Painters Amy Sillman and Cameron Martin

Editor’s Note: The artist sat down with painter Amy Sillman before Cameron Martin’s exhibition “Baseline” and enjoyed the Sikkema Malloy Jenkins in New York until October 11. Both discuss semiotics and abstraction – and what humor and tragedy can and do in such an era.

Amy Sillman: You can start by talking about how these new paintings are made and how they differ from earlier works?

Cameron Martin: We live during this time, involving so many paradoxes and contradictions, and it is easy to escape it rather than embrace it. I won’t call the subject of this work my mind completely. I’m interested in putting together forms that are not necessarily meaningful in the same space and then exploring what is produced. In my last show at Sikkema [in 2022]several paintings have these articulated strokes – graphic representations of gestures – but lately, I have been thinking about other types of surrogacy or alternative gestures.

As: Why do you want to stand up and make a gesture? That’s not what it means?

centimeter: To some extent, yes. It’s an attempt to ease the strokes and replace some luggage with some trademark of some kind.

As:Is that a picture?

centimeter: Since the late 90s, the graphic paintings I made were derived from landscape photos, and I really imagined them to be pictures. I changed things about ten years ago and moved towards what I thought was a more abstract approach. [turning toward brushstrokes and shapes]. But I’ve learned that every painting I make still has the logic of images, graphics, logos, and grids.

As: Are they interesting? You think they are funny?

centimeter: They might be. Did they read it to you?

As: I’m not sure if I just saw them alone, but if you call this claim a “picture” I’ll find it interesting because your paintings are like deprived of signs of meaning, or images of background and foreground, or images of meaning, and if you try to pin these categories into any of them, they seem to twist them. I think I think that stupid… “droll” instead of “witness”, because wit is like a play Characteralthough Droll looked at the attitude of coming out, his eyebrows raised… maybe it was removed from below.

centimeter: I think personality will produce a unique painting. Whether it’s in my paintings and what I see in the world (whether it’s credit card ads in the subway or in art history), I’m thinking about what I call “almost signs”, where the indicators and the meanings shown don’t add up. That’s my abstract version. It allows for a correlation reading, and people might say, “It reminds me of “X,” but if they are asked, “Do you think that’s a photo of that thing?” “The answer is “No.” ”

As: Yes, that’s what my concept of horror came to: it’s the feeling of your almost dead humor, with a slightly skewed relationship with things. But your work is not visually dead; visually, it’s like a baroque figure. These come with ribbons in the form they are doing animation things, even if there is a kind of non-disclosure of their exact work, which is a weird combination. Will you laugh when you finish one?

centimeter: I won’t say I laughed loudly, but I could be happy with what happened in the painting. Perhaps this entertainment is never exactly the juxtaposition of parts. It’s a way a joke can work, and when the parts make no sense, things are enough, and you may encounter humor, if not full-blown laughter.

As: You say “almost signs” and now we’re talking about “almost ridiculous”. Your collage (the fans I like) has a completely different impact. They are animated, but not interesting, and the painting has a static mass, or a contradictory state of stillness and motion. I like to see them together because I think collages give this completely physical feel, where the smoothness and smoothness of the paintings make them a little “other” to the physics “other”. I feel that once you start doing quote summary abstraction, this is actually a non-avoid work.

centimeter: I thought I had done this, but I couldn’t stay away from the indicator as I thought. I sometimes feel like I’m the last champion of semiotics: it’s still fueling what I do, though maybe more tilted than when I painted mountains and “nature” photos.

As: When you paint “natural”, do you think you are doing political things? Or something useful?

centimeter: I am considering our mediated relationship with the natural world and how the environment is burdened in thought. However, “useful” is a difficult task.

As: Is that your move to release abstraction? Because it amplifies the alienation of the pictures you like with Mao?

centimeter: I don’t think the meaning of the picture is completely direct. When I speak, it always focuses on putting the term in parallax. I’m thinking about what assumptions to make around natural images. But in some ways, abstraction is more likely to allow for the multispecial value of meaning. I think that’s exciting, I want to be free.

As: I think your collage is more organic than your paintings. They make us realize that we are making, and they are significant. If I put my fingers on them, I feel the grip, cutting the edges of the layer. However, your drive in painting is very much towards a space that is not reflected, and optics prevails physically. No sense of physical resistance, no residue, traces, stains or grains are obvious. But, of course, this is a paradox.

centimeter: I wish they could feel the effect they had just appeared on the canvas.

As: Exactly. In your paintings, it is almost impossible to see what happened before, or how to get there. They appear and we look at them. But we have bodies, we cannot no There is history, residue, leftovers, residue. Your paintings are purposefully deprived. They are very clean. But then your collage stings a little bit of this tiny example…