Rail: How does this intense layering process, along with your reflections on color and materiality, relate to Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting?<\/p>\n
Chisom: I start typically with an unstretched canvas that\u2019s stapled to the wall and then thin acrylic paint down to a watery consistency. The initial layers of paint application involve a lot of intensive staining and soaking. Eventually the surface becomes semi sealed after about fifteen or so layers of successive color. I start applying thick layers of paint irregularly. I sand a lot as well. I love the surprises you get when you unearth color buried in five layers of paint. I\u2019m usually alternating various kinds of really intense application methods. It\u2019s really quite physically exhausting if I\u2019m being honest. But I get completely immersed. I often experiment with the surface and priming. One painting in this exhibition is paper mounted on canvas. I decided to paint that one in oil because I knew materially the process would take me for a ride. Many large and small paintings in the show are also on burlap mounted on panel. They\u2019re like slabs of paint. I absolutely love to paint on surfaces that fight back. I can\u2019t really explain it but it makes me feel alive.<\/p>\n
Abstract Expressionism was a rupture in painting history. It was a rupture in what one means when they discuss the internal logic and inner necessity of a painting. The use of industrial paints and materials and the subsequent innovations in method changed everything. To be specific, for me it\u2019s particularly Color Field painting\u2014the logic of bands of densely saturated vibrating color, with negotiated edges, lined up against one another. When I start a painting, those are always the very first decisions I make. Yet I understand myself as a pictorial painter. I paint figures, figures displaced by landscapes, ruins, animals, architecture, interiors, etc. However, I paint these subjects with the material practices of Color Field abstraction smuggled in and metabolized. I think about the exact ways paint disperses\u2014drips, sprays, splatters, or layers\u2014when one introduces a material that is corrosive to its binder, or when one introduces surfactants to it. One of my main prohibitions in the studio is the mode of painting via rendering. I don\u2019t even use certain brushes because they\u2019re too small. In some ways, the instincts of abstract painting contaminate the sensibilities in pictorial painting. In abstract painting, one is working with a reduced syntax of sorts. A brush stroke can be a foot wide and run in an undulating horizontal direction for close to four feet. Prior to this point, I think it\u2019s fair to say that the internal logic of a painting could gesture towards a solution where the bottom section of a painting should be filled with a rug, or ceramic tile floors, or something descriptive such as grass. Yet I think we all intuitively know by this point that it could simply be a plane of semi-opaque color that occupies this portion of the painting, or, if you lose your nerve, perhaps a solid color with a shadow as a subtle temperature shift there. You cannot go back to painting trees without going through Franz Kline, you cannot paint rock formations without seeing Clyfford Still. Before you see the landscape, Mark Rothko already sees you in it. You\u2019re always passing through that history when returning to representation. Yet I don\u2019t want to give the impression that I\u2019m simply preaching some kind of self hatred for figurative painting, or an elevation or an apologetics for abstraction, when pure abstraction has its own particular limitations. These instincts of mine come from a really naive origin. A misunderstanding, actually. When I was very young, I basically believed that Abstract Expressionism was the dark ages. I literally thought that painting\u2019s goal was to be as pictorially convincing as possible, until I was probably fourteen. Since Abstract Expressionism came chronologically later than Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and Expressionism, I thought of it as basically a regression at the time. I thought that Ab Ex painters had literally forgotten how to paint. This misunderstanding meant that I thought the intention of a Rothko painting was to be an inhabitable space. I thought that this inhabitable space Rothko was aiming for could be fog, water, heaven, or a cloud, but he just sort of fumbled the execution along the way. It\u2019s really funny, but after spending a few years looking at Abstract Expressionist paintings that way, and not being able to figure out why painters suddenly sucked at academic drawing, I just intuitively realized that technically learning to draw and render wasn\u2019t really that hard to do. Of all things in an art education, it\u2019s actually the most teachable skill if you\u2019re committed and can let go of your ego. I\u2019m not diminishing technique, I\u2019m just saying that these realizations made me question the premise my teenager brain was working from. I just had these realizations. And so after a while I was just like, \u201cMaybe Still and Rothko aren\u2019t dumb. Maybe they had a different intent with painting altogether.