On the occasion of Jarvis Boylands's solo exhibition Lucky Stars (4 November-17 December 2022) at MAMOTH, we are delighted to share an exhibition tour video accompanied by a conversation between the artist and writer Ade J. Omotosho in the exhibition space.
Ade J. Omotosho [A]: So, self-portraiture has always been a part of your work and this work is really special because you've made it as a kind of homage to a 1975 painting by Barkley Hendricks, who, of course, is such an important forebear for many Black figurative painters. What drew you to the painting?
Jarvis Boyland [J]: Yeah, I don’t remember the first time I saw that painting, but I do remember being struck by it, and it kind of became a significant work in terms of a particular conjuring that Barkley’s painting has. It’s really the intensity of the reds, both in the field of colour of the background, but also of the suit. A lot of my practice involves collecting things, including clothing. I came across this suit, which is almost an exact replica of the Barkley suit from that painting, and I just had to have it in. I owned it for a few years before it became clear to me how to use it as a sort of prop or a costume in this work. The idea of the character, I think, began with the Fool’s Errand [2021]painting and just thinking about the burden of representation and visibility in the portrait, the self-portrait, and so on. So in this painting I was thinking about the ways that the figures in Barkley’s paintings tell any number of stories and how those stories are so much shaped by the garments or the apparel within them.
A: Did it feel like you were almost situating yourself within a lineage in making the homage and thinking about the history of Black portraiture from Barkley to yourself?
J: That’s complicated. I think it’s important that we name Barkley, and it’s important that I’m thinking about my work within that lineage and perhaps responding to it in some aspects. But inserting myself feels presumptuous. I think I’m more interested in the likelihood or the chance that this painting even exists, and then these objects of live beyond us. I can encounter this suit and that painting and give it a new meaning, if you will. So in that way, I suppose I do think of the painting as a homage to that work by the late Barkley Hendricks.
A: One of the things that I’m so drawn to about this work – and I see it in other paintings in the room as well – is the way that you make highlights in your subject’s skin. Here you use these greens that also show up in the squares that make up the plaid. There’s some light blues, and even some purples. You see it in this work as well. I really love this passage with the blue. I wonder, when you’re making these special decisions, thinking about how you’re going to use colour and the painting overall, what is guiding your sense of colour in these paintings?
J: Well, the title of this painting is California Interior [2022]. I guess the starting point was this aperture of light that has been developing in adjusting my eyes, adjusting to navigating and occupying California both physically, but I suppose emotionally as well. It has this yellow bleeding haze that felt something like the constant and even quality of light in California. I like the idea of a glitch, which someone mentioned in talking about Hauser Bl [2022], in the ways that the foreground is shown that almost has this transparency that in some ways feels like watercolour. I like to think about the fluidity of that. And I like to think about rain as a glitch to California’s reality, for lack of a better word. You get so accustomed to these pleasant sunny conditions that when it rains, it reminds you that this is the climate in places like London or other parts of the world that I know as a person who’s not from California. But it’s the conditions of a life, a reality, that I’m painting from. But part of that is also the garments, even though I’m interpreting these things quite emotionally. I’m not as interested in painting things as they appear, using photographic source material, but the emotional state at any point of time throughout making these works on any given day. I feel like there are different types of emotions or moods throughout all of these works that show up in the way that colour is applied. My temperament; I suppose the colour is dictated by daily temperament.
A: You talked a little bit about not being so invested in rendering things exactly as they are, and you often work from photographic materials and photographic sources. Does photography make it difficult to move away? Or what sort of challenge does it present in your practice overall?
J: I think it is a challenge. I just think of the photograph as a tool, and for me it’s a way of tracking a thought.
A: You’ve talked some about your relationship to California and how it shaped this body of work. And when I look at this shape canvas I’m obviously struck by this arch, which for you I think speaks to the particularity of some of the architecture that you’ve encountered in Los Angeles. Could you talk some about how the place as a whole has seeped into your sense of composition or even light in some of these works?
J: My work has always been rooted in changes in geographic locale. I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and spent some time in Chicago, and now I’m in Los Angeles. And so I think about the things that make the distinctions of those places. And architecture is one of those details. And so here the Spanish-style architecture down throughout California and the stucco finishes in the Hauser Bl painting feel like ways to consider the odd specificities of California that retain some really special details of an early idea of going west. So using these elements, as well as the decade-specific clothing merged with the contemporary figures, feels like a way of traversing and collaging and glitching, this idea of time and space and geography.
A: All of the protagonists in your paintings hold themselves with such particular gestures and are figured in these very delicate, often elegant poses. I first saw this painting last December, and it’s the earliest work that appears in this show. I think what is really interesting about seeing it within the context of these other works is seeing the way that the palette has seemed to bleed into some of these other paintings. They seem to share these deep purples and blues. Could you talk about the impression that this palette as a whole has left on you, and how your relationship to it has transformed within the last year as you’ve set to work on the paintings in the show?
