Hans Theys
Hopping,
stepping and jumping through a forest of nondescript colours
A conversation with Mil Ceulemans
I
visit Mil Ceulemans’ two studios. The first is in the working-class district of
Borgerhout in Antwerp, the second is part of the Vrije Academie in The Hague.
In the studio in Antwerp necessary renovation work has come to a halt half-way
through. Clearly the painter is not overly concerned about the interior of his
workplace. The space is crammed full of paintings. They are everywhere, leaning
against the wall and against each other, stacked up and hanging. Across the
middle of the space is a wardrobe with no doors and sitting on top of it are
some thirty pristine, square canvasses. Ceulemans obviously works tirelessly.
He is slim and tall in stature and has an alert expression which suggests
inquisitiveness and elation, but also caution. He reads literature and
philosophy and he loves films. He knows my old hero Fassbinder, which is unusual
for someone who was five years old when the film director died. “François
Ozon's film Gouttes d'eau sur pierres
brûlantes (Water Drops on Burning Rocks) made a deep impression on me”,
Ceulemans wrote to me, “and it was through that film that I discovered
Fassbinder, who it seems wrote the original play when he was just seventeen.
Incredible! I once saw four Fassbinder films in one week and was pretty fazed
by the experience for weeks afterwards.”
Ceulemans
is well-read, but he doesn’t make paintings that translate ideas. They are real
paintings, which reflect on painting in the serious and amusing way that is typical of all art. (There is no
discrepancy between play and seriousness, only between play and reality, as
Freud wrote. Only play that is taken seriously can lead to new forms which for
a while give us a grip on reality.)
How might one characterize Ceulemans’ work? What is special about it? On the one hand, the paintings are delightfully simple because you immediately recognize unusual, isolated, deliberately clumsy or very skilful touches, interventions or additions, which conjure up their own pictorial space because of their mutual relationship and their relationship with the background or with a figurative element. At the same time, the paintings are complex, because in just about every work you can count to five, to seven or to seventeen. The painter Walter Swennen once told me that in a good painting you can always count to three. This is certainly true of many paintings. Seen from that angle, Ceulemans’ works first strike you as having been made by a painter ‘who doesn’t know when to stop’. It is as if he has added more elements than are necessary to arrive at a successful pictorial space. Look carefully, however, and you'll see that while the resulting pictorial space is complex, it is also transparent and light. The paintings are not clogged. They create the illusion of depth. They evoke a sort of ‘stacked up’ space, which might be described as a visual climbing frame.
A second striking characteristic of these paintings is the use of colour. Looking and floundering, I suddenly remembered a remark by the painter Johan De Wilde, who wrote to me that he would like to invent a nondescript colour. What he meant by this was, I think, a colour that implies no meanings or connotations; an anonymous colour that puts us in mind of nothing else but that colour. Johan De Wilde would find Ceulemans’ paintings extraordinary, I thought, because the colours the artist uses often make you think of nothing: they keep your mind from turning to things you already know, which would blot out the actual colour or the actual painting. I shared this thought with Ceulemans. “That makes sense,” he answered. “Johan De Wilde has just bought one of my paintings!”
- Your paintings conjure up a pictorial
space by means of fields of colour, stripes and messy brushstrokes, sometimes
by means of a figurative element. Some of your strokes remind me of the
highlights Joris Ghekiere applies with a brush attached to a drill.
Ceulemans: Yes, I know those highlights. They’re amazing.
- Here, where you would normally expect a
highlight, you’ve painted a beige spot. The background is fluorescent
vermillion. That’s a nice touch. The highlight is darker than the background: a
sort of negative highlight.
Ceulemans:
The advantage of fluorescent colours is that the onlooker understands that the
painting is not trying to be realistic. I also like to make fluorescent colours
vibrate with non-fluorescent colours, so that they change character. Here the
result is a sort of Rothko on acid… The work of the painter Pierre Soulages,
where light and dark carry equal weight, helped me make and assess the almost
white highlight in that fluorescent area, which nevertheless suddenly turns out
to be darker than the fluorescent area. Black dominates in Soulages’ work, but
the white of the ground is just as important and occasionally even
essential. A traditional or academic painter adds the highlights at the end.
