m messing around with the clay and exploring possibilities, and all of sudden things start suggesting themselves and I just go with it. And maybe even have a chuckle; fantasy mountaintops, that’s really absurd, but they’re fun at the same time.

Rail: What did you find so attractive about the vagueness? The vagueness of scale? The impossibility of knowing?

Ross: With ambiguity, the viewer participates more, projecting their own meanings. Early on, my project felt a little risky, because it’s a world unto itself; green, monstrous, the oddness of the whole program—I would describe it as a little bit hermetic. So I wanted to allow breathing room for the ideas to be understood in many different ways. 

Anytime you get literal you shut down avenues of interpretation, especially if you give titles and things like that, then suddenly it’s not open-ended, it’s now a cucumber. It becomes more illustrative. I was employing a highly illustrative or photorealistic style, which traditionally showed you a world that you understood. Applying that to something abstract was really interesting, and still is, and then having it be hyper-depictive—as depictive as you can make it with all the shining bits and dark points and at the same time having it be unknowable. It seemed poignant and definitely worth exploring.

Rail: I wanted to ask you about Ernst because you’ve talked about Ernst in the past. For me, you share a lot of thought processes with him. I was thinking about the piece in the Venice Guggenheim, the “Anti-Pope.” It presents a group of objects and figures in a landscape, but within those figures there are also these abstract processes forming the figures. Within your practice, what has been your relationship with Ernst? What are some other painters that have influenced you?

Ross: Ernst is one of, if not my all-time favorite painter. I’ve been looking at him since I was a teenager. What I love about him is his unrelenting exploration and inventiveness over many different types of work: the collages, the drawings, different kinds of painting and techniques: an outrageously great discoverer, craftsman, and visual thinker. I really like his quiet, steady, creative pace. It’s solid, you can’t argue with it. There’s certainly a lot of thinking going on, but I would say he’s a poetic, visual thinker over a hardcore conceptual thinker. Another artist I was influenced by early on was Giorgio Morandi, where there’s this straightforward still life with dead space, highly focused-upon in a kind of dead background. That really appealed to me, as well as the handling of paint; a willingness to squidge it there in front of you and make an object. So there’s definitely a still life approach with my work. And John Currin’s early paintings were an influence on me in that he showed how a story or theme could drive a whole body of work.

Rail: Some painters I’ve talked to use photorealistic processes but say they are not photorealists. Do you consider yourself a photorealist?

Ross: I see myself as a post-modernist. I take lots of different styles and revisit them. I’m purposely using photorealism.

Rail: And parts of your paintings are not photorealist either—the backgrounds are clearly hand drawn.

Ross: I enjoy mixing. There’s something about surrealism that I’m borrowing, I’m mixing that with photorealism. For a while I was borrowing the shaped canvases of the early ’60s and purposely taking that and shuffling it into the mix: what if you did photorealism and surrealism and shaped canvases? What could you do with that? Maybe there’s something new I can find. So, it just continues, I feel like I’m borrowing now from films, fairytales, or illustrations. What if I merged fairytales, or gargoyle and grotesque sculptures into my work? It’s a lot of borrowing and shuffling and reconstituting of past approaches.

I feel like we reached a certain point where everyone was assuming that there was this kind of linear unfolding of avant-garde art, in the way that each generation challenges the previous and gets its new thing and it goes in a straight line.  Suddenly everyone’s scratching their head in the 1980s with multiple “isms” happening all at the same time in the art world, and it never settles. Increasingly there are artists who just go back to a previous style. Painting in an old style and just doing new subject matter. It’s all over the place; a big messy tree with millions of branches and nothing is  taking the lead or setting any kind of standard. I think of what I’m doing as contemporary, just borrowing all of these styles. Everything’s mixed up and cut up. Each artist picks and chooses from a huge bouquet of possibilities and finds what’s interesting and employs them.

Rail: But you clearly are seduced by the propensities of the paint. Talk a bit about your relationship with oil paint, I’m very curious.

Ross: I have always found painting to be much harder than drawing. This brings me back to Morandi, there’s something of the love of paint itself and letting it be itself. I made a decision early on to isolate the different components of painting: like the design and the subject matter, which I do all ahead of time, making the clay, I make a mock-up and finalize the image I want to paint. Then—I know Lichtenstein worked this way—once you have the final design and the mock-up, the next stage is execution. For me, breaking it down like that, having an execution stage as a separate component totally freed me up to enjoy painting itself and how to apply it, because I already had a map of where I was going. That’s how the color bandings came about. I wasn’t thinking about the compositions anymore, I had already finished that. I was just executing the image. I still like paint and I’m not trying to erase my hand. I love the hand of a painter, I love when it’s visible. Just putting the brush down and letting the shaky stroke be kind of wobbly at the edge. I think I still come across as being pretty tight, especially from a distance, but if you get up close to my paintings, I’m definitely having fun moving the paint around. I’m always thinking about that feeling I get when I look up close at a Morandi, or I remember looking at messy painters like Frank Auerbach. I love the look of squishy paint.

Rail: Are you actively interested in contemporary advancements in science? There’s a photograph of your studio in the back of this catalogue from 2011 and there is actually a microscope.

Ross: Yes, there is a microscope. It’s called an inspection scope. You don’t use it for slides. You put objects under it—it’s big enough you can put your hand under it. It’s an absolutely fascinating thing to play with. You can take it outside and sit in the grass and start putting insects and things under it. Because it’s in stereo, it really gives you the volumetric feel of what you’re looking at. Science is amazing on so many levels, and because it’s verifiable and, in theory, real—as close to reality as we can get anyway. The strangest world is the real world.

Rail: Do you feel that your paintings get a certain conceptual mileage from hitching their wagon to the fact that science is real. Because people then look at yours and say, “These must reference something.” There’s something in the human mind that then latches on to the recognizability of what you’re doing.

Ross: Yeah, I’m thinking that way anyway. For example, I was reading about, and it still hasn’t really happened, but there’s supposedly a coming biological revolution and people who talk about it say it’s going to make this current computer revolution look like nothing because we’re about to be able to manipulate organisms profoundly to our advantage. We now can grow human body parts and bone and have them implanted. But this indicates that the future, if we survive long enough, will have all kinds of organisms that we grow and create ourselves. So part of my thing is, what would those organisms look like if we lived in a world, say 200 years from now, where you have pets that were grown in a laboratory? Maybe they would be green and have chlorophyll in them. So what kind of paintings would you want on your wall in that kind of home? In the future, you probably would want something graphic from the past, like one of my paintings. [Laughter.] I’m projecting—this stuff will make sense in 200 years from now. I’m being tongue-and-cheek a little bit, but it’s a fun fantasy. It helps me generate ideas and think about why I am making this work and why it looks this way. I’m attempting to jumpstart the future in some way, at least that has been one of my operating motivators.