Julian Page presents
Kate McCrickard
Le Lit
A new series of paintings
Solo Contemporary, Stand 7
British Art Fair 2024
“This group of paintings is a response to Le Lit (1892), the famous Toulouse Lautrec painting housed in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Lautrec paints the heads of two women- doubtless prostitutes- working in a maison close, in happy conversation, cosseted by soft pillows, with covers tucked up to their chins, far away from their clients. Only their heads protrude from the safety of the bedding. I’ve expanded on Lautrec's playful view of the bed and its two heads (most of the canvases are roughly the same size as Lautrec’s), playing with what it entails as a staged setting with various imagined protagonists of indeterminate sex: zooming onto heads on pillows seen from above and below. Imagined participants are painted talking or kissing. The structure of Lautrec’s bed largely disappears with only an occasional glimpse of a bed post or the folded corner of a pillow to suggest edges. These are invitations to bedtime stories of intimacy, jealousy, games, solitude and a hint of the bed as the place for our final conversation.”
“It’s not a matter of painting life, it’s a matter of giving life to painting.” Pierre Bonnard
“I want to put the human exchange into paint: our quirks, our oddness, our differences. I paint figures on stages, performing on the canvas as I perform with the paint—at the table, on the bed, in my local betting bars, backstage in the theatre or in a forest. They are observed from sketches made from life or historic paintings and sculpture; others are imagined or remembered.
I see the world through art historical images and in each work, there is always a prompt, something recognised from art history. Some figures are dressed in contemporary clothing while others are dressed in clothes from centuries past. Some are naked, some are animals. Most are knotted or entangled in an enactment of our noisy modern lives. They are pressed into crowded urban spaces, ghosted or addicted to social media, isolated within messy communities on the brink of folly. But some of these performers are also just lounging, draped over bars, flopped like Degas’ Absinthe Drinker, not really doing anything. They look at themselves being looked at, look at others inside their painted world and perhaps look out at us, beckoning us in.
I see these painted people as more than portraits—they are types, even tronies: the drinker, the smoker, a smoking child, peeping Tom, the punk, the lover, the goth. There’s nearly always a voyeur within the frame. I am interested in the slippage of observation into fiction, people that blend into types, real people, but also inventions.
I begin with an idea usually taken from an observational sketch and draw out a composition that gets pushed through many changes as I work through the image. The mark is quick and speed is important to bring liveliness to the surface and keep the eye roaming. I work and rework the canvas leading to slightly gnarly surfaces, like painted catacombs with many previous images buried underneath.
The ‘grip’ that overworking and grappling out an image on a canvas brings represents a deliberate avoidance of super-realism, preciousness and the shiny surfaces that please Instagram; a search for something more concrete. Paint is an unfinished medium that lends itself well to my motley crew of odd characters, a display of human imperfection.” Kate McCrickard Paris, 23/9/24
