Peter Morrens

On trying to be the third person.

 

 

Date of interview: February 2018

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes

 

 

Close to Antwerp, in a sunny Merksem studio, I meet a welcoming, lively Peter Morrens (°1965). It always takes some getting used to his unbridled energy; the most important characteristic that makes him the inspired, versatile and hard-to-define artist whom I have now been following for a couple of years. Peter is represented by Ghent based Kristof De Clercq gallery and involved as a drawing/graphics professor at LUCA Ghent. He does lectures, performances and produces a multitude of series and editions under just as many heteronyms. Until 2016, together with artist Rik De Boe, he ran the exhibition space Voorkamer in the city of Lier.

 

During the interview, he is in perpetual movement, gesticulative and hyperasociative. His knowledge and gift for remembering quotes are impressive. The somewhat roguish reserve of first soon makes place for a familiar openness. Few sentences get finished and when they are, they end up somewhere completely different than where they started. Because every turn is interesting though, I but gladly follow. After two hours of talking, Peter asks me if the interview has already started…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How should we look at your studio set-up?

 

Well, to start with, I always work in notebooks. I never fail to carry those things with me. Afterwards, those early ideas get into a transitional phase. That’s what you’re looking at right now. I’m always working on different things at once; I look upon those works as building blocks to be puzzled together in the gallery or exhibition space. I like to be very thoughtful about how something is shown; I think it’s just as important as making the work itself. I may use about every medium at my disposal and wouldn’t like to be known as the ‘grey charcoal artist’. I really love to experiment around.

 

Could it be that something comes together in your drawings?

 

Yeah, that’s certainly true. Nevertheless I always search for something else… when I apply one method for too long things start to go a bit too smooth. I’d prefer some resistance in my process. Something has to be a little bit ‘off.’ It’s about the intensity by which something happens. I rather like the idea of walking on a cutting edge, making metaphors literal. A framed piece can be taken apart again, repainted, destroyed. Besides, I am interested in art history, film, literature, and music. I’d like all of those things to find their place. I mean, knowledge doesn’t have to burst out of the work, but still… I presume that if you have made a drawing of it, you can really start to understand something.

 

 

 

 

I rather like the idea of walking on a cutting edge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Times change. Do you consider yourself to be post-modern? What role do topical affairs play within your work?

 

I don’t really think about myself in those terms. But I do hope that the current state of the world is in my work. I even perceive it as the role of the artist. I think it’s important not to fall into retrograde traps, which happens very easy when you work with psychological affects. I find that post-modern attitude quite disturbing regardless of it being the era from which I stem. What especially bothers me is the ‘anything goes’ mentality. On the contrary I really like to be very conscious of how, where and why a work comes to be. Of it being truly lived and existential. In a way you could say that the basic materials may or could be banal.

 

You mean anecdotal?

 

Rather how the story of a work’s genesis also becomes part of the work itself. In that respect, the artist always talks about the genesis of a work. What’s important to me is that everything carries its own inherent energy and this has everything to do with how different works are juxtaposed. I’d like to add that I almost never show my work in this studio set-up. I find it very hard to allow people in this private try-out area.

 

 

 

 

What especially bothers me is the ‘anything goes’ mentality. On the contrary I really like to be very conscious of how, where and why a work comes to be. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Your drawings often refer to the photographic. What is the role of craftsmanship in your work?

 

Of course it is a base to start from. Still, I only try to apply graphical assets to the point where they evoke contrasts within a set-up. I can work with flashy colors and sculpture as well; sometimes I splash a whole space full of paint for some wild performance. Just yesterday I scribbled down a huge, very banal penis just because I felt like it. I don’t know what I should do with it; maybe I’ll make an installation with it later. Still I understand lot’s of people may find that your best work is the work in which you show your mastery of the medium. But craftsmanship can also mean scribbling down some stupid doodle in one try. Anyway, it demands enormous concentration. Sometimes you can conceive the clearest of thoughts just to have it blown away by ambiguity one second later. You encounter those energies in life as well.

 

When is a piece finished?

