Let’s go to the roots. At what point did you know that you wanted to pursue art professionally?
I started getting into drawing when I was in third grade, eight or nine years old. It began because a friend of mine in class was drawing in class and I started drawing with him. And for a number of years in Primary School I assumed I would either be a comic book artist or a fantasy illustrator, because those are the things that I was excited as a little kid. Then, when I was around twelve, my father showed me a book of Picasso paintings and said “Oh, you can do this thing, where you just paint whatever you want, and people pay millions of dollars for it”. Before that, I had no idea that was a possibility. So, I thought, I'd rather do something like that, instead of doing something that someone else is telling me to make. That was a big thing.
You know, I didn't grow up around art really. My dad would go to the museum every now and then. But, my parents don't own any artwork; maybe someone had a Monet poster or a Georgia O’Keeffe poster in their house, but I didn't grow up around a lot of artwork. My grandmother would make little watercolor paintings, but I didn't have any real exposure to them until I started going to high school. I had a wonderful set of art educators in high school who exposed me to the larger narrative of Western art history and how to connect that to some of the things that I was thinking and feeling at the time. So, all of that coalesced into my wanting to spend my life making art.
So, Picasso’s catalogue was a kind of pivotal moment for you, because at that moment you understood that there was such a profession as an artist?
Yes, that's true. Nobody in my family was an artist. My mom studied dance for a period of time, but she gave up on that even before I was born. Maybe she danced a little bit after, but as far the professional pursuit she never really got too far with it. So, growing up it was like: “You can't make a living doing this thing that you love, you have to have a real job!” Both my mom and stepfather were public school teachers, so I grew up in a pretty middle-class family. They were interested and pretty well educated, but not engaged in culture in the same way that I've become.
When you start working, do you have an idea of the finished painting or is this idea born in the process of work itself? Do you work on multiple canvases at once, or rather prefer concentrating on one painting?
I work on a lot of canvases at once. It's kind of a necessity, because of the overall way in which I work, which is to build up multiple layers over time, and wear them each down, and repeat these processes. If I was just trying to focus on one painting at a time, I would have a lot of time where I was doing nothing, because I’d be waiting for paint to dry. Now I have 12-15 paintings, that are in various stages of completion, that I'm adding layers to, waiting to dry, waiting to unstretch, waiting to scrape down, depending on where they are and what they need. Because of that, and because of the role that chance plays in my process, I don't have a specific image or idea of what the piece is going to look like when it's finished. But, I have an idea of how I'm going to make it. Which is to repeat these processes.
Installation view of Painting the Infinite: Power & Process, Kadar Brock, Jeremy Lawson and Ben Tong @ Bode, Berlin, 2024
When you are working on twelve canvases at a time, they would probably all be dedicated to one exhibition, right? So you already have the concept of the show and the direction, in which you are moving. In the end, that is a kind of series that you are developing simultaneously.
Yes, I think that's an apt way to think of it, serially, or a group of paintings. For the last six years I've been working with a similar subject matter for the images and layers of paintings that I then erode. All the paintings that I'm working on have that in common, have that subject matter… Saying it's the subject matter is a little disingenuous, because even though it is a subject, the paintings are not solely about that. The subjects and the images that I paint are kind of springboards that allow me to make the final object. This material speaks to some ideas and concepts that I'm interested in, and so the images and subjects are sites from which I can extrapolate these ideas and concepts. So, as I'm working on them, I use the subject matter, because I find it fascinating, it’s personally relevant to my life, and it’s something I’m interested in unpacking. I see that as part of my experience that speaks to bigger themes and ideas that are contemporaneous, even if the subject matter is not necessarily contemporary. In that way all the works have that in common, as well as the processes that I'm doing to create them. When I work, I always try to further my formal understanding of things that I can do in my process, ways that I could push the formal aspects of the paintings, ways that I could allow the process to guide me to whatever next visual or formal thing needs to happen. So, if I think I made an error, but there's something happening, how do I lean into that mistake a little more, how do I lean into that visual or formal thing that has happened, that I feel maybe uncomfortable with or unsure about, how do I lean into that to allow it to take more space to maybe become something that I can figure out and put forward in a way that’s exciting.
