Interview: Melanie Authier
MELANIE AUTHIER I INTERVIEW
Interview with Melanie Authier
By Anna Kovler
Macrh 2020
Melanie Authier is known for her massive abstract paintings where line and shape cascade in crystalline, dramatic compositions. Working at times with a subdued palette and at others with punchy, saturated tones, Authier’s vast corpus evokes many moods and psychological spaces. Relationships between brush strokes and colors form the core of these works, letting a viewer’s gaze explore the endless transitions, edges, and groupings in each dense entanglement. It’s tempting to search for representational moments here, but any such effort comes back alluringly empty-handed.
I spoke with Melanie to find out what her influences are, how she chose her medium, and what her favorite paintings of all time are.
Anna Kovler: There are moments when your paintings remind me of flowers, ribbons, crystals and waterfalls. Do you ever look at these potential visual sources?
Melanie Authier: I don't actually look at source imagery. The works draw upon the phenomena of experience. This includes experiences in wilderness landscapes and coastal travel, but it is also about the contrasts of daily life: the mundane, the quotidian versus the moments that take your breath away. Incidental encounters and snippets of visual experience capture my attention: The wine glass that slips from a hand, smashing square against the tiled floor, the perfect bulls-eye. You see it shatter as the pieces scatter refracting light, reflecting transparent red. The darkness that creeps in and dissipates painted road lines. Blurred by concentrated grime the line wavers in and out of view. The sharp edge of the sun’s glare in the studio and the way it throws irregular shadows onto surrounding walls and objects. When I’m painting I recall the texture of the water, its erratic patterns, ranges of intensity. The passing breeze creates its own blue mosaic, each tiny ripple creates its own silver gesture. These kinds of encounters remain lodged and inform the phenomena that unfold in paint.
My goal is to focus on presenting a psychological state rather than to depict an actual place or site. I often start out with the idea of a space in mind rather than a distinct memory of a specific place. My intent is to respond to the landscape as an expansive geographic record. So, it is about the internal memory of landscape, which is more general. This knowledge is filtered through my imagination and also expanded by the painting process itself. The vision in its finality presents itself as abstract first and foremost.
AK: Abstraction and figuration are often posited as opposites, but your work has elements of both. Do you see abstraction and figuration as opposites?
MA: I understand why art history has created this legacy of putting them in opposition, but what’s interesting is that art history pits a lot of movements against each other. These distinctions were important at one time, during the Modernist hay day when categories and rankings were seen as necessary. For example, growing up in Montréal I can recall a moment when the permanent collection at the Musée d’art Contemporain (MAC) pitted the Automatistes against the color field and hard-edge paintings of the Plasticiens. Each were relegated to their own gallery rooms. My practice is to allow all those painterly contrasts to exist within one work. I reference art history with a capital “A” but also attempt to recalibrate the weight of it. The goal is to re-contextualize it by imbuing it with a level of inventiveness as it presents itself in unexpected visual scenarios. I employ strategies of representation, and play with foreground, middle ground and background to create illusion but also to simultaneously question and subvert it. Paint allows so many opportunities to create spatial conundrums. There is also a relationship to the Baroque in my work in the way that vortex recesses of interior and exterior, descriptive luminosity, dramatic shadow, turbulent forms and swathes of colours reference the monumentality characteristic of that movement.
AK: You talk about withholding from representational reading. Do you ever paint something and realize it looks like something you recognize in the world and then take it out?
MA: Rather than take it out, I try to disrupt it. I try to impose or introduce another element that will intervene and shift the content away from that recognition I might be sensing. I do this because the idea of disruption is also necessary to creating a sense of precariousness in the work. I think references to landscape today inevitably respond to our increasingly complex and fraught relationship to nature.
AK: What are your favorite abstract and figurative paintings?
MA: For abstraction it has to be The Seasons by Lee Krasner. It stood out to me when I saw it in the old Whitney. At the time it was hung on a wall all to itself and I was so taken with it. The Naples yellow presents itself as background but becomes foreground. There is a fantastic confusion of background, middle ground and foreground, and Lee Krasner does it beautifully by interrupting the yellow with large bold brushstrokes and forms in bright Fuschia and Sap green. This was the first major piece she painted after Jackson Pollock died, and given how much she lived in the shadow of his career, she really came out guns blazing.
In terms of representational paintings, there are particular Henry Fuseli works, such as Mid-Summer Night’s Dream and The Shepherd’s Dream that have incredible layering of shadow and light. I’m drawn to his capacity to embed so much information into the shadows, with these curious little creatures hiding in the darker areas in his work.
AK: What made you choose to work in acrylic as opposed to oil paint?
MA: I investigated oil paints as a student but I was constantly trying to force them to work as a watercolors. I was using far too much solvent and medium to get these washy effects. Then I began to use acrylic, and with so many mediums available, I can achieve the effects we usually attribute to oil paint. But I can also get that crisp edge we associate with acrylic. That sharp edge is often very useful when creating spatial illusions of contrast, and the fast drying time allows a quick response time which I think ultimately traps a greater sense of energy in the work. My paintings have a unified surface and I think that using acrylic speaks beyond the history of modernist painting, where the abstract works were predominantly made in oil. A uniform surface also references screen culture, and although I’m not directly quoting that, I am working with different light sources within one work. In essence I think of these paintings as the “after-burn” to being in certain landscapes.
Melanie Authier’s painting Psychic’s Knot was part of a recent exhibition at Arsenal Contemporary Art New York. She is currently the subject of a solo show at Division Gallery in Montréal presented by Georgia Scherman Projects.
Melanie Authier in her studio. Photo by Julia Martin.
