These paintings were made in Ouakam, Dakar, Senegal. It’s where I’ve been living and working. A stone’s throw from the bay. If they have rules then only black charcoal for flesh and oil paint for drapery and the little ‘nature mortes’. The canvas is un-primed. For all their baroque irony there is still an honesty to the materials.

I work on both sides of the canvas. I draw in charcoal then reverse it and apply layers of vanish and paint that soak through and fix the charcoal on the other surface. When I reverse them back the initial drawing is half destroyed, the turps having bled into the charcoal. It softens it. It bleeds the edges of where drawing ends and painting begins. That is what gives the canvases their smokey character. It is also what introduces a healthy dose of chance into the process.

<p>If there is an artistic strategy then it is the implementation of bastardised classicism and irony on a subject that resists. A subject who’s resistance is born out of the fact that it cannot tell which of its wounds are actually self inflicted. The paintings don’t seek to challenge traditional artistic norms, instead they capitulate to those norms. And like the alcoholic in its surrender, they find their feedom. But it is the subject that always wins this game. In this they are maudlin paintings for maudlin times. In this I find them mystifying.

Ouakam, Dakar Studio View 2024

I think that’s a good sign, that I haven’t been granted access to their meaning. I think they are difficult to pry open. But they are not totally opaque, they have a tenderness that lets you in enough, that suspends you for a second. Then closes its access to meaning leaving you with just the retinal afterburn of an idea. Looking at the paintings now I see that vacant, dusty nebular quality that Dakar has. Its schizoid charm. Its narcissistic hubris caught in the reflection of its own reality. Of conceit and insecurity co-exiting, the tensions of it as a neurotic subject. The paintings are terribly in league with that which it abhors. Painting that might be deceitfully beautiful. But not as dishonest as the quotidian. A friend wrote to me recently of them: “These new paintings are inherently influenced by place, by West Africa; however, they are synthesised through the lens of Western European classical painting. This dialogue between two artistic contexts on the one hand serves as an ironic commentary on representation and identity. The comfort and familiarity of classical painting conventions, akin to Manet’s “The Balcony” and “The Railway”, represents a heritage that you draw upon, yet they also deconstruct the ways in which these traditions can marginalise or misrepresent black subjectivity.”

I’m surprised she wrote this – There is nothing comforting about either the “Balcony” or “The railway”. Nothing familiar, that’s kind of the strength of Manet. And for me, however tragic historically, the women’s subjectivity is solely grounded on the accidental level of melanin in the skin and nothing more. And the more melanin the more reflective the skin the more vividly chromatic it is as it reflects its surroundings. For the painter there is no black skin, just the luminosity of the light that is reflected. Rainbow mirrors. A skin able to capture “all the cosmic effluvia. Drops of sun under the earth. (Fanon). And yet I choose (out of expediency?) to render the myriad of colour in the carbonised black of charcoal.

They are crepuscular even though there is an absence of colour and light that suggests the time of day. But they are on the cusp both of day and night, and of land and sea. They are from what T.S. Eliot would call the “violet hour”. And as I walk the dog and dusk, over the cliffs and down onto Ouakam beach. Past the women gutting fishes down form the Mosque of the Divine, through the testosterone fug of the men working out. See in the huddles of commerce and trade the proto space technicians of tomorrow. Those Wakanda warriors in their market bought Puma’s. I have not worked from photographs, instead I am left with my memory. My time is taken up in this labour of memorising and imagining. I paint them later out of a mind half cocked. Everything deferred, everything at one point removed. Of dusk and the crepuscular. Of the coast and the cusp of land and sea.

"Joust" exhibition view, Minus 5, Beirut

"Joust" exhibition view

"Joust" exhibition view

EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

"Actaeon & Dogs" oil on canvas 290cm 170cm

"Fledge" - Gallery View 2. Millennium Gallery, UK 2013

"Fledge" - Gallery View. Millennium Gallery, UK 2013

Chris Anthem – Fledge Exhibition CATALOGUE

Exhibition - Artlab Galerie Beirut 5th September - 6th October 2019

Hadiiqat Il Bambaan – The Teargas Garden

A Sudanese friend came across Khartoum to the studio. Written on a painting of a Madonna suckling a bathtub of baby submarines I have written in in Arabic “Mother of Submarines” (“Im il Ghowasaat”). He asks me if I know what “ghowasaat” refers to in Sudanese slang – “We call informers for the government security police the submarines”. I like this tethering of the painting to place and politics. It gave me some faith that the paintings hadn’t got caught in the screeching, feedback loop between painter and painted.

