by There is a kerfuffle in the Camden Art Center. The exhibition of the painter Richard Wrights will be opened shortly and the time is not on your side. Ten people are on the landing that the galleries open. Huge, elaborate glazed panels have just arrived, the metallic sections that form complicated geometric designs and they need to be installed. It is a relatively new descent for Wright, which contracts with craftsmen to work in glass. These panels must be aimed at the roof lanterns so that the light floods through them and throw a dance from pattern and shape onto the walls and floors.
Wright – Intensive, immensely big, quickly and quietly spoken – lets me know through his ironic air, knowing that he wishes you would just do it, and then the rest of the show can rise. In the galleries on both sides there are books that were placed on tables, some of which were partially pulled or painted, “illuminated”, as he says, and borrow the word medieval manuscripts. There are many drawings and paintings on the walls. Some are manufactured by immersing the pen of an old -fashioned cartographer (a kind of adhesive) before the entire surface is burned with gold leaf: the gold rods to the markings produced by the pen and the rest is shaken away so that a shimmering, fleeting drawing remains. In the main gallery, the scaffolding rises up and four people are arranged in perfect symmetry, two below, two above, black stars, diamonds, triangles and other shapes in a great design in the rear wall. The painters are Wright’s daughter and brother and two long -time assistants. He just climbed down to speak to me, his fingers are littered with disobedient black acrylic.
Since 2009, when he won the Turner Prize, Wright has mainly been known as an artist who produces incredibly labor-intensive murals, which either paints at the end of an exhibition or fade at their own pace. He painted a blanket in the queen house in Greenwich, a large staircase in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and folly in the Lismore Castle in Ireland. He also painted the most remarkable 47,000 stars on the ceiling of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, a reaction to the architecture of the building and its decorative motifs. Even if I allow the fact that he has assistants to help, I wonder how this extreme repetition has to feel psychologically. “Yes, it’s torture,” he says. “You ask yourself: ‘Why do you do that?’ I assume the answer would be: “Because this is the only way to do it.”
Wright – Up to a fairest recent move to Norfolk lived in Glasgow for many years – trained in Edinburgh in Edinburgh in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was a strange time to make painting, and it had stayed for a few decades: it was only about 10 years ago that the painting was not regularly declared dead. “When someone who is quite passionate about painting, it was difficult,” he says. “It is difficult to say:” Shit, I play the banjo, but everyone else plays guitar. “And then, in 1988, he stopped and gave up the painting as a whole.” It sounds somehow dramatic, “he says.” I think it was really obstacles to life: Relationship Breakdown, Studio Loss, Things that happened that made it very difficult. And I assume I was disappointed; Disappointed by painting a bad painting in another. “
He decided to train as a shield author. He also moved to Glasgow. Writing of signs turned out to be a turning point, a way of seeing everything differently. The type of painting in which he had trained was about touching the artist. But character painting meant the use of color “fatally”. The idea was to deliver the color, “almost as it looks in the can. To put one thing about another, that’s it.” He pulled things back to the basics. No more figuration. Painting became one thing – e.g. B. red color on a canvas. In the early nineties, he also started in Glasgow with wall painting. His scene at that time included artists such as Douglas Gordon and others who had come out of the Glasgow School of Art environmental sculpture program, who were thinking about their art as a specific answer to places and contexts. He found a groove.
Wright’s conversation is peppered with references to art history. He thinks and reads deeply and reads. There was a time between 2008 and 2011 when he painted 1,000 circles a day. Painting the letter O had been a large part of his tieder training. In Vasari’s life of the artists there is a story about which Wright speaks, in which the writer Giotto’s brilliance describes through his ability to pull a perfect circle. “This is enough and more than enough,” Giotto said. “I like the idea because it is a fact,” says Wright. “A circle is not the head or hand or an eye of a horse that could be said that it was well done, but Michelangelo was a little better. Everything you can say is: this is a circle. It is a perfect circle. I like the idea that the painting has a kind of objectivity to be somewhere between a sign and one thing.”
However, it is not just the fact of the circle, it is the fact to make the circle. “I don’t want to tell people how to live their lives,” he says, “but I think everyone should start their day with a drawing.” But not everyone has confidence or facility, I say and think guilty about my drawing -free life. “But that’s a kind of misunderstanding what is drawing,” he countered. “Everything it is to look.” He thinks that he draws as a kind of impulse that could be as simple as her wish to move her pepperpot from one point on the table to another. He tells a story that the American artist John Baldessari told in a work of art. “He describes that driving in La rolls backwards and forward on his dashboard with his pencil. One day he decided to take the pencil out of his car and to sharpen it. And he knew that this had something to do with art. And I think I have what I had to do for some reason. For some reason, he had to sharpen the pen.” I sharpened my pens yesterday, I tell Wright. “And did it feel good?” he asks. I say that, but I wanted to use it to write, not for drawing. Although I would like to be the person who drew every morning. “But it’s not that, isn’t it?” He says. “It’s a way of feeling about things.”
To make me understandable, he tells me a story about where everything came from. “It started for me: when I saw a Piero della Francesca. And I wanted one. I wanted one: and I could go home and do one. I had the impulse and the wish to feel The thing. “” “I think he tells him, so he is a painter and I am not the case that a piero does not have to do for me, and that’s true, and I agree with them,” he says. And that you are somehow between heaven and earth. ”He laughs to dispel the serious intensity of the thought, but no, I’m with him. Probably not that much. There is enough color here for a lifetime. “
• Richard Wright is located from April 16 to June 22nd in the Camden Art Center in London
