CLOSE DISTANCE, BENJAMIN DEAKIN

CLOSE DISTANCE The Tea House Paintings

Benjamin Deakin

CLOSE DISTANCE The Tea House Paintings

Benjamin Deakin

CLOSE DISTANCE The Tea House Paintings April 6 - May 14 2022

Benjamin Deakin

Published on the occasion of the exhibition by JGM Gallery 24 Howie Street London SW11 4AY info@jgmgallery.com Catalogue Design: Alice Wilson ISBN 978-1-9196153-4-9 © 2021 JGM Gallery and the artists All rights reserved Khumbu (Bridge), 2019 c-type print on archival paper 50 x 40cm

Exchanger, 2022 Oil on Panel 64 x 74cm

We have all experienced that uplifting feeling of being in the mountains. This latest series of Benjamin Deakin’s paintings has taken this feeling to a new level, not least through the intensity of his colours – from the deep blue of the skies to the garish vibrancy of the Tea Room interiors.

I am a mountain lover wherever I am in the world. I remember the moment I first saw images of Benjamin’s Tea Room Paintings and how they struck a special place in my heart. Some years ago, great friends Jane and Murdoch Laing lived in the Himalayas for several years. Murdoch, a Canadian doctor, was trekking hundreds of miles each month from village to village to treat remote communities for tuberculosis, prevalent at the time. Jane his intrepid British wife, raised her young children in a local village house with no running water and an oven dug into the earthen floor of their lodgings.

I admired her ability to live without the comforts of their London home, but obviously the exhilarating experience of life high in the mountains, surrounded by the colour and energy was a stronger draw.

Sadly, fate did not take me to Nepal while they were there, but on sporadic visits to London, Murdoch recounted tales of family escapades in the high Himalayas that were spellbinding and that really triggered my engagement with Benjamin’s work.

Benjamin’s paintings take me to this place with a vivid reality. His works are equally spellbinding and allow me to dream of the majesty and community that is found in the high Himalayas. Thank you for these wondrous paintings Ben.

Jennifer Guerrini Maraldi JGM Gallery Founder

Plastic Reality Jillian Knipe talks to Benjamin Deakin The scenes in Benjamin Deakin’s Tea House Paintings are weighted in fact. There is no falsetto here from an artist twisting and churning, as he farms his subconscious for the bizarre or nostalgic. Instead, we have scenes from today’s reality, where ancient fabric production techniques are partnered with the ketchup squeezy bottle. Where table covers have wipe down practicality and picnic chairs are easily stackable to carry up mountains. What makes non-sense aesthetically, makes absolute sense for places which act as linchpins for communities, looking to sustain themselves in environmentally-challenged pockets of the contemporary world.

Jillian Knipe: Your paintings depict mostly unpopulated interiors of Nepalese tea houses; places for people without the people, where compositions are dominated by curious juxtapositions of mundane objects, personal decoration, and highly patterned, soft furnishings. All fore-fronting the mountains which act as sublime backdrops.

Benjamin Deakin: They almost look implausible. But it is important to me that they are of real places I visited while trekking in the Himalayas, and to a large extent, I’ve been faithful to how they appear. I also associate these paintings with the experience of being under lockdown and the yearning to be in far off places. Though I hope they speak to wider things as well, beyond lockdown.

JK: They all sit on a principle which acts in opposition to Caspar David Friedrich’s famous, Wanderer Above the Sea Fog, 1818. This depicts a lone white male explorer standing triumphantly on a mountaintop, overlooking a grandiose vista below and beyond him. I get the impression you’re referring to the opposite: where there is no single, dominant, ruling force. Instead, there’s the slip sliding of imagery that passes from one culture to another.

BD: One of my enduring interests has been how certain tropes from Romanticism keep resurfacing in different modes throughout visual history. It starts out as something highly associated with European and American painting in the 18th and 19th centuries. Then it’s quickly harnessed by the film industry in the early 20th century, particularly in the genre of apocalyptic disaster movies and science fiction, and now it’s used in video games.

JK: Where there’s always one white man who’s going to save the world.

BD: Exactly! Whereas these interiors offer a different way of representing grand landscape imagery, which brings in an idea of cultural exchange. The times when I have embellished things, is simply to make that more apparent. In Recollector, there’s a reference to Post Impressionism in the poster of a Van Gogh painting featuring a Chinese vase. opposite: Khumbu (Stack), 2019 c-type print on archival paper 46 x 37cm

There are also many differently patterned surfaces and representations of space within the interiors, which reflect my interest in repetition. Like posters of mountains next to the views of the mountains themselves. They become images within images which reinforce the fact that our experience of the world is always a mediated one. There’s an absurdity in the idea of “repeating” a mountain. Take the Matterhorn for instance, which has long been a fascination of mine. Walt Disney built a replica in Disneyland and there’s one in George Harrison’s “Alpine” garden in Walton on Thames. There are chocolate Matterhorns, Matterhorn snow globes, and a whole range of mountain kitsch which I find delightful and ridiculous all at once.

