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Stuart Cumberland: Comma 10, 2009

This series of six large (300 cm x 240 cm) abstract paintings was commissioned by Bloomberg as part of Comma, its scheme to help artists make work they might not be able to make within the commercial gallery system. In Cumberland’s work, elements of the Romantic brush-based painting tradition are in constant tension with cruder, more ‘mechanical’ elements, with which he is continually experimenting, and this commission offered an opportunity to deploy the standard printers’ CMYK colour-separation technique, as a means of creating a ground for the paintings. Each painting is made up of three distinct layers – oversized Ben Day dots in cyan, magenta and yellow oil paint; a layer of recurring motifs (circles, squiggles and triangles) – sometimes created with a brush, at others, with a spatula or edge of a window-cleaning tool; and finally, a layer in which large rectangles of white are applied with a roller. The aim was to use CMYK in the form of applied layers of oil paint. The stencilled dots were designed to heighten the mechanical aspect of the grounds, in contrast to the brushed imagery that is also part of the work. Cumberland’s larger aim was to investigate his role as a painter in the 21st century.

Please see the accompanying portfolio for further discussions of the research dimensions.

For the whole of the artist’s working life, there has been talk of the death of painting. Yet painting today continues to stimulate interest, principally for its perhaps anachronistic insistence on each work’s uniqueness. These issues have become the focus for artists such as Wade Guyton and Albert Oehlen, both of whom attempt to force a dialectic between traditional painterly concerns and contemporary technology, as means of interrogating the subjective trace of the artist’s touch. Oehlen’s canvases mix representation and abstraction, incorporating mistakes, rubbing out and over-painting: he refers to them as Bad Painting. The Comma 10 paintings inhabit this context, in that Cumberland’s aim is to deconstruct and analyse the mechanisms of painting in order to investigate the potential for incorporating both mechanical and accidental developments. However, with these works, Cumberland opens up a new dialogue with painting’s past in order to be part of its future. The different layers of the Comma 10 paintings allude, by turns, to Lichtenstein (the dots), Rauschenberg and Warhol (screen-printing), Picasso (semi-abstract body parts) and Pollock (in that Cumberland sometimes works with the canvas on the floor). The artist reuses aspects of past innovation in ways that eschew the subjective qualities of the brush-based tradition. He uses oil colour, for example, straight from the tube, so that the colours do not vary from painting to painting, and to avoid emotional ‘depth’. Similarly, stencils were used to negate the ‘one-off’ painting trope and avoid the obviously expressive, subjective gesture. These qualities sometimes slip through the net, however, to create a satisfying tension. In the spirit of Oehlen’s Bad Painting, Comma 10 mixes iconoclasm with respect for the genre and a desire to contribute to it creatively.