CLAUDIA COMTE

Curves and Zigzags is the third work in an ongoing series of freestanding walls. Claudia Comte’s practice embraces all media with equal ferocity, and she uses this series to examine what happens when two-dimensional painting is superimposed on a three-dimensional structure. Unlike the walls where graffiti artists paint, Comte builds her walls specifically for the work. Curves and Zigzags starts with a stringent geometric composition that gradually morphs into a more organic wavelike pattern reminiscent of Bridget Riley op-art paintings or the gardens of Roberto Burle Marx. Playing on a constant exchange between dualities—nature and culture, order and chaos, geometric and organic form—Comte’s wall suggests a walk through the shifting sands of abstraction, to a place where beauty and contemplation sit side by side.

neville wakefield: The idea of a wall became a hot political topic in the period leading up to Desert X and after it, but you’ve been making painted walls for quite a while. Curves and Zigzags was the third in a series.

claudia comte: Right. The first wall I ever made was 128 Squares and their Demonstration for a sculpture park in the south of France (Domaine du Muy). I was interested in doing a wall painting, but as there were no structures with suitable surfaces, I came up with the idea of building my own support. The result is a structure that straddles painting and sculpture. As a freestanding wall, it doesn’t work as a wall should. It doesn’t effectively demarcate space. It’s a false partition: you can access both sides, loop around it. It’s the illusion of a wall, amplified by the distortion of the shape-shifting pattern.

The pattern for the wall installed in the French sculpture park is a mathematical equation; it takes a square half the size of the wall and divides it twice over. As such, you have a kind of Russian doll scenario, with the smaller squares fitting inside the larger squares. This is where the title 128 Squares and their Demonstration comes from: one side demonstrates what is painted on its reverse, and both sides must be viewed in order to complete the formula. The green of the inset is a deep forest color that reflects the surrounding foliage, but its flatness provides a constant—whereas the tones of the leaves will fluctuate seasonally. The work is still standing there, and the relationship between the wall and the environment will continue to evolve over time. The pattern also has a relationship to the spiral arrangement of leaves, meaning that its rendering isn’t entirely manufactured. We might say that artifice and nature are more entwined than we realize. Yes, it’s something I play around with in all my work. Concepts are digitally rendered and diagrammed, as all of the measurements have to be precisely worked out. The seed of an idea begins in my head, but the rendering process is really where I grapple with an idea. I’ve long been interested in the fabrication process made possible by computation. The fabricated object will closely represent the rendering, and yet there’s always a discrepancy between the design and how it is experienced three-dimensionally.

I’m a great fan of the technical process, as often it means taking things back and forth, and finding a common register between different approaches to materiality and form. Recently, I worked with the computer science department at the University of Freiburg in Germany to produce some 4-D animations for When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth at König Galerie in Berlin. The sculptures for the show were first scanned and then animated. The subsequent animations showed the sculptures liquefying, colliding, and morphing into other shapes. The process created something I couldn’t do in the material world.

Do you distance yourself from the graffiti or mural type of wall painting?

The question is not even if it’s graffiti or not. The typology is different, and it’s important that I work directly on the wall by hand, with the aid of vinyl or tape. I like the group effort, with people creating a skin on a wall, which is also a sculpture. It gives the work energy; it’s not something that was machineprinted and applied as a transfer. I like the human fallibility of reproducing a pattern using paint.

Was the work that you created for Desert X— Curves and Zigzags—the first wall where the geometry of the structure directly corresponded to the geometry of the painting?

Yes, it was, although it was part of an evolving process. The idea for Curves and Zigzags developed out of previous wall works. The geometry of 128 Squares and their Demonstration used black and green inlay, while the second wall, 128 Triangles and their Demonstration, installed at Miami Beach, featured black triangles with blue inlay. These two works are very similar; they have the same size and number of shapes on either side. Like the effect of the green, I enjoyed how the azure tone reproduced a postcard sea blue.

Curves and Zigzags differed in that the shape of the wall wasn’t dictated by the pattern, but

actually augmented the morphing condition of the zigzags and curved lines. The effect produced a kind of structural mirage, in which the structure and geometry worked in tandem to produce tension.

The installation was sited near a trailhead in Palm Desert. The wall was really a line set out in this space that echoed another line between habitation and nature.

The site was perfect. There was a symmetrical placement to Curves and Zigzags: the desert on one side of the wall, and the city on the other. The wall was parallel to the road, with the mountains in the background; it straddled all of these elements.

I was interested in the visual disjuncture the work creates. Curves and Zigzags was so incongruous with the environment—the monochrome makes it pop. But at the same time, it shared a direct relationship to the Southwestern vernacular of desert cities such as Las Vegas, not far away. That’s the point. It’s a wall without structural conceit—it operates more like a surface, transforming before your eyes. I have the feeling people appreciated the surroundings more with the wall there, as it provided a footing in the landscape. In this sense, it wasn’t so much what the work was, but how it interacted with everything around it.

There’s something immediately engaging and cartoonlike about this transition from the geometric to curvilinear. It’s as if psychedelic content had been added to minimalism.

For me there’s a comedic aspect, possibly even slapstick. It’s rather like reaching out for a ledge to stabilize yourself and falling right over. It’s also about joy; there’s something pleasing about the shape’s transition from hard to soft. I’m looking to communicate a feeling or energy: how the work might relax or energize its viewers, communicate joy and humor—that’s what I task myself with.

It gave permission for a different kind of engagement. People did all sorts of things. It activated the landscape, but it also became a backdrop for other activities. You had some break-dancers, and people enacting their own dramas.

Exactly, and that’s what I love to hear. So much of my work is about interaction and opening up ways of experiencing artworks. Even with structured formats—for example, I often build games into my work—it’s a jumping-off point for activity.

For Curves and Zigzags, I invited four break-dancers from the larger LA and Palm Springs area to interact with the wall. Their response completely expanded our sense of what the work could do. The top narrow band was wide enough that they were able to use it as a platform to walk and dance on. The dancers’ interactions created a third layer, in which they were responding to the wall as a space, but also to the pattern as a contouring tool. I was really pleased to see choreography develop out of Curves and Zigzags. We documented the performance and developed a new video work with an electronic score by my great friend and collaborator Egon Elliut.

As you approached the piece, it looked like a straight, flat wall. As you got closer, you realized it was actually bending with the pattern. Was that optical illusion important?

Yes, that’s important. It seemed flat when you stood in front of it, but if you stood to the side, it was completely different. It shifted your perspective— not only of the wall, but of the environment it was embedded in.

Were you surprised by the way people reacted to it?

Absolutely. Interest began during production. People would come up and talk to us all the time; they would ask about the concept and check in to see how things were progressing. It became a backdrop for hikers, runners, dog walkers, Coachella-goers, and art enthusiasts who would pose in front of the work and roam around it, mesmerized. It was a destination, something people would travel to, document, and use. In the end, the turnout far exceeded our expectations.