JK: There’s another type of repetition in Indicator 2021, where you repeat a cushion with a print of a palm tree on it. This first appeared in one of my favourite paintings of yours: Expander 2019. And there’s also your references to William Morris who was interested in imagery from elsewhere.

BD: Yes, the 19th Century craze for Eastern designs famously influenced the Impressionist painters as well as the Arts and Crafts movement. But the success of those western interpretations of eastern designs meant that they ended up being copied back in the east, creating a cyclical process of design being passed across around the globe like Chinese whispers, endlessly mutating.

JK: And all these takes on takes end up looking slightly unreal. This strangeness gives us a sense of Capriccio, where a landscape or an architectural composition combines real and fantastical elements, but it’s not that at all. These are painted images translated from photographic images.

BD: Yes, they’re of lodging places for tourists, which double as homes for the people who run them. Aesthetically they represent an exchange of ideas and assumptions about what constitutes a welcoming, homely dwelling for a paying guest. The way they’ve decorated them in such a particular way is very interesting to me, especially the combination of the generic with the personal: family photos or a child’s school sports medal. And they also speak to the fact that the Nepalese culture is incredibly nomadic. People walk for weeks to get back to family homelands in the mountains, from their urban homes in the Kathmandu Valley or from abroad.

JK: And as a tourist, you would have used a guide or a team I imagine, who are only there for the tourist season.

BD: We had a Nepali guide and we were a small entourage of British, Cypriot and Nepali trekkers.

There is an interesting analogy between moving through the landscape as part of this extraordinary micro economy of high altitude, human-bound transportation and wider ideas about globalisation.

All the materials for the structures in these paintings have been carried up on either the back of an animal or a human being, and up the most tricky, technical and steep terrain for days on end. It makes the effort they’ve gone to, to make them look the way they do, so much more extraordinary.

JK: It’s the sort of travelling where every little step that you take has to be considered. And the meticulous detail in the paintings reflects that well. Something else I notice in your accompanying photographs is the presence of blue: painted doorframes, tarpaulins and clips for mountaineering gear. These are the close-up details set against the blueish hue of distant mountains. So the colour almost holds those casual travel snaps together and it creates a collapsing of distance in both pictorial terms and in cultural terms.

BD: Yes, absolutely. This series was partly inspired by the sort of Post Impressionists for whom a kind of flattening out or collapsing of space, was key to their work. Artists like Bonnard, Matisse and Vuillard. And it’s no surprise that pattern played quite an important role in a lot of those painters’ works. It was the combination of interior and exterior space in these images that offered a way to investigate those spatial ideas as a painter, which first drew me to working with these amazing images I had taken the year before. I wanted to push the language of the Post Impressionists a bit further by splicing it with this High Romantic and High Pop language of the mountains and plastic condiment bottles.

The blue of distance, to use Rebecca Solnit’s phrase, really disrupts the sense of scale at high altitudes. A destination you think you’ll be arriving at in a few hours takes you two days. I’m trying to bridge that gap between us and this desired distant peak, which goes back to the Western idea of the

previous page: Khumbu (Chairs) (Detail), 2019 c-type print on archival paper 50 x 40cm opposite page: Repeater, 2022 oil on canvas 21 x 23cm

conquering lone white male and the impossibility of that. There’s a kind of humility that comes with trying to cross that divide and realising that you can’t. Many mountaineers talk about this, including in Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind 2003.

JK: One of the other devices you use is the grid. In fact, the windows act like an Instagram grid. Yet, if we think about Mondrian’s grids, where he sets up a system with shifting signifiers, your paintings are, in contrast, very still. Despite that, they start with outrageous colours, including fluorescents, then become quieter and quieter. However, we can see little peep throughs of the original surfaces.

BD: That’s another little painterly device of mine. There’s always a tiny part of the painting where the underlying, brightly coloured ground gets to have a moment of its own. I don’t want to overly seduce the viewer but it’s a reminder that this is a painted space.

JK: And in these as well, you can see the use of dense patterning that either directly or indirectly recalls your exhibition at William Morris Society.

BD: There is a connection, conceptually, to my ideas for those earlier paintings which has to do with the sense of being in multiple places at once. To me, the conceptual framework of News from Nowhere is an imaginative construct for how we are never fully present in our surroundings. And that relates to these interiors. You could step into a cafe off Whitechapel High Street and find yourself in a very similar interior. But this is the Himalayas, or is it an airport lounge, or all three of these places simultaneously?

JK: Though in these images, there are no actual people. I think you’ve used the word uncanniness to describe your work. By not having people in them, they retain that slight eeriness if you like.

BD: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s also a way of emphasising the setting of the spaces, the way that things are arranged on the tables in a certain way, becomes a kind of universal language of welcome, or hospitality. And peppered amongst them are these completely un-aesthetically thought out, incidental groupings of things such as a mirror over a shard of poster, or a family photograph almost jammed behind the curtain. There are all these purposeful arrangements set against these very unintentional ones, which I thought was an interesting dynamic within these spaces.

Paintings of interior scenery usually project passivity as they welcome us inside a space, where we can imagine ourselves stepping across the room, pulling out a chair and settling at the table.

