2020 Vision

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2020

Just in case you forgot what year we’re in. That’s how I felt, walking along Piccadilly in the rain, lo and behold, ‘2020’ is written vertically and spanning the entire height of the Fortnum and Mason’s building. Why do I need to see a giant ‘2020’? Do they put the giant year we’re in up every November? I hadn’t noticed. The next level of absurdity is that I don’t think it is meant as a joke. How is it meant? All that can be gleaned from the rest of the display, which is as extravagant as any other year, is.. that it’s not a joke. But what is it? Yes, I am walking along, but my sense is not so many will be seeing this display this year. You’d think they might opt for a more modest version. The monolithic ‘2020’ was just baffling though. I should have taken a photograph. (Here is one I just found online). Anyhow, here we are. I have written and completely re-written the intro to this blog entry almost a handful of times over the last few months, but keep coming back and starting again. Why does it even need an intro? I will refrain from further deviation and just skip ahead to not all the tumultuous things (well, I’ll try), but the resulting art:

 

Monochromatic Minds – Jennifer Lauren Gallery – Live Artist Talks Videos

Jennifer Lauren Gallery continue to achieve innovator status with their various approaches to engaging with artists, dealers and collectors, which it looks like others are catching on to and building from also. Hats off. On this occasion, I want to flag a series of talks initiated through the use of video communications program Zoom that many who use computers have become familiar with during Covid 19 lockdown, if not before. For three consecutive weeks, Jennifer spoke with several artists in realtime, showing a few of their images, and taking questions from others that had signed up to take part in the video calls. There were also prerecorded talks with artists who were more comfortable with that format, or couldn’t make the live sessions. All the artists in the talks had work featured in the groundbreaking Monochromatic Minds exhibition Jennifer Lauren Gallery put on in London earlier in the year. I’ve written and posted images and videos relating to that in previous blog entries. You can view the hour or so long talks with me, Daniel Goncalves (Portugal) and Robert Latchman (USA) in part 1 here (Alternatively, a transcript is available here) and I recommend checking all the parts out for insightful words from artists Mehrdad Rashidi, Julia Sisi, Cathy Ward, Aradne, Judith McNicol, Zinnia Nishikawa and curator/archivist Vivienne Roberts speaks on the art of Madge Gill.  Below is an image of my set up for the artist talk. I admit, I like to have a certain degree of control over what I say in terms of not forgetting anything that might be relevant, but also about how precisely I can convey what I mean, which in theory is best done by using considered and recorded wording. I ridiculously entertained the idea of actually reading a lot of information out, but in the end directly referenced just three or four sentences out of all my typing there! However, the act of typing reinforces the memory also, so I like to think it helped in a different way. 

 

Drawing Dec 1999- Aug 2020

On August 19th, 2020, I completed the seventeenth instalment of my diary drawings, and the eleventh on A4 format, out of twelve. I won’t tread the path of associated pedantic details as to why here, other marginally more significant meanderings entail. This drawing clocks in at 27,659 words. In 2015, the then diary on A4 contained 11,273 words, which was the most in relation to its size, by that point. In November of 2019 I completed an A5 (half the size of an A4) diary comprising of 12,627 words. That half size diary contained more words than any of the ten A4 diaries preceding it. The current A4 diary is double that in paper size and words, with an additional almost 3,000 words. It surprises me every time this sort of thing occurs. The feeling of completing this diary is indescribable, really. The level of euphoria reached, and the value of that euphoria lingering and resonating with aftershocks, it prompts a lot of questions which I won’t go into here, but anyhow, here are the recent ongoings:

 

Raw Vision Weekly  #169 – Art In Quarantine 

On June 19th, 2020, Raw Vision published their weekly newsletter featuring myself in the ‘Art In Quarantine’ series. You could do worse than to subscribe to their weekly newsletter. It is insightful, inspiring and if nothing else without fail can add colour to grey days. Read through or scroll down in this edition and you’ll find me below Mr.Imagination. I answer some questions they asked me in the newsletter, and they published a few images. Here is one of them..