They are not vestiges of an earlier layer breaking through here and there, but
strokes placed so as to illuminate certain areas. I enjoy reversing these
things. The idea of ‘negative highlights’, as you call them, amuses and
inspires me.
- You make comical stains.
Ceulemans: Sometimes I spend ten minutes working on a
small stain. I keep on rubbing, trying to work it into the canvas so that the
edges lose their definition and stand out.
- Here you conjure
up the image of a field of reeds by means of a whole host of choppy strokes in
three different colours.
Ceulemans: I wanted to paint a stretch of grass, but it didnft work. I ended up with a field of reeds.
- A virtuoso, illusionistic effect
reminiscent of the Impressionists or of Van Gogh. At the same time the brushstrokes
are so far apart that from close to they seem to float in a void. It looks as
if you put them there to conjure up a dark void. The addition of the white
touches shimmering against the brown background evidently gives your canvas
depth.
Ceulemans: Those touches also serve as a contrast to the almost
mechanical, overworked areas which in the top half of the painting create the image
of a building. Itfs a good example of a contrast you canft think up in advance. If I try to plan something, the painting goes
wrong. I don't plan. I look at the result of a gesture and then I try to
counter it.
- The result is often a hollow piling up
of minimal gestures, like a stripe created as a crevice between two added
layers, which might suggest an architectural element like the corner of a
building.
Ceulemans: I love color field painting, but that’s not what I’m aiming at. I try to evoke a space which I paint very flat, allowing the spectator to approach it from different standpoints.
- How do you begin a painting? Do you use
gesso?
Ceulemans:
I like to apply a first element as something to react to. Sometimes I use
acrylics mixed with ink and sometimes coloured gesso, which usually produces a
sort of pastel colour. The more dissimilar the ground in terms of colour and
texture, the better. Different formats and stretchers of various thicknesses
can also help get me started. Acrylics mixed with Indian ink or airbrush ink
produce very runny, but highly pigmented paint which I really like working
with. The pigment in that ink dissolves much more finely than you could
possibly grind or mix it yourself. Unfortunately I can only get small bottles
from my supplier now. I sometimes mix those inks with acrylics to give them
density. That way I can also apply different strokes and I can work wet in wet.
- In this painting you did use a white
ground.
Ceulemans: Yes, but it took me months. The white gives it a sort of freshness.
-
How did you make this smudge?
Ceulemans: To make a smudge like that, I go backwards and forwards 500
times with a fairly hard, hog’s bristle brush. There’s often a gradation in it, which I paint with a
softer, synthetic brush. These are attempts to paint like someone who can’t paint.
- I have the impression you sometimes lay
your paintings down flat to paint them, otherwise there would be many more
drips (because you work with very liquid paint).
Ceulemans: You’re right. I often paint on flat canvases. Flat canvases provide a different perspective; you relate differently to the painting. Sometimes you are in for a surprise when you hang the canvas up, but that tension is all part of the process.
- Here you use a flesh colour for an
abstract section.
Ceulemans:
I don’t think I would use flesh colour to paint people, but it works for a
background.
- Why do you so often go for indefinable
colours, colours that don’t trigger associations?
Ceulemans: I don’t want to make pure work. I don’t like pure ideas and pure execution. My work sets out to comment on the work itself. So it may come across as too double or too full, but to me that ambiguity is necessary. That’s the way the world appears to me and that’s how I look at the world. The ‘over-fullness’ is intentional.
- How would you describe this colour?
Ceulemans: It’s ochre with a dash of blue ink mixed in so that the ochre turns greenish, bluish. But actually it’s very difficult to define a colour. This area, for example, is painted very opaquely; it is more thickly covered than the other areas. It makes the colour look different. The other thing is that a colour is always influenced by the colours around it and by the way they are applied.
- The edges of your paintings often
contain little accents or even essentials.
Ceulemans: Do you go right to the edge, do you stop just before or do you go over it? I want to make these options tangible, not for compositional reasons but to reveal the thinking behind and about a painting.
- I like the obvious vestiges of a bottom
layer on the edges of your paintings. At first glance they suggest sloppiness,
but then you see that they were applied afterwards, in a rough and humorous
sort of way.
