Two Painters

By Rebecca O'Dwyer

Writing about two artists at a time is preferable to writing about three or four, I suppose, but I would always prefer to only write about one. Thinking about any more than one insists on drawing parallels, forcing a narrative between different time-zones, different languages—or so it seems, at times. Still, there are far worse artists to write about in the same breath as Kathy Tynan and Andrew Vickery. When I first heard about the pairing I thought, that makes sense. I doubt I was the only one.

Between these two artists, points of similarity are easy to find. Both work in paint, for a start; Vickery mostly in gouache and Tynan in oils, but paint, all the same. Both work on a relatively small scale. Their pairing is intelligible, too, considering their respective handling of paint: neither is looking for absolute verisimilitude, but with giving shape to the formal inaccuracies of life as it is really lived. Both painters make me think about memory, about travel and representation, and how we make sense of and hold onto the past. One last thing: it would be very understandable to interpret both bodies of work in their link or resistance to everyday life. I could keep listing similarities, but for now, I’ll leave it at that.

My first encounter with the work of Andrew Vickery, assuming I did not come across it even further back, was with Arcades Ambo, an exhibition of small works shown at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin back in early 2013. I can still remember it: a sequence of painted works—all unpeopled—photographed, converted to slides and projected to play atop the backdrop of a miniature theatre. But I had never actually met the artist before visiting him at his studio in Wedding here in Berlin. It was a cold Saturday morning, one of the first days in a new year. In his large studio, a series of paintings—a tentative rehearsal for Two Painters—had been hung over three of its white-painted brick walls. Something by Philip Glass was playing in the background. A large couch—bright orange, if I remember correctly—sat at a diagonal near the centre of the room, and a beautiful fern luxuriated out from one of its corners. Andrew and I sat at a large table and talked. I drank herbal tea and ate exactly one biscuit.

Every now and then we would walk over to one of the studio’s walls to look at the paintings, before again sitting back down. As with his earlier works, none of the paintings contained people, but again, it would be a stretch to call them landscapes. Someone might have just left these scenes and is about to return. It might be more apt to call them portraits without people. While not instantly recognisable as specific places, Vickery’s latest paintings have an indefinably theatrical look. He tells me some depict Paris, others Venice, Dublin, while another couple, recognisable from their distinctively reserved colour palette, originate from our home city of Berlin. During our conversation, it emerges Vickery does not, as I had previously assumed, work from photographs.[i] All the recent paintings I was looking at, the ones to be included in Two Painters, were made from memory—sometimes, drawing on images from as far as twenty years back. When I think about things that far back, I grimace, discomfited. Time takes on a nearly physical heft.

Outside the frame, then, the painter. His eye is pulled towards details. Given the temporal distance, this eye is often partial and idiosyncratic. Faithful to the fallible implacability of true memory, it can lend significance to odd and minor things (deviations from the repetitious fabric of everyday life). One painting, part of a series set in Venice, shows a traditional Venetian canal at night-time, the glamorous vista marred by the distinct shape of a rat in the right foreground. In another scene, the mnemonic hook is a poster on a yellow office wall, depicting a train. Elsewhere, the subject-painter paints himself holding a map, surveying a Parisian scene. Though physically and metaphorically this is an impossibility: the one painting can never be the one holding the map, or, not at the same time.

As to the motive behind the retrieval of one image over another? This is more difficult to explain. Vickery’s after-the-fact image making is led by a desire to conjure a feeling or state of being that is distinctly personal, but, being in the past, always already lost. Staying lo-fi and refusing to work from photographs, it seems to me, is a way of highlighting and embracing the central failure of all representational acts. Painting in this way is like time-travelling but being doomed to always retrieve the wrong thing. As a physical translation of memory, what we come back with is never quite up to task. But we keep painting all the same.

I packed light when I moved from Ireland almost two years ago. Among the objects I did bring, though, was a small, strange painting by Kathy Tynan, which I had taken as payment for a small, strange text I wrote about her work, now quite a few years back. I do not think it has a title; now, it hangs on a slightly bumpy wall to the left-hand side of my desk. The painting’s two mysteriously headless figures observed our recent conversation over Skype. Our chat starts, as it does, with a certain, predictable reticence. Chronology has been twisted and foreshortened; we have to orient ourselves in this new time and place.

Over the call, Kathy pulls out paintings I had previously only looked at on my phone and computer screen. A mixture of old and new works, Two Painters, she tells me, is an opportunity to reflect and appraise work done over the last few years. It also presents a chance to show the kind of paintings—tender portraits, family scenes—which, for whatever reason, do not really sell. The ones worked from photographs of clear personal significance; she speculates as to the prospect of their self-sufficiency. Maybe it is a kind of human fullness that keeps the viewer (or buyer) out.