 

Raw Vision issue 106 / Summer 2020

It was an honour to be asked for a contribution to the reviews section of Raw Vision magazine earlier this year, and when summer came I found my name attached to the only exhibition review included in the Summer/Autumn issue, for Scrivere Disegnando (“Writing By Drawing”) at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland in collaboration with the Collection de L’Art Brut (Lausanne, Switzerland). I must admit, though my name is at the bottom, I do not myself read it as my own writing. It is well written, more academic than the way I write, and includes at least one or two words that I would not choose to use and didn’t include in my submission. I am still pondering whether adding words is normal practice for magazine editors? Or to not consult the writer at least. I feel uncomfortable taking the credit for this piece, feeling it should have been credited as co-written by myself and the editor, who made considerable changes. For example, there is a part in my review where I speak on the poetry of moving through the space, referring to the curation. The editor took the word ‘poetry’ and contextualised it differently, saying that many of the works and their content have a poetry to them. A different application of the word entirely. In the end, the spirit of my review is gone, which is a shame. So anyhow, I felt I needed to clarify this and put it somewhere in the universe. I can now channel that energy elsewhere.

Bittersweetness aside, it is a great issue otherwise. The Joe Coleman feature is great, honing in on a specific painting and its story, with beautifully reproduced foldout images. I’d learned about this painting in a Lydia Lunch podcast interview with Joe Coleman not long before the Raw Vision came out, which can be heard here. The David O’Flynn cover story on artist Gwyneth Rowlands is beautifully put together, and the Tony Thorne article on Albert is potent too. I love Beth Elliot‘s photograph of Albert working. I remember first meeting him in around 2011 when I visited Bethlem (before refurbishment and relocations) to help him and others write their artist profiles and to photograph their work for the Outside In website. His work was incredibly affecting then and I’ve loved seeing it whenever and wherever I do ever since.

 

Scrivere Disegnando Book

A hardback book has been published to accompany/memorialise the Scrivere Disegnando exhibition which was on show for most of the first half of 2020 at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, Switzerland.  This book contains images of and words about my diary drawings. Separate French and English editions available. Including text by Michel Thevoz and artists of interest: Adolf Wolfli, Aloise Corbaz, Henri Michaux, Nick Blinko, Laure Pigeon, Luigi Serafini, Melvin Way and many others… I’ve written about the exhibition in previous blog posts, which you can dig out if you so desire. Here is the blurb from the art space in Geneva: Through the work of nearly a hundred contemporary artists and Art Brut personalities, the exhibition “Scrivere Disegnando” and the catalogue “Writing by Drawing” explore writing’s shadow side. This 300-page catalogue is published in EN and FR editions by Skira, brings together essays specially commissioned from curators, critics and philosophers on the questions of asemic writing and plural writings.

Apart from the somewhat sensationalised text and muddied facts about me and the diary drawings, I was both surprised and alarmed to discover an image of one of my diary drawings was blown up to take up the entire page beside the title page a few pages into the book. Of course part of me is honoured to be chosen for such a position, and I’m sure my folks are into it, however, I have learned a valuable lesson. In future, I will make sure to forbid enlarging my diary images beyond actual size, without my consent and signing off. I have only had myself to blame for such results, but no longer. I can understand why and how it may be an interesting thing to do, as a publisher or curator, but being a living artist making work of this nature, somewhere in me I expected more sensitivity I suppose. In any case, this little video below gives you some idea of what the book looks like..

 

Frieze Magazine, no.211, May/June 2020

I was late to the party on this one, but there is a review of the exhibition in Geneva included in this issue of Frieze magazine, and they’ve used a really nicely reproduced image of one of my diary drawings to accompany the review. Of course I am surprised to find myself in there. I am in good company, with a review of Nnena Kalu‘s exhibition at Studio Voltaire in London included. Incidentally, Kalu was making these works just a few doors down from me along the hallway in the building we both work from in South London. Elsewhere in the magazine, there is an article on art critic Jerry Saltz‘s book ‘How To Be An Artist’. Jerry Saltz has crossed over into my world on two occasions that I am aware of. Firstly, at an exhibition in New York called Bring Your Own Art, at X-Initiative in 2010. He critiqued my drawing with a negative view. He made an analogy in the form of a question, to paraphrase ‘Is this the work of a drunk, or a stoner?’, and then moved on. A few years later, of course, he pops up on Instagram here:

