Jonathan Lasker

I met with Jonathan Lasker, controversial abstract artist at Timothy Gallery, Bond Street, to talk about his exhibition Studies for Paintings 1986-2006, that will be showing until the 16th June.

He arrives holding a take away cup of coffee and a warm smile. We sit down in the middle of the gallery and he questions me on my not-quite Red Neck look. He’s a short mature man with a charming bright nature, he’s polite and exudes an air of confidence as well as coming across as being humble. He loves London and feels very proud of his honorary title as a visiting professor at the London Institute. He says he’s very happy to be doing this show, “it’s a chance to do a small retrospective of the oil studies on paper that I do”. The show here in London is related to a show in Munich that will exhibit a retrospective of drawings from 1979 to 2007.

BCR: So how did you start this work?

JL: I think of it as being a continuous body of work that started in 1977. If you look at the early paintings from then you will see some things that will look somewhat different from what we have now. The basic yellowness of figure, ground, and line, are three consistent formal elements in the work and they’ve been a formal interplay since that time. You can see certain constituent aspects of the work that are constant from then till now.

It started as a response towards minimalism and the position that painting found itself in at the end of the 70s, which was a situation where on the one hand you had conceptual artists who opposed painting altogether and thought painting was thoroughly dead; and on the other the last really successful body of painters that almost declared they had ended painting. They painted the last possible most reduced painting you can make which would be a minimal painting, the flat surface. So to me as an artist was like how do you reinvest the picture plane with metaphor, maybe narrative or maybe not narrative, to talk about picture making and put it in the way that shows the consciousness of the elements of making a painting, and that’s how I began this body of work.

BCR: What made you change the colour structure over time?

JL: Initially there was always very strong background colouration and now the fundamental colour from which I’m starting tends to be white in the recent paintings for the most part. There is no programmatic reason for that, it just sort of slowly happens that way.
BCR: Do you think the reason you are turning towards white is to do with the fact that unconsciously you are turning towards a minimalist side of abstract after playing around for so many years?

JL: White is a traditional ground colour where you normally start a picture. My first paintings I started with a pattern painting in the background and then one day I decided to take these black and white drawings, these biomorphic shapes I was doing on newsprint paper. I was just playing with it, and I thought to myself what if I painted those shapes on top of these multicoloured pattern things, and make those the background and the white shapes would the foreground. I did that and then drew off register a black line into those forms, and that created a resonance with the figure and the ground and the drawing which became the body of work. One of the things that I thought I was doing that was the most important at that time was reversing the background as being relatively naked space and the foreground figures being active space. Because on those paintings the background was very active and the foreground was black and white, I thought that was kind of interesting initially and I started with that but then bit by bit I came full circle. Now the foreground figures are kind of discreet objects in relationship to the black and white background. Initially something I was very involved with, was trying to create a light, a resonance in the colours. I often tended towards complementary colours which were a little bit dull a little bit off, like a pink against a greyish green instead of a red and green which are two complementary colours, things like that, and they would generate an optical light which may be even related to impressionists colour systems.

BCR: Is there a symbolism behind your work?

JL: No, you can sort of say that these elements in my work, these gestures in the paintings break down into signs – you can say that. There are a lot of elements that are signs that we learn to know in abstract painting. But they are not quotes.

BCR: You said that you see your art as an image kit, can you explain what you mean by this.

JL: That was a little brief essay that I wrote for a book that came out on artists in the 80s that was called Beyond Boundaries. I was talking about how the paintings give you a lot of the elements of the picture like figure, background and they give you queues to spatial readings and you know these horizon lines in many of the paintings suggest a deep space, but doesn’t quite go in the way you normally go in. So you have all the components for construing an image in your mind, you have a kit, like an image kit. The idea is to make the viewer see him or herself looking at the picture, forming a picture. Because when we look at a picture we are always forming it in our minds, we are just looking at the flat marks on the canvas and not looking at the actual landscape. So these paintings are suppose to show people how they see a picture

BCR: So the viewer just looks at the work and constructs his own landscape?

JL: Yes. I think any abstract painting is dependent upon the viewer having certain amount of pre-knowledge of painting and the history of modern art. So you’re working with that basic acceptance. The average viewer will look at these pictures and not usually see a picture because they don’t see recognisable forms. But I think when I suggested to them that these lines are forms, they seem to go back in space. I start pointing that out to them, I think they see it, I think they read it very easily, sometimes, in most of the pictures. They can see a disjunction between the figure and the background, they can see forms that appear to be floating, they take this role response to the pictures in that way.

BCR: Someone in the New York Times said that you invented and refined the existing style of abstract painting.

JL: Well all I can say is that I think these pictures do not look like any other pictures that I know of. And people may do related work in some way but it just won’t look like this. It is peculiar for better or for worst.

