Mirror-like painted squares, reminiscent of Malevich’s Black Square, the digital pixel and dimensional portals, hang together in Francis van Hout’s new body of work a.d.o. Ahead of this exhibition, City Art Reader editor Cameron Ralston discussed these intriguing pools of colour with van Hout in his studio. a.d.o opens 5.30pm Tuesday 28th March at City Art Depot and runs through to the 17th of April.
Cameron Ralston: The one work I’ve seen before today seemed a very straight single colour. Looking at them here in the sunlight though they have more tonal patches.
Francis van Hout: The other one is black, that’s why. It just happened as I layered and sanded back. It was a choice to either leave it or try and cover it and I decided to just leave it. To me, it just leaves the viewer something to look at and respond to. They’re not actually black – for example this one is blue – it’s just that there’s are so many layers that they’ve gotten darker and darker. If you see them in good light the colours come out. They change during the day.
ascend, tinted shellac on panel, 1195x1195mm, 2023
Are you layering the same colour repeatedly or mixing new ones?
Same blue. It’s wood dye stain mixed with shellac. The shellac thickens the stain and makes it glossy. It’s labour intensive and smelly as hell.
You’re brushing it on? Is it different to how you use oil paint?
I brush it on. I use it in the same way I do oil paint. I did a lot of testing with test patches and drawings. Testing whether I use white gesso, black gesso, how many layers do I do, do I want them to look blue or red or go darker. I started testing and seeing what I like. I knew I wanted to do dark works, and I wanted them to be more mirror-like.
So, it was always the intention to have them so reflective?
Yes. I thought about reflecting the world. I had them on the end wall of my studio and I’d come in and start staring at them, seeing how they change. There’s the horror element of looking into a mirror and seeing if anything changes. It’s a typically ghost story kind of a thing. Even Harry Potter has the mirror.
The texture came out of the wood well too. It’s quite amazing when you see the ply, you think it’s flat until you start putting stuff on it. Then it becomes textured.
I think the texture adds a lot to it.
It creates movement. It bends the light in different ways.
They can be like looking into an abyss but when the light comes across it you start to see all the textures and scratches.
descend, tinted shellac on panel, 1195x1195mm, 2023
It makes you look at things. I enjoy bringing my finger up to the surface and it’s as if it is coming in and out of focus.
It distorts the reflection, like a filter the further you get from the piece.
It’s like in The Matrix when Neo gets sucked into the mirror. They can become a lot of different things. To me they do. They become things from my past that I’ve looked at and thought about.
Is that other artists or ideas?
My first inkling of black paintings was going to the university library one day and I started to look through books on painting. I came across this one catalogue called ‘Black Paintings’ which was a catalogue of an exhibit of four American artists in the mid 20th century. The four artists were Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko and Frank Stella who were all doing black paintings around the 1940s. Which coalesces with World War II. The book fascinated me because it was a black book with black writing of black paintings on black paper. It was so hard to look at the works, you had to really look to make them out. It fascinated me and started me looking at that side of things. Then I would think, ‘Why would you do black paintings?’
What is your reason for doing black paintings?
It’s that whole thing of doing nothing, painting nothing. Because there’s so much already being done. I live with a lot of my work around me all the time. But when I do nothing, it is doing something. Especially because I’ve done shiny, reflective works. People might say, ‘It’s just a black painting’, but there’s more to it. You’re not just looking at the surface of the black painting, you’re looking at all the reflections that come off that painting. It reflects the environment around it, it reflects you basically. Like looking at a painting, you’re looking at all these things. I think those artists I mentioned wanted people to notice the work and get what they want out of it.
Do you think it’s possible to paint absolutely nothing?
Yeah. It’s like a matt painting that absorbs everything. There’s the whole thing of Malevich’s black square being the end of painting. But it’s not, it’s a new genre of painting. At the time it must have been revolutionary to just do no painting.
It says something about the development of the art world in general, that there was that desire by people to come together to look at a black square.
The thing is that it’s not a black square. It’s a textured black square because he painted on so many layers it cracked. There’s no such thing as the end of anything.
That’s what I’m getting at. To me, there’s motivation in painting anything at all and you’re engaging with a medium and concept that has centuries of history.
But to me it’s like, I didn’t want to paint anything. I wanted the painting to do what it was going to do. Changing the painting position in the studio even changes what the painting is about. When we hang them in the gallery they’ll change, and again when people come in and start looking at them. To me, it wasn’t up to me what will be there, the painting takes on a life in its own reflecting where it is.
One of reasons I really wanted to do it was I had this idea in my head of a whole gallery space full of reflective black paintings which people would be able to walk around. I would love to sit there and see what people do in front of them.
Sort of like a hall of mirrors?
Like a carnival mirror where people get distorted.
Perhaps we can build you a chapel like they did for Rothko.
The Rothko chapel is another of my inspirations – the whole story behind the concept and how people go there and sit meditating in front of them.