 

Lastly, I found it interesting, and disappointing to discover though Cindy Sherman is on the cover of the magazine, there is no article about her in the magazine! This is the issue though:

 

Art & Mind film on Sky Arts channel

Amélie Ravalec’s film, narrated by John Maizels (Raw Vision magazine), is a fascinating attempt at exploring 500 or so years of art in the context of madness, the mind, perceptions and how they evolve over time. I’ve written about this before, around April 2019. What I loved most was experiencing the flow of the 350 or so carefully selected images sequenced on the big screen, as well as some insightful or interesting commentary by interviewees. Here is the blurb from Sky Arts, ah yes, so, you can now see the film on the Sky Arts channel: ‘An exploration of visionary artists and the creative impulse, from the Flemish Masters of the Renaissance to the avant-garde movement of Surrealism. Featuring Bosch, Van Gogh and more.’ Note: I am included in the ‘and more’. Meaning, an image of my work is used in the sequence of images.

 

Currently Drawing…

I am currently drawing the twelfth and last A4 sized diary drawing and simultaneously on the fourteenth text based drawing in the The Disadvantages of Time series. I’ve just scrolled through my phone and realised there is no evidence of this, but it gives me something to show you next time I embark on one of these blog post frenzies I get myself into.

 

Be well,

Carlo

As we enter 2020, part II: New York, Manchester, Geneva, London

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Greetings. Here it is, part 2. Part 1 had me tying up last year’s loose ends. Part 2 looks at the near future and which walls you’ll find my work on. As usual, everything happens at once. I’m in exhibitions at the Portico Library in Manchester (UK), the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva (Switzerland), and with Jennifer Lauren Gallery at the Candid Arts Center in London (UK) as well as at the Outsider Art Fair in New York (USA).

 

Outsider Art Fair – Jennifer Lauren Gallery /// January 16-19th. Metropolitan Pavilion. New York, USA

I’m not sure exactly what happened during the fabrefaction of my July 31st – November 28th, 2019 diary drawing, but the result is 12,627 words in my bubble text on A5 card. This is almost 2,000 more words than were recorded on the previous page and by now more than have been recorded on any of the ten A4 size diary drawings. If you want to go see the combobulation for yourself, find yourself at the Jennifer Lauren Gallery booth for their third year at the fair. Jennifer Lauren will also be showing work by Shinichi SawadaAkio Kontani, Margaret Mousseau, Leonhard Fink, Chris Neate, Norimistsu Kokubo and more.

For further info on the fair, opening hours, special events etc.. see here.

Outsider Art Fair, NYC 2020

Diary, July 31st – November 28th, 2019

 

Talking Sense: The Changing Vocabulary of Mind and Brain. /// January 17th-April 13th. The Portico Library. Manchester, UK 

James Moss curates the works and minds of 50 artists in this playfully conceptual exhibition fitting to the ethos of the Portico Library, a 200+ year old subscription library in Manchester’s city center. The exhibition “explores the idea of “mind/brain-then/now” – combining 18th and 19th century literature with new artworks to create a space for conversations around the vocabulary of neurodiversity, mental health and psychology”. Sugar Glider vs. Octopus, a painting I did in 2009 will be included along with works by the homies Darren Adcock and Dolly Sen. Quite pleasantly, we are accompanied by 47 artists I can’t say I am aware of by name. I look forward to discovering their work and how all this might fit together in the context! The public preview is from 6-8pm on Thursday 16th January.

Talking Sense: The changing vocabulary of mind and brain

Sugar Glider vs. Octopus, 2009

 

Scrivere Disegnando (‘Writing By Drawing’): When Language Seeks Its Other /// January 29th- May 3rd. Centre d’Art Contemporain. Geneva, Switzerland

