New Artist: Chris Stevens

About

It’s quite a deliberate presence in his oeuvre I think, so much so that it is no longer really conscious. For as long as I have known him, his approach to composition has essentially been figure-ground. A personage, or personages, and occasionally an object or two, sit in an emptied space, normally in front of it but sometimes ambivalently situated in it, without use of perspective, or any real attempt to suggest measurable distance. Usually the figures are around life-size. I asked him why the composition is usually figure-ground. “Because it is” he said. Then he added “I don’t mean to be flippant. I like the discourse between the figure and the viewer, figure and ground… that’s what it is: figure and ground”.

From this technical premise, this visual proposition he has put to us, our curiosity is engaged, and immediately our feelings are pulled into the situation. The fact that it isn’t clear what the physical relationship is between the people and the space they are in is not simply a visual thing, a discourse against perspective, it becomes an emotional issue also. Who are these people? Do they know where they are? Are they alone? What is going to happen to them? We become curious about them; we ask questions of them; we empathise with them. As we stand there in front of them, alongside them even, we realise that we have entered the space the artist has provided, and the concerns of his people have become our concerns, and questions about painting transmute into questions about life.

Some of the most important painters in the Modern period set underlying conditions for their work – self-imposed rules as it were – and then spent decades of exploration within these parameters. When painters do this it is usually in order to eliminate stuff at the outset, so that they can get down to what they think is necessary. One thinks of Giorgio Morandi’s career, the later work of Piet Mondrian, the middle period of Georges Braque, or of Chaim Soutine, as artists who restricted their range – the still life, horizontal and vertical lines, the portrait - in order to go deeper. More pertinent in this context perhaps, are the two great Post-War figures who dealt with humanity, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon. Both, interestingly, were committed to a figure-ground vision of the world, and both reduced their subject matters and methodologies for long periods, in a kind of profound editorial. There is more than a little of this in Chris Stevens, a sense of focus and an emotional and aesthetic aversion to what he thinks is superfluous: “I don’t like decorative painting. I don’t like decoration”. This ties him to what we might describe as the late Modern concern with alienation and isolation.
As committed to contemporary life and modernity as he is, his key painterly mentor is from somewhere else. Velasquez has always fired him more than any other painter:

I told you Las Meninas is one of my favourite works. You have to aspire to that, to the best. To me it doesn’t make any sense not to; you have to compare yourself to that: not out of arrogance, or even confidence, but because you just have to, so that you are always aspiring. It’s what fires you.

His wider formal interest in the seventeenth century, evident not just in Velasquez but Rembrandt also, comes from the use in those masters of reduced backgrounds with an absolute intensity of treatment of faces and bodies. Think of the power of this juxtaposition in Velasquez’s Dwarves, or Rembrandt’s late self-portraits. What we feel when we look at Stevens’ faces is an obsessive desire to get below the skin. We recognize immediately that his models are not generalizations or archetypes, but specific people. In recent years, and in the current exhibition, his principal subjects have been young men, all of whom he knows:

I know virtually everybody I paint, actually 99% of them. Sometimes well, sometimes less well… There was a skinhead, a bloke, that I didn’t know, I just saw him walking along the street and I asked him if he would mind me painting him. He came along to the studio and I painted him. He never spoke the whole time.

The painting of the skinhead is in the National Museum of Wales, and the superb drawing for it is in the V&A Museum collection.

So these are people he knows, whom he lifts out of their normative environments and places in almost Surreal situations. In this way, the familiarity of the painter with his subjects fuels the poetry of the situation. In a way the figure-ground juxtaposition is a metaphor for the personal and the public coming together. Studies of people the artist knows, with their attitudes foibles, whims, reticence, and beliefs, placed in a wider world that neither they nor we can grasp or control: objective background, subjective foreground.

But that’s what its about isn’t it? If it has no objectivity its just masturbation isn’t it? And if it has no subjectivity, it’s just illustration.

At its best, that is what Realism has always been about in painting. It isn’t about copying appearances, it’s about simulating the emotional intensity of the world, by whatever means, without resorting to fantasy. Courbet, who invented the term, produced landscape art injected full of personal vision, as did his contemporary Millet, and his greatest follower, Monet. Their art contained what we might term a politics of humanity, which is obviously a sentiment close to Chris Stevens:

I wouldn’t necessarily say I was an issue-based painter. But for so many people life is often not anything but harsh. I am really privileged, and have a nice life, but there are so many out there who don’t have any chance, and we aren’t making it any easier for them.

After he said this, he paused, and then continued, “I am trying to make something that is unique: not for unique’s sake, but something that is about my world”. I think we can say that he has accomplished this at the very highest level of his profession.

© Paul Greenhalgh February 2016.