Ceulemans: People look first at silhouettes and
contours and then at what’s inside a form. They enter the painting from the
edge. That’s why it’s nice to have something tremble, explode or burst on the
edge.
- They are elements
which seem to serve as a sort of bogus starting point for a first, superficial
reading of the painting.
Ceulemans: The genesis of a painting is part of its total makeup. Itfs a feature like colour or form. Thatfs how I came up with the idea of influencing the
overall shape of a painting by giving it a bogus history. I might do this by
applying a thick layer of paint to the side of a painting to give the
impression of numerous preparatory layers under the surface.
- In this painting you painted over a pink
section with a different pink.
Ceulemans: The painting was finished and then the cat walked over it! It was
covered in paw marks. She didnft walk over it in a felicitous way and so suddenly the painting was
dead. After a while I decided to overcome that setback and I corrected the pink
part but in such as way that you could see what I had done. The cover-up was
executed in a deliberately rough-and-ready way.
The most important question I ask myself is: what is the most unlikely thing I can do on this canvas without resorting to gimmicks? Because I could of course cut the canvas up, but that doesnft interest me. How can you make a painting a meta-painting? Thatfs what itfs all about. In a purely figurative painting nothing is left to the spectatorfs imagination. But what would be sufficient motivation to create an abstract painting? You can see that it still needs something, but what? Sometimes you are overcome by despair because you canft see any solution. I completed the painting you see here with a calligraphic element. That sort of thing doesnft usually work, because the painting starts to revolve around the last gesture. But here itfs in proportion. Itfs often a question of striking a balance: how can I put a line very clearly on the canvas and yet still have it suggest something?
- By making the line sharp on one side and
leaving the other side hazy.
Ceulemans: For example.
- Here you use the outline of a car as a
figurative starting point.
Ceulemans: I studied product development for a year. Itfs a product drawing. The prototype as abstract
matter. Here the abstraction is created by the juxtaposition of lines. The
lines suggest an unrealistic space. This first dawned on me in 2008.
- You have a tendency to exploit the
adventure of each painting to the full.
Ceulemans: How complete do you want to be in a single painting? Thatfs a really important question. Only since
February of this year have I understood how this can work. I now understand
that I donft have to pack everything into each work, that collectively my paintings
tell a story.
- Would you name a painter whose work you like?
Ceulemans: As it happens, you have already mentioned his
name. I love Joris Ghekierefs work if there are no frontal figures in
it. Abstraction and figuration are given equal weight in his work, and I can
identify with that. His quest for strange painterly solutions is inspirational.
Sometimes that sort of quest is endearing, but it is also necessaryc A
painter who has been important to me is Philip Guston. He started off as a
cartoonist. He then went on to make abstract paintings and after that figurative
elements began to appear in his work. Gradually lines crept in and the forms
became harder and harderc I can never really admire painters who
spend the whole of their life doing the same thingc
I trained as an illustrator and
as such worked for two well-known weeklies. But I stopped… I spent most of the
next few years reading: Nietzsche, Montaigne, Bataille, Derrida, Deleuze,
Heidegger, Adorno, Horkheimer, Peter Sloterdijk and Guy Debord, who offered an
attitude to life rather than a philosophy. I was living near the library in Ghent.
Ifm really glad I
read so much then, because now I just canft do it. I canft read and paint at the same time.
- Have you also read novels?
Ceulemans: I found Christian
Dotremont’s only novel La pierre et l’oreiller, really beautiful…
Cesare Pavese’s The Burning Brand, Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, Thomas
Bernhard… And The Thirtieth Year by
Ingeborg Bachmann, with whom Paul Celan had an affair, has always stayed with
me. I also thought the Japanese book The
Woman in the Dunes was marvellous: a couple of characters and otherwise
just the ever-shifting sand. In that novel the desert sand is much more
than a setting, it almost becomes a character in its own right. Brilliant…
- Like a flesh-coloured background in one of your
paintings?
Ceulemans: Indeed. A reversal
that is unexpected but leaves a lasting impression. An ambiguous world to walk
through.
Montagne de Miel, December 31st 2009
Translated by Alison Mouthaan-Gwillim