I’m thrilled to have several diary drawings included in this near-exhaustive exploration of writing as drawing and how this leaves the communicative aspect in ambivalence and/or ambiguity, focussing on work from the early 19th century to the present day. At least that’s my reading of it so far. I impatiently await experiencing the exhibition for myself at the opening on Tuesday, January 28th. I understand the exhibition will be accompanied by an elaborately produced book of 300+ pages. I will report back with details regarding that as I learn them. Co-curated by Andrea Bellini (Centre d’Art Contemporain, Director) and Sarah Lombardi (Collection de l’Art Brut Lausanne, Director), it will be interesting to see works by artists associated with Art Brut side by side with contemporary artists, brought together through the context of this theme. On those walls I’ll be in the very good company of Nick Blinko, Gaston Chaissac, Aloise Corbaz, Jean Dubbuffet, Susan Hiller, Henri Michaux, Laure Pigeon, Luigi Serafini (Codex Seraphinianus!), J.B. Murray, August Walla, Melvin Way and Adolf Wolfli among others.. In my previous blog entry I spoke on the writer Michel Thevoz and the artist Carlo Zinelli. Thevoz is contributing text to the book published in conjunction with this exhibition, and there is a big Zinelli exhibition at the Collection l’Art Brut in Lausanne, so I’ll also be able to experience that, which should be wonderful. I’ll report back upon returning.

 

Monochromatic Minds: Lines Of Revelation – Jennifer Lauren Gallery /// February 25th- March 4th. Candid Arts Centre. London, UK

I can’t help but feel this will be a historic exhibition relentlessly championing works in black and white, through a roster of 62 artists, most of which I admire immensely, and some I’d not heard of or seen but am thus far impressed with based on images revealed here. Jennifer Lauren has taken on quite a task and brought together an extremely impressive group of artists, which I’m overwhelmingly excited to see curated together in one space. On these walls I am joined by my PPP crew (Posca Pen Pals) Liz Parkinson and Julia Sisi, the highly potent Albert who I’ve met through the Bethlem, Madge Gill who needs no introduction, the great Aradne, it’s an endless list and I’d love to think of specific words to describe each artist but I must go and do my tax returns. It’s very tempting though.. Ody Saban who’s work I’ve admired over the last fifteen years, Cathy Ward whom I’ve crossed paths with since encountering her work at The Horse Hospital (which is in grave danger of being shut down after over 25 years, spread the word to your powerful and caring friends please!) around the time they offered to show my work for the first time in 2007/8, Nick Blinko who I’ve written about quite a lot over the years (here are a couple of bits: 2011, 2016), Rashidi, Margot, Harald Stoffers, George Widener, Ben Wilson, Malcolm McKesson, Dan Miller, Kate Bradbury, Nigel Kingsbury, Daniel Goncalves, Michel Nedjar, Evelyne Postic, Agatha Wojciechowsky, Ted Gordon, and the list goes on! I just wish brother Phil was here. Right,.. I feel like I’m about to malfunction. For full details check this  and I’ll reiterate all this in a more succinct and informative manner within the next blog entry in a few weeks, with updated specifics regarding the series of events surrounding the exhibition including presentations by some of the artists and more. 

 

Roger Cardinal (1940-2019)

It was saddening to hear that Roger Cardinal, the man who first used the controversial term ‘Outsider Art’ with having his book titled as such (published in 1972), has transcended the Earth at the end of last year. The forthcoming issue (104) of Raw Vision magazine will be a special tribute edition. I was privileged to meet him several times. My first encounter with him was interesting, I had been writing in my diary drawing for a couple of hours, alone at a table and he walks into the room and asks if I mind him sitting beside me. He then asked if I minded him taking some notes as we conversed. We went from there into another smaller room where a video interview with Jean Dubuffet was showing and we sat there for a short time before he nodded off for a while in an armchair. We crossed paths a handful of times or so after that and began a somewhat intense email exchange, which began with him actually saying he would be “honoured” to write about my drawings (too much!). He could also be quite playful in his approach. Referring back to that email, he wrote: I would be honoured to write something about your work, which is definitely on my personal list of a site of “outstanding natural beauty” (that’s a quotation from the Kent County Council road sign that you’ll find at the entrance to our local villages!). I regret not having resolved the unusual and perplexing tone of our last emails. Irrespective of that, Roger Cardinal will forever be gargantuan. 

