Peter Shield on Gordons work

Random thoughts on curating an exhibition of Gordon Fazakerley’s paintings in 2000 at Silkeborg Kunstmuseum by the British art critic Peter Shield.

Gordon Fazakerley’s art can loosely be regarded as spontaneous abstract art, but this is a description that hides more than it reveals. The paintings are built up layers, and if one layer is spontaneous, then the next has to take that in consideration. And in some ways the paintings are anything but abstract, because they contain a multitude of associations, conscious and unconscious. There is a strange feeling of both engagement and distance in many of his works.

While many artists prefer to empty their head before their paintings in a kind of kenosis, Fazakerley claims that he likes to confront his canvases with as many ideas in his head as possible. The ongoing process can be discerned from Fazakerley’s own statement:

“When difficulties arise in the paintings, the drawings run down the gutter, if one is lucky. The tricks of art are not enough. The canvas is about to be turned to the wall. One visualises and consults a memory‑bank of pictures to get out of the dead‑water. If not one is leaving them in the waiting room. Paradoxical situations arise. You pick up an ornamental passage from an illuminated manuscript to discover later that it was just a joke made by a monk to stimulate his memory. The paintings are full of quotations from memory”.

With Fazakerley one clearly feels these various layers.  Here it is worth noting that his titles always mean something, that they are a layer in themselves and not just designations. Take a painting he put aside in 1972, and did not remember making, which became damaged. Initially it was Untitled, a rare designation in his work, until we suggested Title Eaten by an Insect! But other than this serendipity, in all his other titles there are traces of the ideas that were present when he started.

This ongoing process is very complicated. He begins to read a book of translated Mexican poems. He finds poets like Mirón and Balbuena. Mirón he interprets as a very strong human being, soldier and writer in the tropical forest. Out of this comes a slim picture in browns of a fragile but heroic male figure. Balbuena’s poem La Grandeza Mexicana is a long sumptuous baroque work with many colourful metaphors from the natural world of Central America. But in Fazakerley’s painting La grandeza Mexicana there are only large lurking human figures. Although he had in mind precisely the Mexican splendour of the poem, it was the dark power ‑ Ferdinand and Isabella? ‑ that brought the Spaniards into contact with it, that came through.

It was only when we had to give the paintings labels that we began to see the importance of the titles. They were associations, complicated associations, sometimes associations we did not understand. Not that it is unusual in today’s art.

Here we have Fazakerley, an artist with access to two cultures, the English and the Danish, but without roots in either. This complicated existence can be tracked in his art. On one hand, we have the perfect nature idylls from his summer stays in Skåne, very Scandinavian. Yet they are not without problems, but they are a kind of formula. They use the moment of recognition  ‑  we are there, even if we have never been there. The smell of luxuriant plants by the water, or the warm stones. Summer? Or a disposition of pleasant forms and colours? Or an intellectual enigma, where the reflection in the water contradicts the painted “reality”? Should we be inside the painting to experience this or outside to read it?