\u201d So anyhow, I went to art school and in my final year at Cooper Union, I began to get into the idea of misunderstandings as a strategy for painting. Like mishearing, misreading, or misseeing. It\u2019s been over ten years, but I remember once I was turning around, and probably really exhausted, but for a second a man in front of me looked like his features had all been smeared out. That moment of misseeing has really stuck with me to this day. I think misunderstandings are really genuine experiences. We\u2019re too quick to discard and leave them unexamined, when actually, it\u2019s how we break out of reality. When your perception isn\u2019t lining up to reality, it says something that\u2019s mostly true about yourself. I mean, I guess that thought is only profound if you\u2019ve never gone to therapy and aren\u2019t aware of your insecurities. So suffice to say that thought was super profound to me when I was in college. [Laughter]. At the time, I had this idea that Color Field has this potential as an inhabitable space. I also saw Katherine Bradford\u2019s 2016 show at Canada Gallery, Fear of Waves, which really solidified my convictions around this. I\u2019ve talked to her about this, so I know she thinks the same way. So I took that idea really seriously. At first I treated it as this shallow landscape or fog, then the space became a primordial abyss that figures emerged from. Eventually I was negotiating horizontal bands of color like they were landscapes and using colors that made it feel like the figure was being struck by lightning or a wormhole was opening up in some corner of the painting. To this day, I operate from the premise that Color Field abstraction can be misunderstood as an inhabitable space.<\/p>\n
Rail: I\u2019d like to focus a bit more on your current show. There are noticeably more figures in these new paintings than usual. I\u2019m wondering why that is.<\/p>\n
Chisom: It partly just happened through what I was drawn to, the photography, illustration, film stills and other references I was working from. In the past I was really drawn to making and viewing paintings with lone isolated figures in them. I really liked paintings where there would be maybe a single displaced figure in a landscape that dwarfed the figure in scale. I thought, in this painfully sincere way, that being physically isolated was probably the loneliest thing ever. The paintings had this intensity that I thought I couldn\u2019t get with crowds of figures. I\u2019ve since learned that it\u2019s actually really possible, especially in our current social reality, to be lonelier than ever even in a crowd. Alienation doesn\u2019t have much to do with lacking access to the other, but not being present to the other or even to the self. So aesthetically I was open to crowds this time around. I also moved to London and spent a ton of time on my own working and processing life, and I developed a different relationship to my solo time. That shift in environment definitely affected the images I pulled from. I can\u2019t even say how fully, it isn\u2019t intelligible to me in the here and now, but maybe if I look back and reflect it\u2019ll be obvious. I think the shift to multiple figures reflects a shift from mythological, singular, larger-than-life figures, to a collection of figures who individually lack aura\u2014the soldiers as a unit, as the engine of ideology. Their identity is contingent on each other, like a pack of subordinate animals.<\/p>\n
Rail: I also thought this shift might have to do with an increased interest in theatricality. You mentioned recently that you\u2019ve been going to the theater a lot. Did those experiences inspire this kind of composition?<\/p>\n
Chisom: Yeah, definitely. That\u2019s really funny. It\u2019s sort of obvious, but yeah when I got to London I just decided to go see some theater. It\u2019s really not a passive experience. How you set your attention in theater affects your viewing experience in a very different way than how your attention functions in cinema. For example with opera, you make the choice to primarily engage with the content of dialogue and lyrics, or you just stop trying to follow it, you lean in, and just let the whole experience wash over you. In plays there\u2019s often multiple actions happening at the same time. It usually takes a couple of seconds for your eyes and mind to register that something is happening in the corner of your line of sight. Then when you shift your focus to that thing, a new action happens at another part of the stage, or the light shifts, or someone enters, or something else happens. They\u2019re obviously working with some major limits. You couldn\u2019t adapt a Michael Bay film to theater. But within what they can do, they have a way of mining even the tiniest actions and punctuating them. So yeah, I\u2019ve been going to the theater a lot here, and I\u2019m really drawn to its limits\u2014spatial limits, perceptual limits, how the viewer is positioned. That logic carries into painting. The majority of the compositions in my show with Matthew Brown are deliberately structured like staged theatrical spaces, with lighting and arrangement influenced by the stage. There\u2019s some play between the landscape feeling like a projected image behind figures, or dramatic lighting, and some play between interior and exterior. I\u2019m really inspired as well by the endless number of painters who have engaged with theater in various ways across the tradition of painting up until this day. Hopefully down the line I\u2019d actually get into some actual scenic painting.<\/p>\n
Rail: The titles of your works are famously long and absurd. For instance, The Historical Reenactment of The Empire’s Counterattack on The Monstrous Races, Restaged as a Minstrel Comedy, and The Ironclad and its Virginia Bluejackets Pulled Toward the Point of Extinction, A Minute of Latitude at a Time (both 2026). Can you tell us what you are trying to achieve with these?<\/p>\n
Chisom: The titles extend the work\u2014they create continuity across paintings. They accumulate detail but end up producing opacity rather than clarity. There\u2019s this bureaucratic, pseudo-explanatory voice that doesn\u2019t actually explain anything, so you\u2019re left with way more questions in the end. Although, I\u2019ve gone through tragic lengths to make sure that the immediate narratives in the paintings, as opaque as they are, are always internally consistent. Some psychopathic art historian could actually reconstruct the historical timeline from them if they tried. There\u2019s contradictions but not accidental contradictions. What I mean by saying that there are no \u201caccidental contradictions\u201d in the titling (aside from that probably turning out to be the cockiest and most false thing I\u2019ll ever put into print) is that I recognize after the fact that certain contradictions in titles do occur that contradict what\u2019s being described sometimes or contradict events in other paintings. But I\u2019ll just leave them most of the time because the contradictions are generative.<\/p>\n
