Momentarium

Lisson Gallery, London
6 July – 20 August 2022

For the artist’s third exhibition with Lisson Gallery, Christopher Le Brun presents a comprehensive show that can be seen as a culmination of his work to date. The exhibition features some of his most ambitious work, including monumental triptychs and diptychs, providing an opportunity to see the development of modular compositions from singular pieces through to large and highly complex canvases.

Le Brun is still deeply committed to experimentation, exploring new techniques, palettes and dispositions, as experienced in the varying approaches adopted in these works. The exhibition features a number of large-scale multi-paneled oil on canvas paintings, including the eponymous work in the show, Momentarium II – referring to a collection of fleeting moments – a painting that feels like an account of time and consciousness made visible.

Alongside their powerful scale, there is a palpable sense of movement and rhythmic energy in this body of work, which often alludes to musical as well as literary references. The psychic and stylistic range of the presentation spans from White Diptych, a visually elusive painting that gathers colour and intensity before slowly fading as it approaches the edge of the canvas, to The Waves, a panoramic assembly of panels, dense with layers and accumulated colour touches. This is a painting that re-enacts the process of its making at all times of the day from first light until sunset and night. The title cites the 1931 novel by Virginia Woolf, a similar meditation on the structure and limitations of time and the self.

Extracts from Christopher Le Brun in conversation with Andreas Leventis, Lisson Gallery

AL: Since 2019, you have sought to expand your compositions so that they are increasingly ‘panoramic’. First were the diptychs, then the triptychs. What is driving this predominantly horizontal expansion?

CLB: Maybe it’s because of the immediate presence of what in painting is called the picture-plane, which is the point where the imaginary inner space of the painting meets the real world. You can envisage it as a flat wall or a window confronting you (it’s important to hold in mind that it’s somehow both) and that stimulates my imagination. It’s like a desire for limitlessness. That feeling has always been there, but never quite so much as recently.

Looking back on my work, I do recognise key or breakthrough or declaratory moments that take up this panoramic format; in particular I remember a wide white painting made in my final year at the Slade using a discarded wooden stage flat hauled back from University College’s theatre to make the stretcher. Also the Forest paintings from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Tristan, Forest, Aram Nemus Vult. Technically just now, making paintings from many parts also allows me to grow or edit the composition while I go on, as opposed to committing to a fixed format at the beginning.

AL: The titles of your works often have literary references, for example your multipart work on paper The Waves, after the Virginia Woolf novel. At what point in the making of that particular work did this book become relevant or imply itself to you?

CLB: The painting grew from the middle out, but when I added the top section I was reminded strongly of The Waves, particularly the episodes describing a coastal scene through all times of the day from dawn until sunset. Woolf ’s method is often described as ‘stream of consciousness’. I first discovered the book before art school and I thought it the most purely visual thing I had ever read – it was like an epiphany – colour especially is described and emphasised in a way that feels unprecedented. So I’ve always had it in mind, but as a painter I couldn’t think how to come anywhere near it. It was written in 1931, but as an approach to imagery when applied to painting it feels to me still relatively unexplored. I feel as if I’ve got closer to this idea than ever before in this group of paintings, including Momentarium and Momentarium II - hence the title of the show.

AL: You give equal status to working on paper as you do to using oils on canvas. This exhibition came about as a result of a discussion around a body of recent acrylic works on paper. Unlike most painters, the marks you make when printmaking or working directly on paper are very similar to your gestures on canvas. Has this always been the case to some degree?

CLB: This came directly from painting over the stage proofs from the print- making I’ve been doing here in the studio. As for the look of the marks, it’s true there are very few hard edges, although the recent Lustrations prints were an exception. I have always appreciated the way a brush is made in such a way as to incorporate chance or accidents, like the apparent hap- hazardness of nature. It amplifies style in the autographic sense, which comes from the hand and body. We know very well how this reaches an exceptional state of sensibility in the eastern calligraphic traditions, but it has been equally highly valued in western painting.

The question for me is where is the most beauty or meaning or depth? This atmosphere of visual philosophising or wondering or questioning is integral to painting’s nature. That’s alongside its use as a way of communicating – although there are plenty of more efficient ways to communicate if you think that is art’s primary purpose. The metaphysical side of painting isn’t fragile, you can’t break it, but it is subtle – you need to listen for it. I associ- ate it with the phenomenon of glowing – where colours and tones appear to ‘sing’. Message-ridden paintings are so heavy they make it impossible to hear painting’s unique still music – the suggestibility. They smother it. It’s not a matter of obfuscation it’s just trying to give an honest account of what this art form feels like and how little we still understand it. I’m happy to quote Chardin here when he said – “Painting is an island whose shore I have skirted”.

Lisson Gallery, 27 Bell Street, London
www.lissongallery.com
Text extracts on this page taken from the press release by Ossian Ward.
Catalogue credit Zoe Anspach, Lisson Gallery.
Installation photography by George Darrell.
Images copyright Christopher Le Brun, DACS 2020