You’re right, when I went and saw it there were people on cushions meditating in front of the work. It’s a hard space to not be quiet and just observe the nothingness of them. I can see similar ideas in your work.
It’s about what the viewer is going to get out of them. It’s not for me to tell the viewer what there is. As well as that, there are things there, they’re not just black paintings. For example, my mother came in the other day and said, ‘You’re doing black paintings again.’ I said, ‘Go and stand in front of it and tell me if it’s black – can’t you see all the reflections?’
oblivion (detail), tinted shellac on panel, 1195x1195mm, 2023
Is there an element of randomness in the works – such as where there is patchiness in the colour?
It’s totally random. I never told it to be there. There’s some element of me leaving it there because I wanted it, such as this nice red patch on this work. They’re just little things for people to focus on. Then they come to the realisation that there is more to what they’re looking at. There’s also marks leftover from sanding processes that just happened randomly. There’s the texture of the wood that is random in its approach. But then again, is that actually random? When I was making the works I could actually see where they started, the slice of the veneer off the logs.
Are you mostly working in one direction on the pieces?
The paintings look like they have a mixture of horizontal and vertical, but they’re all painted on the vertical with the grain of the wood.
How did you get the works so reflective?
It’s the shellac and a lot of sanding back. I could have gone to more degrees of shininess. It depends on the layers. It took a long time to get the look I wanted. I thought I’d never get it there. The first work I tested I called ‘abyss’ and I’d sit here and slab on shellac seeing how reflective I could get it. My mother would come in and ask, ‘Are you in your dark period?’ She thinks every time I do black paintings I’m getting depressed.
It’s quite fascinating, the colour of the reflection doesn’t seem to be altered by the colour of the work. It’s not adding a tint to the reflection.
Because it’s being absorbed. I was amazed at that myself. I thought you might get a lot of red or blue coming out. The other thing that fascinates me is that black is a non-reflective colour. Yet I did a white painting and it reflected nothing. A bit of science there.
They’re certainly fun to photograph without capturing myself in them.
You should have left yourself in, haha. I quite like it because when it’s digitised or reproduced with a reflection in it, there becomes a question of has he painted that whole reflection onto the surface of the painting.
I should get you to come in and hold the camera.
There is an iconic photo of Ad Reinhardt sitting in front of one of his black paintings. Maybe you should photograph me reflected.
It’ll be interesting to see how they look under the gallery lights.
You can’t use flash photography on these. The lighting has to be diffused.
When I hung one in our upstairs gallery, immediately what I could see were the artworks on the opposite wall. In that way they absorb other artworks as well.
Exactly. That’s the interesting thing. It creates another world. A metaverse or multiverse basically. The way I want them to hang in the gallery is opposite each other. I wonder if they will end up reflecting each other. I can’t visualise that on the computer.
oblivion, tinted shellac on panel, 1195x1195mm, 2023
Tell me about the titles: ascend, descend and oblivion.
The blue one is ascend – going into the sky, descend is red – going down to hell, oblivion is like purgatory – the end. When I Google searched the names it was quite interesting. One of the sentences they use for oblivion is ‘the last show the artist had sent him into oblivion’. I thought that was pretty ironic. It’s like the ups and downs of life. Ascending, descending and ending in oblivion. The world is going up and down all the time, the universe is ascending to its descending point – I think there’s a theory that expansion of the universe will lead to an eventual contraction. The other thing is a portrait of my struggles in my own life, in depression going up and down. There’s the whole thing of religion in it, red and blue are very common in religious iconography. I see myself in the painting.
As well, ‘ado’ has funny kind of connotations to it. I must have little jokes in my work. There’s the whole Shakespeare thing – Much Ado About Nothing, which fits too perfectly.
There seems to be a theme across your latest bodies of work in taking previous ideas or paintings and reducing the details into new ones. The last exhibition took ideas from the Every Tom, Dick and Harry series and you’ve mentioned your Null & Void and de void exhibitions in relation to these.
These came from the Null & Void series basically. Striking out, starting something new. de void was the same thing. The Green Field Grey Field works were like the end of the world where we’re all living in bunkers. The thing about art is you’re always trying to minimalise things and trying to make something new and different. How do you do that? You take away things or add things. To me I’m taking away things but also adding a lot of things. The viewer is going to add a lot to these works. How much can this painting absorb? These works have been in my mind since the Null & Void show and it’s been a tussle to get them out. It’s really hard to actually do works that don’t have any narrative at all. That haven’t been made pictorial, but still are pictorial.
What’s the difficulty for you?
I don’t think it’s difficult for me. I think sometimes it’s hard to do minimalistic (work) from a selling point of view. People often want things they can attach themselves to and illustration is easier to do that with. You have to be a certain person to take time and involve yourself in these. I’ve always said this myself: I make the work, the next phase is the viewer’s phase with it. From there it becomes their work.
