Artists: Luc Fuller and Nicholas Gottlund
Exhibition title: FULLER / GOTTLUND
Venue: OFG.XXX, Dallas, US
Date: August 29 – September 26, 2015
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and OFG.XXX, Dallas
Luc Fuller: …roots or tradition that everything you make is steeped in. do you find that tradition to be an endless well of material, or does it ever feel burden-some? especially the aspects of place and craft which seems to run so deep…
Nicholas Gottlund: …this is something that I dove into headlong early on…the way that decoration and adorn-ment were both embraced and shunned depending on whether you were “plain” or “fancy” in the P.A. German jargon…
LF: …but I think there is some kind of reverence that the work has…the work has roots, as do you…in that the same way tradition is basically performing something from the past so that it can continue and be passed on in the future, rhythm is basically the same thing…
NG: …the performance repeated…
LF: …for instance a musician has to assume that the next beat will be the same as the previous one… it’s the same way we create patterns in our mind…
NG: …doubt becomes the break…and non–conformity with the outside world…I’ve always been a “cropper” in the way I take photographs…that closeness and that merge has always been a goal…when I visited your studio I remember you mentioned how the new paintings with their large margins were at least in part inspired by looking at reproductions of art in books…
LF: …I have always felt that art books help people, including myself believe in art…so by cropping the painted space on the canvas, I think in a way made it easier for me to believe in the painting…not like a trick, but just a format which is for whatever reason more legible…
NG: …the design and composition of the image area versus the margin or “white space”…that imbalance and tension is really interesting to me…
LF: …intuitively and just by making decisions on the go…5 inches here, 3 inches here 10 inches here, etc… some of your recent work also has the “figure”, or image, or really just color, pushed to the margins as well…
NG: …right, the Brick Gutters book, the Spanners and the newest Dunk paintings all in their own ways address marginal spaces and the periphery…
LF: …for me that is where the humor lies in your work, in a very subtle way of course…do you feel that the restrictions that you give yourself, such as cropping, splicing, or pushing information to the margins, is conducive to repeated looking?…as in the lack of information allows you room to breath and to want to come back for more…
NG: …within the procedure there is the dance…and that book is a good example because while it’s 500 pages of the same pattern and white page…areas vary due to inking, pressure and humidity…a whole host of variables that alter the way the pattern appears…
LF: …and if it weren’t for that repetition, all those little characteristics would be lost…I find a similar thing in my painting, in that it isn’t really about coming up with something new every time I start a new painting…I’m more interested in new things that occur when basically painting the same painting…
NG: …seeing your new paintings which have the same figures/elements in them, I start to zero in on the brushwork and where things converge, repeat and wobble from piece to piece…
LF: …which also goes back to this element of performing something…ING: …or playing pick–up sticks…
LF: …I think of it in terms of music, where you only have 12 notes … but for me it does help to narrow it down to something…and to take myself out of it, or at least attempt to…
NG: …I guess I’m getting around to asking about a sense of weight or the lack thereof within the pieces… for me there is a real feeling of buoyancy…
LF: …I’m not sure exactly how I ended up here…I think I’ve sort of fallen in love with painting all over again and so these new works are really involved…I think it has to do with painting being made from a human per-
spective, and so everything is grounded to the horizon…NG: …they are also very life–sized in scale…they feel very 1:1…these table pieces I’m working on for our show are goofy because they are basically paintings with legs…they were going to have a rather elaborate base, but now they are just spindly 2×2’s…like you repur-
posed this painting cause you got tired of it and wanted to see it flattened out…
LF: …or you just needed a place to have lunch…
