James Quin
Unheimlich
Christopher Jones
Walking down Church Street on a grey morning I glanced through the misted up window of a parked car to read across the top of a spread out tabloid “ A WALK IN THE WOODS”. Below the headline a grainy, rather uncertain monochrome image of some banal spot was printed, the double page spread lending it some kind of importance.
Coming across the exact words in the title of one of James Quin's paintings in this way, just a day after visiting an exhibition of his work at the Globe Gallery last year struck me as particularly apt. I was not so much interested in the coincidence as the way in which I felt I had stepped into Quin's shoes, that it seemed this might be just the kind of moment Quin himself would seize on as the starting point for one of his paintings. Further, that sense of finding oneself in someone else's shoes somehow chimed with the feeling I had on viewing his paintings the previous day.
What struck me as I looked at those paintings was the sense they gave of being the view of a fictitious lone observer - in other words they did not seem to represent Quin's view of the world but rather that of a character he might have invented, or of an alter ego. Each painting could be said to describe a different part of the world that this solitary character inhabits, each painting a fragment of the implied narrative of his isolated existence: here he glimpses a jet plane through the trees, there he takes a walk in the wood strewn with torn remnants of clothing, he faces himself in the mirror the morning after, blank and whey faced, features bleached by a harsh stark lamp. In a studio discussion with Quin, the sculptor Phyllida Barlow put it another way: Quin paints “other peoples experiences.”
Looking at these paintings I feel I have the same relationship to them as I might to the first-person narration of a novel or short story. I feel as though I am seeing these images through another's eyes and understand something of the “narrator ” by the way he describes his world. In this sense part of the subject of the painting curiously exists out of the picture frame. A further analogy is that of film - these paintings have characters, artificial stage sets, locations, vantage points, camera angles, close-ups and dissolves, long shots, implied narratives, and they play with the viewers gaze.
Another aspect of the work that intrigues me is the way that Quin subverts the familiar, converting the ordinary into the uncanny. As Freud implies in The Uncanny the power of the “unheimlich ” is arrived at not by an encounter with anything strikingly odd or unknown, rather it is held within something that has a familiarity about it. Wishing to place some kind of psychological distance between himself and his subject matter Quin begins with second or third-hand material that belongs to a common popular consciousness: he works with mug-shots of missing people from the Big Issue, photographs from the kind of news stories we read on a daily basis, star studded night skies we have all gazed at or, as Quin's Middle Europe, overused images we cannot help but recognize. That the images have already been mediated by photography also provides a sense of familiarity - we know the type of image they are. The reference to photography also implies an element of reality or truth to the facts and, as Freud states, the play between reality and unreality is at the centre of notions of the uncanny. “He (the writer) deceives us by promising to give us the sober truth and then after all steps all over it. ”
Quin disturbs the familiarity he has established in subtle and unsettling ways so that by the time a painting is resolved it will have a resonance far beyond its initial source. Our encounter with one of Quin's paintings might start with a flash of recognition but we will gradually be apprehended by what is out of kilter in it and it is that quality that holds out attention and which is the real content of the work. This quality is usually one of uneasy or disquieting mystery: why is the 747 in A long list of lapses being observed from a hiding place behind the trees? Is the blank-faced man peering out of Missing the observer himself, caught in reflection, or his quarry? Why is the boardroom in the most recent work being entered at night by torchlight? How is it that one image makes us think of another?
In addition to the way Quin places the viewer other devices contribute to the creation of this tension. At the Globe Gallery he installed painting in such a way that they “spoke ” to one another: one painting lending a particular charge to another by physical proximity or by a shared image or setting. Quin also has the knack of working the images so that they accrue resonance by their links to others. In conversation he has described how the painting, Better Late than Never, with its figures isolated in a muted, barren landscape had its genesis in a recent photograph of ice skaters in Suffolk. However, what determined the choice of image and the way he subsequently painted it, was the connection he found in it to Breughel which in turn triggered Quin's memory of the sequence in Tarkovsky's Solaris where footage of Kelvin and Hari's weight-lessness is cross cut with slow pans across Breughels The Hunters in the Snow. It is almost as though Quins interest mirrors that of appositely named Quinn in Paul Auster's City of Glass: “Quinn knew nothing about crime. Whatever he knew about these things, he had learned from books, films and the newspapers. He did not, however consider this to be a handicap. What interested him about the stories he wrote was not their relationship to the world but their relation to other stories.”
I have not yet remarked on how Quin marries his interest in imagery, narrative and fictional conceits with the activity of painting but, for me, what Quin does with paint is the crucial determining factor. The way he paints tell us that crucial bit more about the person observing these scenes; it is what allows Quin to go beyond the vernacular, to convert the opportunities that the source imagery provides.
In the act of painting Quin is a man in a hurry; the top layer is painted in one session, achieved fast, and tipped off the end of the brush. One brush load is sometimes sufficient to achieve an image. This reinforces the sense that permeates much of the work of rapid, furtive observations, hurried accounts, of voyeuristic glimpses; the shorthand of someone on the move. Yet as paintings they gain from this restless distillation because it reveals the versatility and plasticity of paint: dragged colour holds a painting together; two or three smears describe a house; the black marks which sit across the left side of Middle Europe, like careless studio spatter or a child's notation for a flock of birds, are what finally resolves and defines the painting. Choices of colour and tone set the scene, time and place as much as the iconography does. Quin's deft command of the formal elements results in seductive paintings that lure us in, we are held by their fluent ease as the imagery commences its unsettling work.
In James Quin's most recent work for the Red Box Gallery's boardroom he takes some of the interests described here into new territory but his intentions remain resolutely consistent. He dispenses with found imagery referring instead to first hand examination of the boardroom space itself. Painting is used as part of a developmental process towards the production of digital images rather than as the end product. However, the nature of Quin's examination of it, lend the images he creates a psychological distance that is familiar from the earlier paintings. His interest in the position of the viewer is also re-worked: as we consider the digital images installed on the walls and computer monitor of the boardroom there is a gradual, slightly disorientating recognition that we are standing in the very space that is depicted. Reality and fiction become part of each other echoing Bachelard's observation on an extract from William Goyen's novel House of Breath, that “in a passage like this, imagination, memory and perception exchange functions. The image is created through the co-operation of real and unreal.”