Vickery’s unpeopled scenes are made precisely so in order to generate imagination; emptied stages, his scenes are left open, populated by clues and given matter-of-fact titles, which invite the viewer to speculate and to activate the work. Tynan’s paintings, by contrast, are often characterised by a plenitude of life. With Yellow Roses, for example, a fairly traditional portrait depicting Tynan’s late grandmother and younger cousin, their gaze unmistakably meets ours. Waves in the Air stems from a photo of the painter’s brother and his girlfriend, eyes closed as she kisses him on the cheek. All of Tynan’s portraits hint to a tangible relationship to the one creating the image: expressions are either responding or trying to avoid responding (pretend I’m not here) to someone just outside the frame. Regardless, intimacy hangs heavy. I observe it but am not exactly included. Vicarious intimacy, if such a thing exists.

This observation of intimacy, it seems to me, is one way to explain the appeal of travel. It is an opportunity to experience places while temporarily side-lining the knowledge that sustained presence would bring. Travel, something that runs through the work of both Tynan and Vickery, takes on a significance precisely because it is traditionally understood as fertile ground for memory. Tynan’s paintings of Dublin are touristic in the best sense: in them, home turf bristles with life, charged through painting to become simultaneously well-worn and foreign—cast through the eyes, maybe, of someone not yet so close. Alongside depictions of Dublin’s languorous south side and shore, we see roving, almost dispassionate impressions of Stockholm and Paris. For Vickery, music and theatre are his coordinates, the means of directing and shaping his travels through the world. Going elsewhere is a prerequisite.

Going elsewhere is the anti-everyday: a prime opportunity to generate memories, and the souvenir a means to substantiate the past—as something that happened, but also as something that had a shape and weight all of its own. As the theorist Susan Stewart points out, though, the souvenir is something that simultaneously authenticates the past and discredits the present.[ii] As a discrete, material object, it has a tactility and sensuousness, which the present, as it stands, resists. Our present tense, she writes, ‘is either too impersonal, too looming, or too alienating compared to the intimate and direct experience of contact which the souvenir has as its referent.’ In the souvenir, the past holds a materiality which the present, through its diverting, all-encompassing presence, obstructs. Both Vickery and Tynan’s paintings, it seems to me, can be understood in this way: nostalgic, in a way, but only insofar as they deny the material primacy of the present tense.

In the summer of last year, the left-leaning Berlin government voted for an immediate rent freeze. The Mietendecke (“rent-ceiling”), however, went much further than most people expected, or feared. Through it, rents have been frozen for a period of five years, while measure of acceptable rent levels is to be gauged by looking at what they were like—in 2013. Not just halting growth but actually reversing it, in monetary terms, the decision strikes me as poignant. It resembles an attempt to turn back time; or, better put, to unmake the synonymy of progression and economic growth. Whether it comes off, however, is another matter entirely; opponents plan to fight on the basis of its legality. Economic growth, unfortunately, might yet prove to be a constitutional right.

I’m not exactly sure what it is that makes me think of a German political measure now, as I consider two representational painters ostensibly dealing with personal themes. What I suspect it is, is a shared materialisation of the past. The past, disappeared as it is, can be reshaped or repurposed towards new ends. It might look strange and misshapen, different from what it looked like back in the past and it might not even really fit now, but it can be articulated again, nonetheless. In painting, its lostness is not exactly true. This is quite different from photography, for example, which usually subjects memory to a flatness or equivalence rarely compatible with actual experience. I think of the late Svetlana Boym’s idea of reflective nostalgia—nostalgia, not driven by the desire to restore the past, but to complicate what the past even means.[iii]

Writing in her recent, brilliant book of essays, Axiomatic, the Australian writer Maria Tumarkin describes the deep physical discomfort of watching films compress a life into ninety minutes, or less. The problem, she eventually realises, is the absence of time: ‘Time as a straight line,’ she comes to realise, ‘is a monstrosity.’[iv] What Two Painters gives us, I think, is the solace of painting; the slight power inseparable from its imperfection; the consolation of the misremembered and even factually wrong. Something to remember, I think, if we can.

[i] You might say, instead, that Vickery’s paintings are created towards photographs. Originally, the decision to work in gouache came from a desire to avoid shine in photographic representations of his work.  

[ii] Susan Stewart. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham & London; Duke University Press, 1993), p. 140

[iii] Svetlana Boym. The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001)

[iv] Maria Tumarkin. Axiomatic (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019), p. 91