Rail: I feel like the titles perfectly capture this contrast between humor and seriousness in your work. In a way, it reflects you as a person\u2014you are incredibly funny, but you can also be dead serious with the heavy facts you bring up. How do you balance those two elements in your paintings, allowing them to be funny, but also very serious, and at times, almost daunting and eerie?<\/p>\n
Chisom: Hey, you know, in your draft question, you said I was one of the funniest people you know, not just \u201cincredibly funny\u201d! This is such a demotion! [Laughter] To be honest, in my head I have the most serious thoughts like ever all the time. Much more serious than anything I\u2019ve said here today. I would be pretty embarrassed if someone could read my mind. But then when I\u2019m in a shitty mood, my thoughts in my head are actually pretty funny. In real time I don\u2019t appreciate those thoughts as being funny because I\u2019m just reacting. But when I lift myself out of that mood, I can look back and laugh at the unhinged, neurotic, or petty thoughts I had. The funniest paintings ever are all from the early renaissance, and in the same image they\u2019re incredibly metal as well. I\u2019ve read enough history to understand that\u2014while our circumstances, environment, and relationship to technology make us people who are particular to certain time periods\u2014we\u2019re driven by the same combination of instincts. So my gut tells me that the painters who produced those late medieval and early Renaissance Christian paintings were experiencing and recording all kinds of moods all at once, including humor. Painting is kind of by default cooking with bad ingredients when it comes to trying to be funny. Although painting is quite funny when it flirts with intention or awareness, it\u2019s not really certain if the painter or institution presenting the painting is in on it. Probably the funniest painting of the decade is the monkey Jesus painting that was badly restored, for example. The recent painting of King Charles III is funny as shit as well because of the over the top fiery blood. I mean, explaining humor is a lost cause. You can\u2019t account for something that happens physiologically by engaging the part of your brain that appreciates logic. Explaining a dream is like that as well\u2014you sort of just have to be there. We definitely live in an era where people are trying to perfect tonal consistency. I don\u2019t really buy into that project. It was tough sitting through three hours of that Robert Pattinson Batman movie because it\u2019s just raining nonstop, the funeral march theme is constantly drumming, or if not that then Ave Maria is playing repeatedly, and the whole movie is just really visually dark and cold. I liked the movie, by the way, I just wouldn\u2019t watch it again on purpose for the rest of my life. I don\u2019t want that for my own work. I don\u2019t want a single mood. There\u2019s a multiplicity\u2014tragedy, comedy, something eerie, even tender. The most serious things can become funny, and that tension is part of the experience.<\/p>\n
Rail: For my last question, I want to bring things back to the present. Although your work draws so heavily on history, I\u2019m curious about its relevance today. With so many wars and crises currently happening, how do you approach making art\u2014and specifically making pictures\u2014that speak to the reality of conflict today?<\/p>\n
Chisom: I think conflict is identical to society\u2014there\u2019s no final resolution to contradiction. It\u2019s constitutive. That might sound pessimistic, but it isn\u2019t. I don\u2019t want to be that guy who\u2019s like, \u201cWhat do you mean by \u2018relevance today\u2019?\u201d But there\u2019s no such thing as pure presence, as a pure and fully intelligible \u201ctoday,\u201d and therefore no way to determine what\u2019s most relevant to today until years later. The present only looks like a checklist of topical trends when it mistakes its own limits for truth. The past and future both leave a portion of their residue in the present. All the present ever does, haunted by what refuses to die, and what\u2019s not yet born, is make the past itself more intelligible. This is how I think of responsibility\u2014as an obligation to not just the present, but to the dead and the unborn. I\u2019m not prescribing that you should or shouldn\u2019t care for the dead or the unborn, by the way. The internet has made it clear by now that you\u2019re free to believe basically whatever you\u2019d like to. It\u2019s your life and what you believe is between you and God. I am just speaking to how I see the world. The present shapes both past and future and it is shaped by both. To end on a really serious note, my life is the consequence of people who fought for freedoms that they would never achieve for themselves. The politics of climate science, for example, are incoherent without a similar responsibility to the unborn. That is why I emphasize history so much, and why I project a world into the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rail: How does this intense layering process, along with your reflections on color and materiality, relate to Abstract…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":213071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-213070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}