Rail: Right. But yeah, it seems to be this search for forcing yourself to be totally present within the act of painting, and the search for what artifice or prompt lets you set the stage for that, and once its built, you have to be totally in it, undistracted, to find the event. You don’t give yourself a lot of time to solve the new problem.
Madani: I love the work that feels as in flux in front of everybody else as it does in front of me. It still has that sense of potentiality when someone else is in front of it.
Rail: Yes. I feel like that gives language to one of the things that it takes some time to realize as a painter. If a painting feels too concluded or contrived—if it feels like at a certain point it’s just sort of filling in the blanks—you end up with something that is dead on arrival, or decorative. A painting needs to have that sense that it could have gone a number of different ways, and it’s best when it still feels like it can.
Madani: Works which achieve or aim for a certain kind of resolution can feel closed and lack mystery—you look at them from the outside.
Rail: Well, as a viewer, when I’m not painting, I similarly enjoy when you can see the painter’s attention. There are some painters that I will see at the Met that just can’t be bothered to finish the bottom of the painting on some of those big history paintings. And for some of those big, twelve-foot-tall paintings, you can see the artist go “Ugh, that’s way down there,” or “I don’t want to get back up on the ladder again.” And it’s the eye thinking and at work with a physical body that is always finding its limits.
Madani: This reminds me of my enjoyment at seeing Leonardo da Vinci’s big commissions that were never finished. It seems he only had the interest to go as far as he did; the rest didn’t matter for him. He couldn’t be bothered “filling in,” as you say, those half-finished works, which also conditioned our eye to further modernism. You know, I think that’s where I disagreed also with Deleuze’s suggestion that Michelangelo is the beginning of modern painters, because da Vinci simply not finishing the commissions suggests as much autonomy of choice.
Rail: So true. That’s so true. And that’s Henry James: art as a vehicle for rendering consciousness, which is unpresentable. We convey what it is that we were trying to figure out, and equally what doesn’t matter. At the last big Kippenberger show at Skarstedt Gallery, you could see all of these textures from paintings underneath the paintings. You could see like a tree in texture or the beginning of a representational shape, and it has nothing to do with the final painting, but he wouldn’t sand those early decisions down. Every painting reminds you of all of its forking paths. But again, that’s the erotics or poetics that painting can create. There’s the famous Donna Haraway thing that humor is always serious, and Lauren Berlant talking about how comedy is a way of kind of revealing who’s in, who’s out, and all those things. And it’s an erotics of opposition, of finding the boundary line—finding what can and can’t be transgressed.
I feel like you use painting in a similar way, and it’s also in how you use humor, whether it’s the crying monuments or the Shit Mom, or working through subjects of opposition towards a kind of sympathy. Is there something oppositional that you’re working against within painting right now? Going back to Bacon hating Hockney for what Hockney represented—is there a type of painting or subject that you see yourself working against?
Madani: So many things: pushing against convention, taste, trends, misogyny, rigid self-definitions, cancel culture, depression, certainty. I don’t know if this answers any of your questions, but I’ve been reading Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, and the book has a great foreword by Adam Phillips. The very first page of his foreword talks about Barthes’s idea of becoming a personality when you write an autobiography, and the possibility of shifting that personality—the permission that is given for redefining it over and over.
Rail: Well, since you brought up Adam Phillips, it’s also that heterodoxy that you allow yourself in your work. It makes me think of some of the psychoanalysis that reconsiders Sigmund Freud. As opposed to thinking of things as phases, stages, phobias, and types, which are very fixed structural things, you have someone like Melanie Klein talking about how the ego takes positions against different objects, so it’s like we can kind of adopt the positionality of a paranoid in this object, but then cast that position aside when confronting a different topic.
Madani: By the way, I have to admit: no one has described Melanie Klein versus Freud as distinctly different positions this well to me. [Laughter] She’s probably closer to Arthur Schopenhauer in terms of construction of the subject/object relationship. He had a profound effect on my relationship to painting in my twenties.
