Dale Frank is exhibiting 16 new paintings at Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong. It’s been suggested that this suite created in 2016 represents a continued exploration of the ‘potential of painting’ building on what has become a signature palette of resin, glass, and varnish by adopting fire retardant foam, compression foam, and human hair. The idea and physical properties of transformation, which we see in his choice of alchemic media such as pigmented varnishes that are poured, melted, and folded to create abstract images, is a mainstay in Frank’s approach to painting. But the artist’s hand isn’t a subject he settles on, as his pithy exhibition statement underscores – “From the very beginning, my work has been premised on the notion that the art produced is independent of myself. Paintings tend to be more interested in pointing out how they exist, act, and ‘live’ beyond the realm of human perception, a paradox of sorts given the contrived nature of artworks.” As such, we were pleased to engage with the artist’s frank account of painting.
What are the key reasons that make you think painting today has a ‘strategic intervention with a situational meaning’?
We know that the meaning of information heavily depends on the situation in which it comes about. In other words: meaning of information depends upon the context it is in. A painting like any information system supplies you with information according to just as many differing sets of meaning, in just as many differing situations. It’s the world of fixed meaning grating the real world of situational meaning, like qualitatively differing tectonic plates.
Modernist people of the fixed meaning world don’t have a clue of the problems they are creating for themselves with art in requesting conformity to fixed meaning within these information systems. It is obvious that meaning of information systems of painting is throughout, situational. With the art you create, you must be aware, take into account the situation in which you locate that work, because this goes to define the meaning, that you and others, in that jagged situational mist, determine from and for your art.
How does art communicate that which you can’t by other means?
Painting doesn’t have to speak. Art can operate under more than one principle. It can catch, hold, and contain an idea, but it doesn’t have to communicate it. The meaning of painting, like that of an ironic remark, is not transparent, but latent.
Does your choice of materials with a changing state express an attitude of futility, or resignation to ‘an end’?
To describe the work in terms of fixed meaning, materiality was a concern for a period, followed by searching for new definitions of colour and beauty. Overarching everything has been a determination with each new work to redefine art in an ever-changing context. This is true as much for interpreting a painting as it is for creating a painting, as it is for viewing a painting. As for ‘an end’, an artist does not end, neither does their art. In every story, it is the viewer that dies! And a new viewer interprets the art in their new ever-changing context.
Pearl Lam Galleries
Until 19 March, 2017
Hong Kong
A nose studies French cheese at 3 am, 2016, compression foam, varnish hardeners, and colour resin on Perspex, 160 x 120 x 7cm
In French everyone was told they were having herring for dinner, 2016, colour resin in liquid glass on Perspex, 200 x 150 x 6cm
Grasshoppers as a term of affection, 2016, varnish pieces in liquid glass on Perspex, 160 x 120 x 7cm
Courtesy the artist and Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong
