Baldessari in blue is UV vinyl ink on canvas — Could you describe this process technically a little bit, both how you developed it and how you make a work?

My entire thesis research probed the history, mechanics, coding, chemistry and comparative interaction of inkjet (and other originally commercial or consumer printing methods) with similar functions in the discourse and materials of painting.

 I create 2D images using scanners that are inkjetted large scale onto canvas, vinyl, acetate, aluminum, paper or other substrates. My entire thesis research probed the history, mechanics, coding, chemistry and comparative interaction of inkjet (and other originally commercial or consumer printing methods) with similar functions in the discourse and materials of painting. Basically, inkjet is just a printhead moving over a surface, delivering combinations of microscopic droplets of CMYK pigment (or dye-based ink in commercial contexts) based on digital code created in imaging software and communicated via a page description language like Adobe postscript. The origins of this series of work was produced in my studio at UTD on a HP Z6100PS pigment printer, which prints up to 60 inches wide. It’s a lot more complicated than a typical desktop inkjet printer, but pretty much built on the same technology. This work in particular is larger than that, so I worked with a specialty fine art printer to have it printed on a large flatbed. The UV distinction just means that the print is lightfast, more like what people are used to from the pigments in more traditional binders like oil paint. It doesn’t need a varnish or anything like that and it is archival, meaning that, given what we know today, it will outlast us all.

The sight of torn magazine pages in these works reminds me of the debate, since the days of Cubism, about the technique of collage. Is collage about the free play of the signifier, detached from its referent, or does it instead refer to its source? Is it about an embrace, or a critique, of mass commodity culture? How does collage function for you in your work?

I guess I’m going more along the lines of Kirk Varnedoe’s idea of unexpected hybrids. In his essay, “Why Abstract Art?”, he basically says that new forms of abstraction are part and parcel with resistance to its premises. I really embrace a tenuous reaction to the image-oriented nature of these works that seem both to incorporate and defy the referent aspect. So, the answer is both. It’s both engaged and diffident. I embrace that people can see recognizable images, and in fact these images have been selected for what they are, but I’m presenting them as scanned formal elements, so I’m trying to disturb that dichotomy a bit.

When I look at one of these works, maybe because of the different levels of sharpness and blur (or because of other techniques as well), I find that optically, I can’t resolve its “depth of field,” so to speak. That is, I can’t tell whether the piece “looks” flat, or extends back into deeper space. Because of that optical ambiguity, it feels a little uneasy when I study it. Is that an expected response, or what kinds of reaction do people have to this piece?

Using the formal tools of painterly surface butting up against line and fine focus, I am asking from the viewer to suspend their belief in gravity and dimensionality to some degree.

Yes, yes, yes. At first glance, these seem to be glorious affirmations of gestural abstraction, but on closer examination there is a calculated unease about them. My thesis was called body poems in suspended space. It’s all about the equivocal space, ambiguity, suspension, body and disembodiment. Using the formal tools of painterly surface butting up against line and fine focus, I am asking from the viewer to suspend their belief in gravity and dimensionality to some degree. I love when someone walks up to my work and has a “What is this???” reaction.

You mentioned “the condition of painting in a post-disciplinary time,” referencing exhibitions such as Painting 2.0 and The Forever Now, and you also work in different media, for example, the exhibition of 100 drawings at CentralTrak, and the video installation at Zhulong Gallery. Could you talk about how the different media relate to one another in your work? Do you have an idea and translate it from one medium to another, or do they develop along separate tracks as well?

I’m always fighting wars on multiple fronts, and the history of painting from Rauschenberg to Laura Owens and Amy Sillman, is a history of engaging with diverse media. Whatever I’m doing, whatever I’m using, I approach it as a painter. I tackle different subject matter, but for the most part I’m interested in sensuousness — the feeling of being in our bodies — and abstraction. Sometimes, I’m tackling painting as subject matter. I prod and trouble the history of painting and abstraction using a feminist lens, questioning the self-serious and mystical traditions of machismo in painting. So, in that, I’m free to use whatever I want in a sort of disobedient way.

You wrote that, “[M]y paintings play on the sensation of paint, how it looks and feels, juxtaposed with everyday technology, which most people experience as part of a work routine,” which is very thought-provoking. I’m imagining how paint looks on a palette or an easel; or how those things look onscreen (as in the movie Gerhard Richter Painting), or how paint looks on canvas on a gallery wall, or how it looks in a JPEG on a web page. The possibilities seem endless, not to mention disorienting. In practice, how do you approach this issue in the studio?

I keep the painting and all of the materials — palettes, references, rags, tubes, canvas, wood — everything.

I approach the work by interacting with paint as a material in as many ways as possible. That means the total process from beginning to end. I paint with hands on materials as part of my sketching process. I keep the painting and all of the materials — palettes, references, rags, tubes, canvas, wood — everything. My more recent works have long skeins of paint just squeezed from the tube in long lines. Some have been further painted with brushes or spray. I paint on all manner of surfaces and opacities, digitally and analog. I project digital paintings and then paint over that. I bring things from the digital space into the material world and then back ….then I just keep cycling to see where it goes. It’s an open-ended process that morphs and travels far and wide. It’s purely about getting into the studio, interacting and trying to observe and capture that sensation.

I pay very close attention to painters who practice art criticism, such as David Reed, Peter Plagens, Sidney Tillim or Fairfield Porter, since it feels like they have skin in the game, so to speak. Along with your art practice, you have been active as a critic too. If I could ask for your views as a critic, I wondered about: 1. Contemporary painters whom you think are important in general (aside from your own practice as a painter). 2. Contemporary painters with whom your work is in dialogue, and 3. Key themes or concepts for understanding painting today?

Oh my god….that’s so hard. I wrote my whole thesis on this!! But I’ll try to be brief.

1. The fire sale, short list: Charline von Heyl, Laura Owens, Wade Guyton, Jacqueline Humphries, Amy Sillman, Albert Oehlen, Urs Fischer, Jeff Elrod.
2. The same list applies, but probably more specifically Oehlen, Humphries and Elrod.
3. Atemporality (as expressed in Painting 2.0), post-industrial production methods (The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol), The Digital Divide ( the idea that digital and the internet has forever changed work and leisure — and art — by necessity), death narratives (e.g., Painting is dead, the task of mourning), Steinberg’s idea of Rauschenberg’s flatbed picture plane. There are infinitely more because every act of painting exists in discourse and as part of all that has gone before.