Rail: How did that take form within the paintings? That’s so interesting. Maybe that’s what I’m picking up on as a comment on painting as a position of looking.
Madani: I was a student, but it expanded my sense of how a painting can operate, in terms of both one’s intentions making it and an audience experiencing it.
Rail: Along with opposition, I wonder if there are rules you have for yourself as a painter.
Madani: Yeah, the painting has to be alive. It has to excite me. Dead paintings are okay, too—they could still be a step toward something.
Rail: Could you describe a dead painting?
Madani: Yeah, the very first “Shit” paintings. They were all dead. But they were promising something that I’m getting closer to. They might not seem that way, but they were so shy. I mean, the very first one is actually before San Antonio, and this guy was sitting on a chair, and he’s opening up his belly button and it’s an inverse anus, and this piece of poo is coming out of his belly button, and it’s not even brown. I was so shy to paint it. It’s the same color as the figure. It’s barely a poo, you know, but it was exciting because it’s a stepping stone.
Rail: I like how all of your characters go through these scenarios of self too. They’re never one-dimensional. They’ll go from expressing boredom and pacing around to then experiencing these violent episodes, and then feeling some kind of shame or shyness again. They often get into repetitive cycles. There’s an elasticity that you’re also interested in, or a scenario of self that I think is unfortunately kind of rare. There seems to be more of an interest in a singular idea of self in a lot of the work being made right now.
Madani: A kind of conservatism comes in when you want to adamantly defend yourself or your position in society. Many artists are wanting to do work that is about, let’s say, empathy or identity or elevating the social position of a group that they represent. With that comes the fear of taking a wrong step—the burden of sincerity. All this takes away from the state of mind that can play without gravity.
Rail: I like that. “Playing without gravity.” I think that’s one of our current regimes of truth, to reference Michel Foucault: looking for good and bad, or replacing ambivalence and irony and difficulty and complexity with confessionals. I feel like it’s important to try to impart an awareness that events shape us, context shapes us, crowds shape us, our environment shapes us, and the desire to look for things that are inherently good or inherently bad is too easy. It’s looking to offload the challenge of sitting with all of the issues we are facing. The art world in some ways has arrived back at an almost Hays Code-era Hollywood.
Madani: This is interesting, because why this is happening is because of the psychological state of the world: apprehension. There is, as you say, a reason for things, right? And the need for a simplified set of facts is because of the sense of bombardment or the risk of getting it wrong. So there is no avant-garde; we don’t have an appetite, or an appetite to risk it. We are in the rerun section. We want to know what we’re going to see. We don’t want any surprises. Let’s watch episodes of Friends over and over and over because we’re afraid.
And I’m much more interested to see why, and then what? It’s always good to check in and see what is motivating you toward an action. It’s a good place to start.
Rail: This is the tricky thing. Pierre Bourdieu referred to what we would call the avant-garde as “bourgeois art,” because the majority of people oftentimes won’t have the time for complexity, abstraction, poetics. It’s like the art that reaches the masses is Netflix. It is the mural. It is the meme, the quick and legible and compressed thing.
Madani: That mural look is now all over the art world. Go to a community center and see the kind of paintings that a person who wants to start painting paints, and then go to Frieze New York: you could take some photos, and nobody would know the difference.
Rail: Yes, and I think this draws the public out of the public and into the private institution, which tries to perform as a new kind of public space. Museums and institutions have shifted to a role of mimicking and reflecting our desires and utopias back to us, and with it the tolerable forms of critique that we are allowed to engage in. The institution is always alluring because it’s always promising that it can adapt to what we dream it to be. There’s some connection to AI and language models with that, of returning our language and our dreams and our images back to us, but now with the mystifying power of the empire condoning it. There’s something always sadistic to mimicry. Its guise takes the form of joke, but there’s violence just behind it.