 

As we enter 2020, part 1

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Greetings and welcome to another year in the Gregorian calendar… Let’s hope it won’t be a disastrous one! Anyhow, here is some information and observations regarding things I spend time on/with…

Paris 2019

The next day, at home, upon rummaging through my jacket pockets on my way out again, I discovered a small Swiss chocolate. Proof that I had in fact returned from another annual excursion to Paris, having spoken to an array of insiders of the Outsider Art field in some form or other. It was the Outsider Art Fair, the seventh edition of the Paris incarnation. Four of my diary-related drawings were shown with the Galerie du Marche, based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Within 24 hours I knew that I’m not getting any of them back. It can be a curious pattern of thought imagining their current whereabouts and the level of engagement that may or may not occur in my absence. I am pleased with what they contain, the way they evolve, and how the thoughts transcribed transform into what in some ways feels like a sort of DNA to me, projected through the aesthetic form that is manifested. But in the end, it is not in the end, it is during the process that I feel the most value is placed/experienced, and while in some ways the evidence of that is contained, the moment in some other ways just comes and goes. Thankfully, the process involves a sequence of indefinite moments.

In the past I have written about things I’ve seen and felt at the Outsider Art Fair, either here or in Outside In‘s blog (2015, … 2016/2014 Paris and New York have mysteriously been deleted) but something that is happening with time is making it unnatural for me to attempt this currently. I have some photos on my phone though, and they trigger open doorways for me to walk in and out of briefly. Apart from photos of the Galerie du Marche booth, the only image I have of a particular work is actually from a short documentary film that was shown on the work of Michael Golz, who spends a lot of time developing a fictional map and associated terminology. Since 1977 he has been dedicated to manifesting Athos. Very impressive. It did remind me somewhat of a fictional map project carried out by Jerry Gretzinger, since 1963. In 2018, I encountered his map when it was exhibited alongside some of my diary drawings in the Vestiges & Verse: Tales From the Newfangled Epic exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum (NYC, USA). It is very unlikely Golz and Gretzinger will have been aware of each other until much later, if at all, given the geographic distance between them and a less linked non-fictional world around the time their maps began to take shape.

At the Galerie du Marche booth, I find myself in a most surreal situation of being placed on the wall beside the work of Carlo Zinelli. Sometime around two decades ago, I was in a secondhand bookshop and perusing the shelf of Art Books. I didn’t see anything that piqued my curiosity but for some reason a hardback book with the bold lettering ‘ART BRUT‘ on the spine made me pick it up. The cover image was intriguing and the authors’ name had a nice ring to it ‘Michel Thevoz‘. I recall that simple, yet effective, convergence. The page I opened it up to displayed a beautiful image of a sequence of figures with blob-like holes in their heads. Incidentally, I was drawing people with holes in their heads also. I looked for the name of the artist and it simply was ‘Carlo’ (they weren’t using Zinelli as his last name when it was written).. so, there is the serendipity of the Zinelli-Keshishian axis. As a tidbit, in recent years I heard that Michel Thevoz had seen my work and was supposedly quite impressed by it.

 

Carlo beside Carlo, Galerie du Marche, Outsider Art Fair Paris, 2019

A Carlo gone missing, Galerie du Marche, OAF Paris, 2019

Photo taken from the screening of Philippe Lespinasse’s documentary on Michael Golz, ‘ATHOSLAND’. Click to enlarge. (That goes for all these images, actually)

 

Still in Paris, returning to the apartment where I was staying after the fair one night, I learned from somewhere on the internet that the simultaneous opening of both David Zwirner’s gallery in Paris and the Raymond Pettibon exhibition were occurring, but just about ending by this point in time. It was exciting to learn that a Pettibon exhibition was around the corner. I went to see it the following day and felt enveloped in that very particular Pettibon atmosphere, relishing the fix. What a joy. I love the curation that seems to have some natural instruction from the works to exist in relation to each other in a distinct manner, branching outwards from the walls, creating systems or communities of drawings in pockets of the space. I even crossed paths with Mr.Pettibon himself.

 


 

I’ve done it again. The information has bottlenecked and as tempting as it is, it would be unwise to bludgeon you with its entirety. This part 1 covers the remnants of last year. The next will detail forthcoming news. Hold tight for part 2…

 

Carlo.

 
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