You have mentioned before that sometimes you see an artwork of yours and can still remember the audiobook or podcast you were listening to while creating it. To what extent does the book or podcast influence the final product?
I think the way that the content I take in influences the work depends on what it is. If I'm listening to an audiobook that is relevant to the subject matter and my research, then of course it’s going to find its way into the work in some way, shape, or form. What I think I was speaking about in that interview is that I have a kind of mnemonic memory-based relationship with my works. Since I have painted each layer of the paintings, as I'm deconstructing them later on, if I see a color that corresponds to an earlier layer that triggers a memory. A memory for me, and, hopefully, even though I don't expect a viewer to necessarily have the same cache looking at work, the experience of recollecting or relating to something that's older from a different time, that prompts that kind of experience of contemplation or reflection. That is something that is important to me, and something that I want to create and make space for in the world. So I have that mnemonic relationship. I think it's kind of odd, when I look at the painting and think, that I was definitely listening to A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin while working on that, or listening to a podcast about far right extremists when I was working on this, or listening to Aphex Twin when working on that. This is kind of tangential, but, in a number of studio visits that I've had recently with other artists, just to look at some of the paintings from the last six to eight months, a number of them have brought up the idea of sound in relation to the paintings, and sound as a correlation to abstraction. So, memory and sound as ways of describing the space created in abstract painting is kind of an exciting way to think about it.
Kadar Brock, inner visions, that's how you live in the light, god is good, where does the light live, the highest good, light of the holy spirit, 2021-2024, oil on canvas, 182.9 × 152.4 cm (72 × 60 in)
Your paintings explore history, including the history of abstraction, personal psychology, but also materials and surface. What are the key messages and ideas that you would like to transmit with your art?
I have the overarching goal of creating a contemplative or self-reflective experience through painting. And having that come about through mundane and ritualistic labor. For me, because of the subject matter that I use, its relationship to my own religious and spiritual upbringing, as well as my relationship to painting and the history of abstraction, it's very important to find a contemplative or spiritual experience in painting, while also not taking on some type of grander narrative or mythology. And so, even though I’m using images from a specific religion, the process is about deconstructing those images and therefore deconstructing that belief system. My goal is to create paintings that offer the experience of what would be called “spiritual” without necessarily relying on or propagating some of the mythologies that go around that. The main question is how do I create this, this object that speaks to my own experience, both with the subject matter of my spiritual and religious upbringing, but also my experience of trying to reflect on that and deconstruct that, and have that deconstruction reflected in the process. Simultaneously, I am trying to get to a place where I can find the placeholder of what would be a spiritual practice through the repetitive labors and actions that I take in my studio. Instead of having that be part of some external mythology or story that I'm adapting, I’m just trying to find that in my day-to-day life through art making. So, hopefully, the way that I try to move towards that formally, is by looking at things that might prompt that type of reflection, and primarily I pull from this idea of ruins being a site of reflection, and that is something that comes out of romanticism in the 19th century. I am trying to recreate this experience of the passage of time, of a certain type of decay, and how that can translate into an everyday sublime, a boring sublime.
Speaking about romanticism, Germany is celebrating the 250th birthday of Caspar David Friedrich, and the exhibitions are opening everywhere. Do you like his works?
