Surface Tension

Fortunately, the idea of painting from photographs is no longer new. Against all expectation it has been with us long enough to have become a genre in its own right. Far from marking the beginning of the end for painting, this dialogue with photography is turning out to be merely the end of a beginning. And where thirty years ago it seemed like a wild endgame, photo-painting is now one of the most important means we have to reflect on contemporary life and the image world. We see this in the way artists such as Roland Hicks go about making pictures today. And we see it in the way viewers go about looking at them.

Although they seem at first like opposites, photo-painting and abstract painting share an attitude to surface. They produce an all-over character in the image. In abstraction it is there in the flatness of the canvas. For photo-painting it derives from the all-over democracy of the camera image. Photo-painting incorporates photography’s own romance with surfaces. There is nothing more photogenic than the chaotic and tactile character of the everyday world. Hicks knows this well. Be it dry or wet, industrial or organic, photography transforms the touchable into the visual. In this it makes the world present and remote at the same time. Photo-painting is photography remade as a tactile image, not in the sense that the painted surface is always irregular, but in the sense that it is a touched surface. Photo-painting gives us ways to look at and to grasp photography that are unavailable to photography itself. It gives us ways to look at what photography has done to our vision and to grasp how it shapes our understanding of the world. It lets us view it from outside of its own glass bubble. If only for a brief moment.

Along with the skull and the flickering candle the liquid bubble completes painting’s little set of memento mori. One solid, one gas and one liquid, they are the eternal motifs of the fragility of life. Certainly they are literal embodiments of time and the ephemeral, but just as importantly they are beautiful things that are tricky to paint well. The liquid geometry of the bubble is perfect. It challenges the skill of the painter. More than that it is the living labour of its translation onto canvas that really allows the bubble to transcend and perhaps aspire to allegory. And yet such allegory hardly seems directly available to painting these days. It isn’t available to the simple camera image either. The act of photography is really as transient, and casual as the object itself and so it fails to elevate it. The camera renders the bubble fascinating but in the end profane and banal. Hicks seems to tell us that it might only be through the painting of a photograph of a bubble that it might become more than it really is. And that painting and photography might become more than they really are too. If only for a brief moment.

We might think of Nothing Can Stop Us Now is a set of ‘head and shoulders’ portraits. There they are, ten souls displaying their family resemblance. But is it not also a set of still life studies, informal objects presented for our contemplation? Hicks blends a high genre and a low genre. More than that he lets us see that the portrait and the still life are not the sole preserve of painting. They now belong equally to photography, and thus to the world beyond art. The portrait photo has its deepest roots in the artless mug shot, and the still life photo is still hard evidence of the material world. As portraits Hicks’ images a rogues’ gallery of likenesses. As still lifes their mood is thoroughly factual, thoroughly forensic. This is art but it’s not arty.

There is subdued drama in Hicks’ unfolding of procedure. As with forensics, photo-painting involves turning up after the event and slowly piecing things together - tracing and retracing, without disturbing surfaces, looking for the symbolic detail to be transformed into a clue. In these fragmented and dissolute times, when we feel so often that we are living among the remnants of the past, the forensic has become our aesthetic of choice. It has moved out from the realm of photographic law to colonise cinema’s gaze, music production, literature, our speech, our sculpture and our painting.
What seems so beautifully, strangely realised in these images is a forensic tension between surfaces. The distance at which Hicks photographs the subject before his camera returns as the distance of his eye to his brush. Then it returns for us as the distance to which we are drawn before his canvas. But where the camera moved in to bring the object into focus, into evidence, we move in to the point at which the photo-like image dissolves into paint. Hicks is less a diligent photorealist than a photo-impressionist committed as much to the true abstractness of paint as to the truth of photography. The pleasures of these images are realised and released at this threshold. It is here that the bubble of dry illusion (and in this case the illusionist’s wet bubble), are pricked to leave us nothing but stains on canvas.
It might be tempting to read this series as some kind of conclusion. Hicks’ art has been heading towards this point for a number of years. Today a successful artwork is one in which questions are successfully posed, and where the manner of the posing produces its own version of the beautiful. That is to say it lays out what questions we should be looking to answer in the future. Looking at these images we might conclude that only painting will save us from photography. We might conclude also that only photography will save us from painting. These are the questions that Hicks poses beautifully. Nothing Can Stop Us Now.