 

When it has left the studio I guess? There’s that constant stress about something that is finished. Maybe it’s an impossible decision to claim you have completed a piece. Making drawings under the heteronym Herman Smit it’s clearer. They’re drawings after nature, made on sight and in one go. They’re finished when the landscape or portrait is interpreted with the accompanying emotion. This takes something between ten minutes and an hour or so. Herman Smit belongs to the nineteenth century more than this one. I’m thinking about a new show with ‘his’ work, given not much has been showed by him lately. It’s also an extension of my constant need to write everything down, the little notebooks I carry with me constantly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes you can conceive the clearest of thoughts just to have it blown away by ambiguity one second later.

 

 

 

 

When does your work border on the performative?

 

Herman Smit can be viewed as a performance. Trough him I try to activate and confuse the gaze. People may wonder who this Herman is, where he comes from, what drives him to make these drawings. I let him die in 2005, when his first book got released. When I look back upon it now, of course it’s very clear how much his work relates to my oeuvre, that it’s not two different people at all. Pessoa, who toyed around with exercise of style and sampling genres as well, also influenced me in that respect. I always combined a multitude of activities, thought many aspects of being an artist to be interesting.

 

What will stay with you from Voorkamer, the exhibition space you ran together with Rik De Boe?

 

Oh, I learned, worked and experienced so much there. Especially the notion of simultaneity and combining different work methods came to realization in Voorkamer. Doing it together with Rik, who thinks quite differently about stuff than I do, gave us a dialectical framework. The juxtaposition of my rather activist, very physical tension with Rik’s more historicizing, intuitive approach was the core power of the project, like a balancing exercise. Also the fact that we considered ourselves as artists rather than curators. Because the influence of a curator over a work or oeuvre can be so overtly big and almost more important than the content of the work itself. First and foremost, we tried to have a visual discourse. We weren’t interested whatsoever in if an artist was represented by a big gallery or had just left school. We really made exhibitions about works of art.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How do you decide if something does or doesn’t work?

 

When I look around my studio I see a lot that doesn’t (laughs). We have such an unimaginably rich art history. If I’ve seen a bad exhibition, an interesting image may pop up right around the corner: in a book, a movie or where ever. There’s a lot to be inspired by. That quantity and richness is incredible. Even our very local art history goes back forever. Of course I can be mad sometimes about an image, although lately I’m much more able to put such things in perspective. Especially when it comes to art school I can still be aghast sometimes. You’re granted such sacred time in an educational context. What a pity it is to waste all that.

 

When I was in school, people like Wim Mulders (art theorist red.) were very engaged in the field of contemporary art and encouraged us to really push the boundaries of our atelier. This gave me a firm theoretical and historical ground that I have leaned on ever since. My students must know that all doors are open as long as they go out by themselves. Everybody wants to talk, be curious and approachable. Those boundaries are absolutely not as rigid as they might seem. 

 

Isn’t it so that nowadays, there’s a lot of emphasis on credibility and name; the contests someone has won, the magazines someone is featured in?

 

I don’t think, for example in Voorkamer, that we cared about credits. Also in the academy or the art world in general there wasn’t much opportunity to make a name for yourself. Maybe I was lucky in that respect? Anyhow, there was never the ambition to strengthen my market value or anything like that. Maybe this isn’t so interesting? I wonder, did we talk about the work yet? (laughs)

 

Of course we did, but I think it’s also relevant to talk about being an artist.

 

I think it’s interesting when you say something about the ‘surface’. Maybe it’s very superficial to talk exclusively about the work itself. But an artist always just lingers on the surface. He touches it while making a drawing, painting of sculpture. He covers and scratches it. Maybe this is a psychoanalytical way of saying it, but it’s like the boundary between talking and making an interpretation. Who’s talking when one talks about oneself? He who speaks or he who listens? Is that the same person? Actually it’s quite hard to get to the heart of things. Hence the surface is the place where you dwell most of the time.

 

My work probably is a catalogue raisonnée that will only be finished when I’m dead. Maybe the others can even complete it or make additions. Of course I can’t reach that ideal position of the outsider. At the same time I also try to create work as a ‘third person’, that distance is quite necessary.

 

 

 

 

Actually it’s quite hard to get to the heart of things. Hence the surface is the place where you dwell most of the time. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you think of yourself as a protagonist in your oeuvre?

