Paul Becker is a painter, drawer and writer. He has exhibited widely, in the UK and internationally. In terms of his writing, in 2022 he published How We Made ‘The Kick Inside’ with Joan Publishing, a fiction set within the production of Kate Bush’s legendary first album. In 2017, with Juan de la Cosa, Becker published ‘Choreography/Coreografia’, a fiction based within RW Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette (1976). His latest novel, ‘Good Work’ is set around and inside the ending of Claire Denis’ 1999 film ‘Beau Travail’. Becker was awarded a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and in 2020, he was the Abbey Fellow in Painting at the British School at Rome.
Your work draws on fin de siècle themes and early 20th-century aesthetics. Is this primarily an aesthetic interest, or are you also drawn to this period for its historical or cultural context?
Like most artists, I look at and think about a lot, not just painting but film, literature, eras, history, music, design etc. Great painting is unbelievably scarce so it is no crime to source influences or find kinship across art historical time. It also flattens time in a strange and important way. I am never too specific otherwise the images would be too tethered, mired or nostalgic.
I am interested in the intensity and perversity of the fin de siecle. I look at a lot of Belgian Symbolism and Leon Spilliaert . Also certain writing of that time is redolent and pertinent to now (despite the malignant misogyny). There is a lot of cruelty and a large amount of doom.
Many of your figures often inhabit “semi-theatrical spaces.” How much planning or “staging” goes into these scenes before beginning a painting/drawing?
I don’t plan anything. I do want images to have some clarity because they are essentially ambiguous, equivocal but I find the clarity, I don’t impose it. There has to be something unprecedented about them in the context of what I do - that surprise is what I am looking for. They don’t exactly materialise from thin air because I have motifs and themes that reoccur but I have no idea what they are going to look like, I couldn’t work like that.
Conductor, 2023, Oil on linen, 96 x 92 cm
Where do the subjects in your paintings come from? Are they purely imagined, or do you draw from specific sources or references?
Things do vaguely reoccur but nothing specific apart from the motifs I mentioned and the fact that they are usually figures. Mostly I am looking for a particular feeling or atmosphere I cannot quite identify. To evoke this gives the images a certain autonomy.
Is ambiguity something you pursue in your work, or is it more of a byproduct of your process?
Both I think! I hope.
In 2024, you curated a show featuring Nigin Beck, Nadia Hebson, and Marietta Mavrokordatou. How did you approach curating in contrast to making art?
In the same way I make work: that is instinctively and thoughtfully. Things work best when those two aspects coexist. Also I had a lot of help from the gallery, my lovely friends at Mackintosh Lane, so my bad decisions were easily rectified. Also the artists were all there and they usually know best.
Lot 7. Paul Becker - Untitled (Mask I)
Lot 8. Paul Becker - Untitled (Mask II)
As an artist and a writer, how does one practice inform the other?
My drawing and painting come out of this idea of ‘not knowing’ as a modus operandi, strategic failure as a way of allowing the work to be surprising and to establish its own ‘existence’. The writing is about this whole idea, an investigation of that process.
Do you have any projects on the horizon that you would like to share?
In terms of the drawings and paintings I just want more time to do more. I have written two books about artists making work. I would like to complete a trilogy with a fiction based on Bonnard’s time at Le Cannet during the war and the pressing question of what it is to be making art and beauty when the bombs are falling.
Visit Paul Becker's Website
Questions by Victoria Lucas