Benjamin Deakin’s depictions of tea houses nestled in the Himalayas do exactly that, and also the opposite. Despite their embracing warmth, and their offer of respite from grueling and often dangerous exterior conditions, they present painterly windows to the actual windows of an actively precarious existence, which has continually found itself a participant in the sweep of trade winds accompanied by their modern solutions. The result is a medley of unexpected props, merging the classical with the contemporary, becoming instantly familiar and confusing. It is something of a resistance to the elements, both geographical and romantic. Close Distance: The Tea House Paintings seems to shift the genre from scenery to scenes: set ups for theatre or film. Are they in readiness or left behind?

Amongst these images, Benjamin Deakin gifts us the freedom to comprise our own drama within the fabrication that is painting.

This is an abridged conversation between Benjamin Deakin and Jillian Knipe. The full version can be heard on Cubitt Radio via www.cubittartists.org.uk

Recollector, 2021 oil on canvas 125 x 150cm

Khumbu (Hot Shower), 2019 c-type print on archival paper 40 x 50cm opposite: Namche Bazaar, 2019 c-type print on archival paper 50 x 40cm

Emanator, 2022 oil on canvas 125 x 150cm

Echo 2: Purple, 2022 oil on canvas 21 x 23cm

Replicator, 2022 oil on canvas 44 x 54cm

Intricator, 2021 oil on canvas 120 x 140cm

Khumbu (Pegs), 2019 c-type print on archival paper 40 x 50cm

Khumbu (Crossing), 2019 c-type print on archival paper 40 x 50cm

Calibrator, 2021 oil on canvas 125 x 150cm

Gazer, 2021 oil on canvas 44 x 54cm

Echo 1: Red, 2022 oil on canvas 21 x 23cm

Sustainer, 2022 oil on canvas 120 x 150cm

Intricator, 2022 watercolour on paper 30 x 40cm

Attainer, 2022 oil on panel 58 x 74cm

Expander, 2019 oil on panel 60 x 46cm

Benjamin Deakin b.1977 Lives and works in London Qualifications & Education:

2005-2006 Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design: MA Fine Art 1998-2001 Kingston University: BA Hon’s: Fine Art Painting 1996-1997 Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design:Foundation Course in Art and Design:

Publications:

Re-Imagining Somewhere and Nowhere: Stephen Baycroft Publishing, 2019

Recent Solo Exhibitions

04/2022 11/2019 03/2018

Close Distance, JGM Gallery, London Reimagining Nowhere, The William Morris Society, London Seeking News From Nowhere, The Concept Space, London

10/2021 07/2021 08/2021 03/2020 12/2019 10/2019 04/2019 2018/19 09/2018 09/2018 06/2017 10/2016 10/2015 09/2015 08/2015 01/2015 11/2014 08/2014 03/2014 07/2013 12/2012 04/2013 08/2013 01/2012 08/2012 04/2011 11/2010 11/2010 10/2010

The Factory Project, Recreational Grounds/Thorpe Stavri, London Unstilled Life, Darl-e and the Bear Gallery, Woodstock Oxfordshire Drawing Room Biennial 2021, Cromwell Place and Drawing Room, London Waving in the Distance, Terrace Gallery, London Detritus, Wells Projects, London (ACE funded) Betwixt & Between, Arthouse1, London Re-Assemble, Collyer Bristow Gallery, London Contemporary British Painting Prize 2018, Huddersfield Art Gallery and Menier Gallery, London Subsumed, St Marylebone Crypt, London Defining Structure, The Cello Factory, London We Are Making A New World, Studio 1.1, London Making the Nature Seen, Tannery Projects, London Screen, Turps Gallery, London Hundreds and Thousands, Lubomirov-Angus Hughes Gallery, London Mid-summer Night, Listhus, Olafsfjordur, Iceland This Year’s Model, Studio 1.1, London ZAP Open, Zeitgeist Arts Projects, London Tan lines, Tannery Arts, London Disclosure, Chart Gallery, London Summer Saloon Show, Lion and Lamb Gallery, London Marmite Prize for Painting, Nationally touring exhibition Drawing Biennial Drawing Room, London Working on the Inside II, Tannery Arts Space, London Parallels of Latitude, UBM Head Office, London Working on the Inside, Tannery Arts Space, London Need and Desire Blue Fin Building, Southwark, London Off the Clock, 92YTribeca Gallery, New York Off the Clock, The Mile End Art Pavillion, London Salon 10, Matt Roberts Arts, Vyner Street, London

2017 2015 2008 2005 2002 2002

Group Exhibitions

Awards & Commissions

Artist-in-Residence: Joya Arte + Ecologica, Velez Blanco, Spain Artist-in-Residence: Listhus, Olafsfjordur, Iceland Artist-in-Residence: KIAC, Dawson City, Yukon, Canada Artist-in-Residence: The University of Kathmandu, Nepal The Slade/West Dean College Scholarship, W.Sussex/London Robert Fleming Award: Artist-in-Residence, The Hospitalfield Trust, Arbroath, Scotland

CLOSE DISTANCE The Tea House Paintings April 6 - May 14 2022

Benjamin Deakin