I go on asking him how was his work received from the beginning, he pauses for a bit, looks up with his small dark eyes searching in his memory then turns back to me and tells me how the controversy started. He talks of two teachers he had at the California Institute of Arts that argued over their opposing opinions about his work. There was always support and antagonism. Lasker is a man that has always believed in himself and has gone forward no matter what.

BCR: Was it easy to get your first exhibition?

JL: After I finish in CalArts I went to San Francisco and I lived there for about a year and a half. When I showed the early paintings to the galleries there they didn’t know what to make of them. But when I went back to New York at the end of 79 people were interested and that’s how I eventually got shown. My first exhibition was in a not very well known gallery and I got a little attention. Then later I joined Tony Shafrazi when he opened his gallery in 1981. That was about 4 years after I started doing this works. I was in the opening show and it was a group exhibition. That show got a lot of attention but my work didn’t. That was just when Figuration Neo-expressionism was starting to happen, the other three artists were pushed into that construct and I was the abstract painter so people just didn’t know how to relate to my work at that time. Of all the shows I did that was the one that nobody seems to remember me from. There was so much attention to something else going on there, that I was kind of reprimand and disciplined. People see different things at different times in different ways, you come to learn that. There was a number of views where was very hard to show abstract painting, then around the 1984 I started to get some shows, and things started to get much better for my work in the following couple of years.

BCR: Nowadays you exhibit a lot around the world, how is your work received from place to place?

JL: I exhibit more in Europe than in America. I exhibit a lot in New York, I’ve done a couple of shows in Los Angeles and in Chicago but basically I show in New York or I show in Europe. There is a very similar reception in both sides of the Atlantic. I think Europe has been more consistently receptive towards abstract painting throughout my career, and just generally abstract painting. While America has been, perhaps, more influenced by different trends. At the moment they say that people are looking at abstraction again, but on the last 5 to 10 years there has been a low and the most prominent painters have been very figurative.

BCR: Is that response quite positive?

JL: It depends as you go from country to country. For some reason I am extremely well received in Northern Europe, in Scandinavia but also particularly in Germany. I did a retrospective in Spain at the Reina Sofia, Madrid, and then I travelled to Germany and the reviews were somewhat mixed in Spain but they were extremely positive in Germany. It just seemed to be that the temperament in Germany was a bit more open to the work, but also I think it was a bad moment. It was just after America had invaded Iraq, so there was a certain amount of anti-Americanism, and I think that was reflected in some of the hostility towards an American painter.

Jonathan Lasker goes to say that when he was still studying he was influenced in his work by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg’s way of thinking. His paintings and the mark his trying to make are very different, but their hands off approach and cruel relationship with gestural brush work is very similar. He feels quite connected in some ways to the dissonant off beat jazz of Felonious Monk. Lasker admires the work of young artist Katie Pratt who shared an exhibition with him at the John Hansard Gallery in Northampton. And though he hasn’t seen her paintings, he found her illustrations very interesting. He also finds the work of Fabian Marcaccio very exciting, but goes on to admit that unfortunately he doesn’t get to see as much art as he would like to.
I thank him for the interview, and we carry on talking freely about our perceptions of art in general. And this is when with his he tells me that he finds that art is necessary for him as an artist but does not believe that art is necessary. I don’t agree with him to start off with so I push for an explanation.

JL: We can live, eat and sleep and exist very easily without art. I think that art is not necessary, but it is absolutely of high value. Like civilization it’s not necessary but it’s a great guiding social force. Just as civilization is valuable so is art. You would be really quite outstanded by how completely vacant of art some people are. There are those who are very martial in their view of life, particularly in more primitive societies which are constantly in a condition of combat, art falls away. Like after September 11 in New York, I was living there, there was a lot of rubble down town. You had to question yourself – were you necessary? But yes, I went into the studio and I definitely felt that my life was of high value and what I was doing was of high value. When I say value I am talking about things that elevate the spirit and you can have a life that is a very impoverished life without art, but it is that, it’s an enrichment and so it’s an enrichment that does facilitate our understanding and so it is very important.

I believe it has a compelling value in society, but when you look at the United States of America there is sometimes a true antagonism against art. So you do start to question – what is the value? And you feel like you have a part of the society which is almost a little bit antagonist towards what you are doing. So you think more thoroughly and you think is it really necessary? What is its value? How do you make a compelling case for what it is it you do? Maybe I think a little more analytically about that because sometimes in America is not a pure given that art is accepted as being necessary. European societies tend to be much more supportive of art; you see it in the national budgets. I think of this as coming from that opposition that you feel about art in America.

Everyone has something on the wall, whether they want to go into questioning what a picture is and think in that nature is another matter. But the compulsion to look at a picture is very powerful and that’s the mechanism that I am dealing with in these pictures. The urge to see a picture. It was written once that these pictures ask the same question of the viewer that the viewer asks of abstract paintings. The average member of the public will say of an abstract painting what’s that supposed to be. And these pictures are trying to ask that back, so they can play with that mechanism.

For BigCityRedneck.co.uk