The Promise . . . and the Fall In Conversation with Michael Greaves, February 2022 Compiled by Hilary Radner and Michael Greaves Edited for coherency and succinctness by Hilary Radner Hilary Radner – Over the many conversations we have had in the past three years, I have come to understand your journey as a painter as one defined by the advent of the photograph – and by “photograph” I mean the analogue photograph – as a technology that can offer “a window on the world.” As you recently explained, during your early experiences with painting in New Zealand when you first came to identify yourself as a painter, in the milieu in which you found yourself, “a good painting was one that looked like a photograph.” As we all know, many paintings today use the photograph in a variety of ways – whether as source material, or as literal projections on the canvas that directly reference the camera obscura. The camera obscura, a predecessor of twentieth-century cameras, was developed largely by painters during the Italian Renaissance. It served to project an image on a wall, with the purpose of assisting artists to depict the world in terms of the specific geometry of one-point perspective. As we know, one-point perspective is a technique at the heart of many trompe-l’oeil paintings – paintings that, at least momentarily, deceive viewers into thinking that the two-dimensional representation of an object is, in fact, the three-dimensional object itself. In this context, I note an anecdote that you recounted recently: you said that, at art school in the 1990s, you painted a detailed image of a small spoon on the face of an otherwise non-representational painting. One of your “studio- mates,” was initially convinced that you had attached an actual spoon to the canvas, recalling the Ancient Greek tale of the two painters Zeuxis and Parrhasios. Parrhasios tricked Zeuxis into believing that his painting of a curtain was an actual curtain, seemingly hiding another painting underneath. Coincidentally in many of your works, the viewer sees another painting hidden beneath a boldly abstract pattern, as is the case with the works included in the series “The Promise . . . and the Fall.” Yet, this strategy has a very different purpose compared with that of Parrhasios, who
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was deliberately trying to trick his viewers. Your purpose, one that animates your work over the past twenty years, is to explore what a painting can do if it refuses the model of representation defined by the camera obscura. In this series “The Promise . . . and the Fall,” you implicitly contrast “the immediacy of a painting” when presented to viewers in which they “see the painting in one go” with the process through which artists themselves create a painting. Michael Greaves – When I’m talking about “seeing a painting in one go,” I’m not talking about how it unfolds over time for the viewer. When the maker makes the painting, it might take weeks or months to make, and during that time the painter will encounter that work in multiple different states. It will alter and shift and change. It’s part of the process of making a painting and that’s part of the interest that I have with painting. You end up covering things up and erasing things and shifting things and moving stuff around. There’s a delicate balance between something looking good and something doing what it is you want it to. You often destroy, or erase, a painting . . . or ruin a painting – or what you think is destroying or ruining it. But you may find something quite exciting because there’s something that you didn’t expect that happens. Even when you are looking at an object in the world to paint or to draw, there’s a slippage that occurs –“in translation.” You see it, you experience it and then you try and make your hand move to make it work. That’s the whole process and it unpacks over time. What I’m talking about when I say “seeing the work in one go” is that when viewers confront a painting for the first time, they see those weeks, months, even years, compressed into a very, very short moment. Now that short moment might be a half-an-hour, the time that they spend looking at it in the gallery. That time might be less, but it also might be the only time that they ever see it. So, they have a half-an-hour of that compressed time. That initial elongated period of time, the time of making, is condensed into a single moment. That’s the thing that operates on the audience. There’s also something that’s left in the art that might trigger someone to think about something. I feel that this process of “making” is analogous to experiencing life itself. Moving through life is a process. Things happen to you. You experience certain things. They all come back as memories. Sometimes they come back to you as false memories. They may come back to you as memories that provide some kind of element of something that happened before – a “déjà vu,” maybe.1 And you are always trying to “scrape” back that moment of déjà vu, which is effusive and somehow always escapes direct interrogation . . . like it sits on the periphery, like you know it but cannot pin it down . . . and you are trying to get close to that thing. From multiple experiences, I think, you end