That’s exciting! I love Friedrich! I love that trajectory of romanticism, into abstraction, and into American abstraction. Where do I get to both relate to that, but also parse out some of the things in the mythologies and stories that are maybe not as relevant or a little problematic today, or that I feel a little ambiguous about… What’s interesting is that the trajectory of art from romanticism into abstraction is very much paralleled by the trajectory of spiritual and religious thought that evolves into the New Age subject matter that I research. They both have similar origins in the Western esoteric thought. So, it's really cool to see how writers, thinkers and artists of the romantic movement were also interested in some of the religious or spiritual ideas that gave birth to my subject matter. And that subject matter connects with people like Af Klint, who was into spiritualism, like Kandinsky or Mondrian who were theosophists. It's cool to be able to touch on both those things, those parallels can be a framework through which to look at my work, and what I do.
Your art has made a shift: In 2021 you have been experimenting with landscapes, but then turned back to abstraction. Could you please explain, what caused this transition and why did you decide to go back to abstraction?
My works all have figurative elements in them, they've just been defaced or worn away or erased or painted over. 99% of the layers of the paintings that I do, are all images, are references to this archive that I have been building, specifically focused on this New Age religion that I've been researching for the last six years. Prior to that, I also incorporated images from comic books, from films, because they are sites where I could pull out some of the themes I was interested in. Starting in 2018, I've almost exclusively taken images and source material from a continually growing collection dedicated to this New Age religion. In the process of building that archive of images I've also traveled to places associated with the group’s history. I've documented them and taken photographs of the landscapes, of the buildings, of all these little details, structures, and things that I've found. So, when you see a painting that has a landscape element in it, it still deals with the same subject matter, because the source material that I'm using for that painting is the landscape image that I’ve either photographed or found in an old newspaper, or book or so on. It's still coming from the same source material even though it happens to be a landscape. There are different sorts of relationships – between landscape, between belief, between the sublime, between the spiritual, that get touched on. A number of the landscape source images that I've used for my paintings are from Utah, where the founder of this religion was born. Those are images of the American West ,and specifically of coal mining ghost towns, because the founder of this church comes from such a ghost town, incorporates another set of ideas and subjects: the idea of the west, the frontier, of coal mining, of American consciousness and mythos. I try to bring that subject matter into the conversation around belief, around memory, around forgetting, self-reflection and self-criticality – all these things that I'm interested in.
The ghost towns are also ruins, which speaks to what we touched on earlier. I found it really fascinating that the person who made up this religion was from a place that no longer existed. In American culture there is a big reverence for people who are “self-made,” for individualism. Additionally, a part of that is people who make up their own story, a story that is not necessarily true, but it resonates with the kind of cultural mythology that America revers. So, I thought this could have been one of those instances, so it seemed really important for me to travel there and see if this person was from the place that he said he was, because the place didn't exist anymore… so how do I triangulate and track down someone who is from a place that doesn't really have its own record system anymore, or its own physical existence. These are the connections to the landscapes that I typically paint.
Kadar Brock, you'd like to be in the air, aura balancing, the ocean of love and mercy, familiarity is fluency, 2018-2024, oil on canvas, 182.9 × 152.4 cm (72 × 60 in)
Considering your technique, one can suggest that the processes of destruction and creation are equally important to you. How did you come up with this technique and more importantly, why?
It connects to this idea of mundane labor. For many years I was an art handler. I would take down and put up exhibitions, cleaning and painting walls, sometimes covering up a mural, or graffiti, or what not… Learning how to take a wall from looking like an artwork, or an installation, back to being blank. At some point I thought it would be interesting to see if I could take a group of paintings, that I had made previously, as close to blank as possible. So I started applying the techniques, that I used in the gallery, to my own paintings. Simultaneously, I was also interested in the idea of reducing the hierarchy of the canvas as kind of a special object and space. So I was thinking, if I move paint around on my palette is that not the same thing as moving paint around on the canvas? So why is there a hierarchy between the gesture that nobody sees on my palette, and the gesture that goes on this canvas that hangs in a gallery? I was thinking, that I should treat my canvases the same way that I treat my palette, and after I make this gesture, I should scrape it away with the razor blade that I clean my palette with. So this kind of convergence, of treating the painting space with less, not even respect, but to just treat it like the wall which gets painted every couple of years. I'm going to scrape it down, patch it, cover it. It was a way of trying to take the sanctity of the painting and the canvas down a notch, and treat it in these other ways that were much more kind of banal, and associated with labor and routine actions. Because I think that type of banality, of routine is a way towards a more thoughtful and appreciated day to day, there is something meditative and spiritual in those actions. Those are the ways that we mark our movement through space and time. I am making performative paintings to a degree, but they're not grandiose and I don't like grandiose gestures. I think a destroyed Roman fresco is so much more interesting in that passage of time! There's a depersonalization that happens, where time becomes a collaborator. In these semi-public spaces, other people who might interact with that object, can be collaborators, and so to deemphasize that individualism, deemphasize that ego, deemphasize all the ideas that are couched in that, of the patriarchy, of genius. I’d rather step away from that than towards that.