J: All of the works in the show were made with this painting in mind. I think through the pandemic I was just disillusioned with the world, but also painting, figurative painting in particular, felt hard to do. I had this image of the car from the scene in ‘Noah’s ark’ that you and I have talked about, but it also felt like the appropriate time to begin to think about California, but also at that time a turbulent transition to California as I was beginning my MFA. And so the car became this other vehicle for figurative exploration that did not depend on exhausted notions of vulnerability and intimacy and Blackness, and so on. The painting presented a challenge of thinking about time, and light, and colour, and death, and a number of personal, but also technical, desires for myself, and my work. And so, I think, it perfectly captures an uneasiness in my life at a particular moment that everything else has channelled.
A: I get a sense of some of the technical things that you were trying to work through, even in this painting; the way that the light hits the hood of the car is something that has shown up in some of these other works as well. I think there’s a sense that, even in the way that you render this hand – it has this reflectivity into it, and a highlight – it feels that it’s drawing from the energy that you got from making this work. It’s interesting to think about how even when you are not working with the figure, the technical skills that you’ve achieved in working on this painting are also relevant to the way that you approach the figure.
J: I had this moment where the back of this head is similar to that bouquet, that car, or that bush, and that it’s really great to see how the work changes so much. I think we were talking about this, how seeing the work in my studio versus seeing it in this context makes me really happy with a lot of the decisions that I made; trusting my intuition and myself as a painter in the studio. I thought about that in the installation of this work as well, that these three particular paintings have a very similar charge. This purple and green show up as a state of being, or as a particular sentiment that I think is imbued with the mood or the tone of the show, Lucky Stars.
A: I always love the attention that you pay to the garments that your protagonists are wearing. I wonder at what point in conceiving the painting do you start to consider clothing?
J: Well, I buy a lot of clothes; I collect a lot of sixties and seventies vintage that I personally wear daily. But I think I always have in the back of my head that these hopefully will show up in a painting. The point at which that decision is made usually happens a few years after something has been acquired. The clothes are not special or precious. They’re jeans and strip tees and sports tees. But I’m interested in the shape that pair of beautiful trousers can create within a painting. There’s a sweeping dynamic to the simplicity of form that then gets abstracted again through painting the objects themselves that I’m really interested in.
A: It’s nice to see this hat show up in two paintings from this show.
J: Yeah. The hat is one that one of my classmates was wearing one night in class, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, that hat makes sense for the suit.’ The suit was sort of activated by a classmate wearing this hat that they allowed me to borrow. So it shows up twice here as a device that links the paintings, but also creates this interesting prop. I love this painting. That pocket is really good. That was fun to paint. And then that rock was one of the last things I added to this work that anchored it. At first it had this openness that quite didn’t quite make sense. So I like the rock in the same way that panther shows up in the bloom painting, but also it feels like a sort of fourth character in this work. The two figures, the gate and the rock, have this stoic quality to them.
A: Sort of anchoring.
J: A signifier of my work.
A: You treated the grass in a really similar way to Augustine.
J: Just this kind of fast painting exercise, an impulse, a gesture. It's like, how do you paint something that's so transformed by light, but also weather and season? Well, this feels like perhaps the only way to paint grass. I guess I could have come with a flat field of colour, but then it would be a different painting.
A: I was telling Evelyn yesterday that I noticed beneath the mesh you see all these other colours, where technically you would see his skin, but you’ve gone in and used yellow and green and pink, which I think is also such a fun way to treat this material. And it’s a way that I think you’re getting away from this very flat exactness about everything.
J: I was doing this experiment in my studio with paintings, and at least one of them doesn’t exist any more. But I was doing this experiment with confetti and enjoying the way that it was reflecting light onto my studio wall. And so this top felt like a way of achieving some of that external magic on the surface. So I like thinking about confetti when I look at the mid top here, and what that can say about the spectacle of figuration, but also the magic of painting. Anything particular in the qualities of light that show up in this painting feels achieved by the impulse of painting this top, which is always the power of a great garment.
A: Exactly. All the texture.
J: I think this is the only painting in the show that has this sort of FIA background. But it was a technique that I had been using in previous works to have this. I think of the future as a sort of heartbeat of the work.
A: I love what it does to the hand. I don’t even know how to describe the density of it. It’s so tiny, but it does so much for me.
J: It really opens up the process of the painting too, that I have been embracing more and more; allowing myself to show a bit more of that foreground, that starting point, which is so transformed in this particular painting. I don't even think that colour was present at all.
A: Do you feel like you’re getting to a point where you feel free to experiment with some of your more formal, traditional training in painting?
J: I believe that if you know all the tricks of painting in a very traditional sense, you can thereby be free to paint with any particular exactitude. Technique is an approach. You can employ that. That’s what differentiates one artist’s work from another’s. I think it shows a variation of time in the work as well; some passages of the painting are a bit more explained and exact or rendered than others. They give different examples of weight in the work that feel necessary for me to show that range in my paintings.
Jarvis Boyland’s solo exhibition Lucky stars is currently on view at MAMOTH until 17 December 2022.