 

All of my sensibilities are captured in the work. Also my social engagement, my obsessions. Care and attention are connected to the way I work, implying affection, a physical act. One makes a double if one creates something. When I make a self-portrait of me as a child, the work isn’t as much about me as it is about ‘him’. Who is who can be understood in a multitude of ways. There are different layers. In this drawing I’m a kid, so we look back in time. The drawing is based on a picture that I didn’t take myself. Which connection does that image have with the now? There’s a shift in medium, size, time and perspective. Again that distance, the attempt at being the third person.

 

There’s a beautiful painting by Zurbarán in which a young Jesus is playing with a crown of thorns. A magnificent game with the position of the viewer towards time. Of course we all know what’s going to happen later on, yet we see a deceptively peaceful interior. A whole realm of images is evoked, which I think is absolutely marvelous. In the mean time, it is the viewer with whom a game is played: of course Zurbarán is the one in control and he knows very well what he’s doing.

 

You also produce text drawings under the name Point Blank Press, how do these images come about?

 

Up to this day, more than two thousand drawings where produced under the name Point Blank Press. Mostly they are sentences or words that I picked up somewhere. It can also be free associations that have an internal origin. Actually it’s a continual exercise in auditory observation. Usually there’s a fixed day on which I work on the Point Blank Series. For me, they are drawings based on the stuff of language.

 

There is a vulnerability on the border of what is and isn’t an image. Often it comes down to a decision, a choice. Tadeusz Kantor has an interesting view on that, the way he lost his faith in painting because it is ‘just’ a reproduction of reality, the way he looks for unpractical objects to be given use. Because for him the poor, worn out, banal object has an artistic value. ‘L objet entre l’eternite et la poubelle’. The object between eternity and the trash can. It makes me feel good about things that I can decide to completely change their value at whatever moment I desire.

 

 

 

 

Like Tadeusz Kantor said, a work of art is an object between eternity and the trash can.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In your house there’s also a small studio, how do the two workspaces relate to one another?

 

At the moment I have an open space here that functions as an archive but can be used to make big, physical and dirty work. For the smaller pieces I tend to stay at the drawing board in my home. There were times where I made the big charcoal drawings at home as well, but for a number of reasons that was very unpractical. What’s so nice here is the huge wall where I can prepare a show or gallery set-up. Depending on the project I repaint the whole room in different shades of grey, which I also use in my exhibitions.

 

The first part of the day usually takes place at home. The Point Blank series for example are always worked on early in the morning. Afterwards I leave for the studio, meaning a transition to a different mindset. A lot of sketches and notes come about when I’m on my way, thus the movement between home and working space is essential. It’s the idea of ‘the moving observer’. I tend to have a hyper focus on details. Whilst moving, this attention is amplified. To get more of an overview I work towards installations, I can’t seem to get that panorama in a single piece. An installation must look like a room in which you enter for the very first time. Only then one can see everything and nothing at the same time. Only after that, a close-up on different parts happens. The way your gaze moves tells you something about yourself. For me, it is very tactile, almost sensual. I often look for the odd, something that speaks of the political aspect of the public space. An interaction between that what makes me warm inside and that what makes me angry. This happens best in an unfamiliar place, that’s why there needs to be perpetual change in the studio set-up. If you want to say something in a public debate, you should also leave your comfort zone. This implies a physical act. I think all of my work is the result of rather heavy physical action. I really dance while I’m working. It’s a very rhythmical, hypersensitive thing, very much related to music of course; we didn’t even talk about that! (laughs)

 

What do you listen to when you’re working? I can imagine something punkish…

 

Well, I do stem from the punk generation and I really like that DIY mentality. But I was never a real punk; I listen to a huge variety of music, ranging from chansons to free jazz and everything in between… I like pumping rhythms and intrusive dissonants that make me think of my work in a way. The energetic, emotional aspect of music is something that excites me and a thing I strive for in my visual work and performances. Wait, let me play you something so the readers can also hear! (laughs)

 

Interview: Maxim Ryckaerts

Photography: Lola Pertsowsky

English editing: Tyche Beyens