In your art practice you rework elements of graffiti and abstract expressionism. Are there any artists from those art movements that you particularly admire or who have influenced your art?
Maybe I'm contradicting myself by saying I love Rothko and Newman, but I also really appreciate Bas Jan Ader, Jack Goldstein, these more performative artists, like John Baldessari burning all these paintings, as I also destroy my own work in a sense. Or someone like the French painter Simon Hantaï. But also, artists who have taken interest in different spiritual systems like Af Klint, Kandinsky and Mondrian. The Transcendentalist Painting Group. So, it's this mix of people who were Believers. I'm not a Believer but I'm fascinated by the relationship of painting and belief, and also people who are doing formal things I'm excited about. I’m finding the space between those two.
And except for anime, music and abstract expressionism, – where else do you draw inspiration from? What hobbies, activities or personalities are your key inspiration sources?
What I've been most excited reading over the last couple years are books about religion and religious studies. I think the typical view of the religious studies scholar, and this is something that really excites me, is this “both/and” worldview. For instance, the organization that I research and the guy who founded it, part of the reason why I was so excited to look at him, is because I was curious whether he believed it or not, whether he was making this stuff up and pulling it together, and just being a charismatic charlatan, or if he really thought he had this higher consciousness in him. And the position of a religious studies scholar is that both things are true. So, we can look at these characters, or these stories, or these kind of experiences, as both from the viewpoint of a subjectivity that is true, and also we can try to contextualize it with rational and naturalistic thinking, science and psychology etc. We can try to understand how this person had that experience, while also acknowledging the validity of their own subjectivity. I think that holding space for two contradicting world views, and coming to some type of harmony, is a really powerful way to think about things. And it's something that is not encouraged in contemporary Western culture. There's a lot of this or that, black and white, which loses so much nuance, and so much of the ambiguity that is essential to the human experience, in order to move through a world with compassion and understanding, to be able to relate to people with different points of view and different experiences.
Could you please give us a quick glance into the future. Do you have any ideas in mind, that you would like to bring into life one day?
I do! I'm obviously working on lots of paintings, and in the last four to six months I have brought a new element into them, where I'm going back in with oil paint, adding touches to redact areas that I think I have either sanded too much, or scraped too much, while simultaneously also trying to lean into the parts, like lean into the moments where I end up scraping too much or sanding too much and letting those things coexist. So, this new element of a more human touch, a little bit of repair and rejuvenation through oil paint, and through these small gestures that are being added to the space that is created through all the destruction. That’s been really exciting.
I'm also working on weavings. Part of my studio practice is that I collect a lot of the residues from the processes that I do, and I use some of the materials that I have collected to make these weavings. I've already completed one kind of almost me-sized, what looks basically like a rug, made from all my old painting rags. And my painting rags, in turn, have been made from all my old T-shirts and bedding, so it’s a kind of upcycling. I'm currently working on one piece made from the trimmings of the edges of canvas. So again, a way I can refigure and reform the painting object, through these residues from the other paintings that I make.
Kadar Brock in his studio, photo: Nicholas Calcott
Interview conducted by Valentina Plotnikova