These paintings have been made in Sudan. They hang, un-stretched, in the studio – heavy as campaign flags; the globules of paint thick as epaulette brocade. Then there are tender glazed passages. The paintings’ energy oscillates between classical lyricism and neo-expressionist gestures. These are paintings that attempt to reconcile the neurosis of historical signification with the desire/fantasy for self-expression. The striped canvas comes from the tent maker, unprimed and receptive to bleeding. 90% of my time is spent on paint tensions and weight. On how best to render a code of resistances in colour and tone. And the other 10%?…..

The paintings get to the stage when they are independent enough to become impenetrable to me; the feeling of going back into the studio after the night before – I recognize them but I do not know them. It is an estrangement that exerts a tender pull.

We had found a house surrounded by an overgrown garden. At dusk thousands of birds swirled in the air as they came to roost in the tall mature trees that protected the garden. High up above them, African Kites, Black Shite Hawks would circle the thermals looking for prey. We would sleep our three-month-old daughter under the trees until we saw one of these birds of prey swooping over her cot. It reminded me of a painting by Rembrandt of an eagle carrying off the baby Ganymede. In the painting the baby is urinating out of fear. There is a pencil study for the painting in which the child is excreting in terror. The soaring wings and the gravity of human waste; a combination of the aspiration of existence with the muddy sinews of reality.

When the paintings are successful, they oscillate on that border between tender fragility and nascent hope. The garden thrived in the relatively balmy heat of winter – new flowers bloomed to paint. I would take the big canvases out into the garden to paint the plants from life. It was a time of protest in Sudan, daily violence from the state security services. Painting in the garden, kids playing, black smoke rising through the trees from burning tires. The young voices of the revolutionaries were beautiful in the way they simplified hope with its trinity of demands – Freedom, Justice and Peace. Simple truths were replacing complex repressions. Then the security services started the attack, stray teargas cannisters (“Bambaan” in Sudanese) landed in the garden. In the still air of evening the white mist settled into a thin haze around the paintings.

”Dressage” Budapest Art Factory - 29.5.13 Installation view.

"Dressage" Budapest Art Factory 28/5/2013

Budapester Zeitung 7.6.2013

The title came from something that was said to my wife by a rebel commander in South Sudan, a drunken joke, a sinister humour….”First we kill them, then we surround them, then we negotiate.”

“Western culture should never have stepped outside its own order where is constituted a kind of singularity. But that was not an option; it could not escape this violent extrapolation because it already bore its own denial – and, at the same time, its own universal assertion – within itself. We are now seeing the backwash of this immense development in the form of an accelerated decomposition of the universal. And globalization is merely the theatre of this decomposition – of this farce consecutive upon history.” Jean Baudrillard – CARNIVAL AND CANNIBAL 2008 Editions de L’Herne.

"The Madonna of Fatmagul" oil on cow hide (160cm x 160cm)

Captagon Bay

“The Angel that presided ‘oer my birth Said, “Little creature, form’d of Joy and Mirth, “Go love without the help of any Thing on Earth.” William Blake.

“Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.” Jaques Lacan.

These paintings set out to be direct, no more than the sum of their parts: stripy canvas, a child plays with a severed form, udders, the Guantanamo orange, a telephone and a drum. No cleverly suggested absence around which the painted elements suggestively hover. Half playful/half imbecilic. Everything explicit and still the nothingness that is a paintings becoming still persists.

John the Baptist, Hussein Ibn Ali, Holophenes… I was raising a one year old in Beirut waiting for ISIS to reach the Mediterranean. Observing him absorbed in transforming whatever comes to hand into his imaginary world. A play of hide and seek with the thing as it disappears into meaning and back out again. That passing skill we loose.(Beirut 2015)

Lacan - Graph of Desire

Mural Persian School, (17th century) / Iman Zahdah Chah Zaid Mosque, Isfahan, Iran

Various bespoke project based sessions for all ages.

PORTFOLIO PREPARATION – AGES 16+

For Students who want to pursue further study all all areas of art and design. Creative project based sessions nurturing the students the creative process; planning and organizing projects, visual research, introduction to media, fundamentals of drawing, mixed media approaches, art and design history.

Ideal for students preparing their portfolios for further education in fine arts, design and fashion.

LIFE DRAWING TUITION.

Whether its form and expression,  structure and anatomy, or simply meditation on the human form, drawing from the human figure has always been the fundamental way to improve your drawing skills.

Dynamic and creative group sessions for all levels and approaches.

Chris Anthem 'Fledge' – Artist Interview Film from Anima Mundi on Vimeo.

Open Studios Cornwall – Chris Anthem from Open Studios Cornwall on Vimeo.

Open Studios Cornwall – Chris Anthem from Open Studios Cornwall on Vimeo.