Underwater with John Ancheta, or notes on an opening (TONIGHT!)

I’ve known John Ancheta for far too long. I’ve seen his hair grow, and then get cut, and then grow again. Like one of those Barbie head-dolls that everyone wanted as a kid. But that Barbie toy never grew up to become one of the most interesting and challenging contemporary painters in the Canadian/International art scene. John, on the other hand, did.

He’s been one of my absolute favourite painters, nay artists, for years. His dedication to his craft, understanding of place within a vast historical context, and unwillingness to settle for a certain set or style of aesthetics never ceases to astound me. The fact that I always, always want to take my clothes off and get it on with his canvases is just a bonus.

Tonight, from 6-8pm, he’ll unveil his new, distinctively different body of work, Aquacades, completed this past year at Battat Contemporary (7245 Rue Alexandra, Suite #101) It runs until April the 10th.

It’s a compelling, less accessible body of work than some of his previous stuff, and extremely rewarding - if you spend the time with it that it asks of you. Imagine someone you meet at a party who you’re not necessarily lusty after within the first 10 seconds, but who slowly grows on you until you can’t imagine your intimate landscape without their presence.

And landscape is a good word to use when talking about John’s work, as he infuses his pieces with a type of organic sensibility that defies or perhaps works in dissonant harmony with his meticulous execution and process. We’ve been talking about that process and the elements that inform it for some time now, so I present here one of our many conversations, this one concerning specifically the 2 shows he has up now.

If you’re blessed enough to find yourself in Montreal tonight, then go and see what I’m talking about. Well worth the movement towards, guaranteed.

You have 2 shows up in Montreal currently – one at the GAO and one at Battat. What’s it like to simultaneously present work in the same city?

The two shows are difficult to compare, really. The exhibition at the GAO is a retrospect of an older body of work while the pieces at the Battat Contemporary are from a completely new series.

My art practice has changed considerably over the past year. Installing the show at the GAO was really interesting. Seeing the old work again gave me a new perspective on that time. But ultimately, my thoughts are on my new direction.

I know that this body of work is quite a departure from your last series. Could you talk a bit about this transition and your new direction?

I see it as a departure, in several ways. What strikes me now about my older work is the focus I had at that time on a dynamic and painterly poetic. I think I was really concerned with proving to myself that I could really paint. The GAO show speaks to my roots as a painter - my education here in Montreal, my love for the painterly tradition…

However, that direction started to unravel towards the end of 2008. I think you can see it in a particular painting at GAO titled Camouflage. I included it in the exhibition purposefully as to me it signaled an end. I had worked that painting over and over trying to take it somewhere. To make it work, I had to retreat back to what I knew, what I had developed. It couldn’t go any further.

I quite like that painting, though it raised more than a few eyebrows at the show. It’s the most difficult piece in the exhibition. What came afterwards was a fairly clean break. I went to London, and came back knowing more or less what I wanted to do. I messed around for a few months and then put down my large bristle brushes, let go of thick painterly surfaces and started over again. I wanted to see what would happen if I took away all my tricks, what was left.

One of the things that struck me in your show at GAO was imagery (however abstracted) and I’d love you to talk about the process of how you go about defining or creating your visual landscape.

My painting process at that time was really intuitive and spontaneous. I was working very fast, finishing the paintings before they dried in order to build fluid image. Primarily I worked from found photographs, mainly of farmers working in fields, anything that put me back into the space of my early years growing up in rural Canada.

Once the motif was loosely developed I would abandon the photo and let the painting unfold. The narratives that emerged are largely based on formative experiences. As an American growing up in what I guess you could call a ‘subversive’ ex-pat community, I was isolated from the surrounding rural inhabitants. My relationship to the land was different as it was filtered through the eyes of my specific community that had this utopic dream of going back-to-the-land. The work speaks to my alien surroundings, to the sense of being in-between something indefinable. They’re cold war paintings as seen through the eyes of a child. The work is descriptive as much as it is dreamed and imagined.

Your latest series seems to have less definite imagery involved. Was the visual research process different?

In a sense, for me, the psychic space of my new work has not changed all that much. What has changed, (quite dramatically I suppose), is how I approach that space. In the older work I was after a sort of heightened yet suspended drama. My new work over the past year has been a process of emptying out all that felt comfortable, as I have said - my hand writing, my typical narratives and figures.

Formally speaking, what remains has become in some ways more clearly articulated through the use of stencils and flat color. At the same time, what can be sensed is admittedly more obscure. The new work is more a relationship between cartography and landscape.

Colour is such an integral part of your work. How does your relationship to colour function?

The sensation of colour is critical to my artistic practice. It’s similar to the sense of smell or taste. It’s immediate, visceral. I dwell less on an inherent attraction to certain colours and more on the relationship between colors.

Who are some of the artists you’re most moved by? Do you think their influences can be seen in your work at all?

Mmm. I always find that a really difficult question to answer. I recently saw a performance by Moheb Soliman that completely blew me away: http://www.habibalbi.blogspot.com/.

I would say music has the strongest and certainly the longest affect on me. Being moved always seems to be about a passing moment, so its difficult to talk about. I am not sure one could sense the painters I love in my newer work. Maybe Goya.

Recently I have been looking at the work of Julie Mehretu - it’s brilliant, what can I say? Who else? Jules De Balincourt. Cai Guo Chiang - I was able to see Head On being installed at the Guggenheim. I missed the show but got to watch the install, wolves being taken out of crates and shaped into flight up the winding staircase, it was unbelievable. I actually hung the show at Battat today and I could clearly see Joy Division’s album Unknown Pleasures. I have no idea what comes across at this point, I guess I’ll see it more in hindsight.

What are some of the joys of painting for you? What are some of the parts that you painfully push through?

The isolation is sometimes difficult. My current process right now entails a lot of uncertainty until the very last stage, which I love. The feeling of peeling stencils to see what comes together is always amazing. I think that painting is a lot like any practice: you have to keep on going and not ask yourself the tough questions when you are feeling low. Enjoy it when it’s working, reflect upon it when reflection comes, and never forget to listen. I recently had an accident in the studio that destroyed a painting scheduled to be shipped to an upcoming show. Things like that are painful for sure.

All in all I love making images, it gives so much back to me.

There seems to be a highly evolved sensuality in your work. Is this something that you hope people pick up on?

Sensuality….mmm…..

I guess I often feel that the studio is the only place that I can really be decadent in my exaggerations, where I can embellish. I can relish in what I love and I hope to share that with a lot of people.

I find that the process of creation itself is so different to a finished work. A little death occurs when a work is done…

I think I used to agonize over the impact of each painting. Now I tend to focus more on a body of work, which makes each ‘death’ a little easier. Each piece becomes more of a single gesture towards a larger articulation. In this way, the peaks and valleys get smaller and easier to traverse. It’s a longer process, but challenging in an exciting way.

What you got coming up after these shows?

I have a show in Milan at the end of March. I just finished my website, and I am going to Madrid to see the Goya collection at the Prado. Things are good.

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