Dispersions: 50 COVID drawings
Dear friends,
As I am an artist who often works outdoors, there is a seasonal aspect to my studio practice. I am beginning to chronicle recent work in a seasonal/quarterly newsletter I hope you will find intriguing. This first issue highlights Dispersions.
In early 2020, I suddenly saw a connection between the things I was reading about—aerosols, relentless mutation, transmission patterns—and the physical behavior of my studio materials. The trajectory of a cloud of powdered graphite falling across a sheet of paper, or the unpredictable path of a bit of solvent carrying traces of oil paint opened up a set of formal explorations that lasted for more than a year, yielding a sequence of fifty works related to COVID-19, executed on a French oil-resistant paper. Most measure 130 x 92 cm (51 x 36 inches).
These works are abstract propositions about things we cannot see, not responses to nature and the visible world. The strangeness of the pandemic experience required a new set of forms, and a number of the works are built around the tension between organic markings that might recall the path of a virus particle, and a more arbitrary (sometimes grid-based) system, like the built environment, or a mapping of toxin concentrations.
Art historian and critic T. J. Clark and I have developed a lively correspondence in recent years, and Tim wrote:
I guess you could say, Christopher, that the COVID-19 drawings are as abstract a set of works as you've ever done. And as realistic. I feel -- I see -- the world of COVID in them: the world of confinement, invisible danger, leakage, contamination, vulnerability, "being out of touch." As well as the beauty of working with and against these things, this general thinning out of life -- the beauty of putting the vulnerability in a painting.
I reckon your long apprenticeship to Cézanne, and to the "empirical" tradition of abstract painting that derives from him, has turned a corner here. What I admire most about the new drawings, in other words, is the way they seem to be in search of the feel of a whole (unwelcome) new time... And wasn't that what abstraction was always in search of?
For Dispersions, I produced a six-minute video, and Lachlan (our youngest, and a student at NYU Tisch) created a website around the body of work.
https://dispersions.cbcampbell.com/
I have continued to sell work in New York and directly from my studio, but I need assistance in finding a major gallery to represent my work. From 2017 to 2019, I built a strong profile in Shanghai with a gallerist, Li Zhou of Classic Jen Gallery, who showed my work at art fairs in China and Miami, and placed paintings in a number of collections. However, sales in China stopped completely in early 2020, and the most recent Chinese art fairs were abruptly shut down just last month. If you think of someone with whom you might connect me, please reply and let me know.
As always, find my full portfolio on my website (cbcampbell.com), and follow me on Instagram @studiocampbell for recent works and studio process.
If any of this speaks to you, I would be delighted to hear from you. Please feel free to forward this email to anyone who might be interested.
Thanks,
Christopher Campbell
