In Conversation with London Painter Celia Hempton (for ‘VAULT: New Art & Culture’, 2016)

 

I arrived late at Celia Hempton’s Bethnal Green studio. She was waiting patiently at the door, in the cold. She generously forgave me and ushered me down the long corridor of the low, whitewashed building. Her studio is neat and compact; a single large window is half-covered with a piece of patterned material. One wall is hung with small finished canvases and works in progress. Some of these paintings feature images of men, closely-cropped, in various states of undress or sexual arousal. Across the room a row of small paintings of depilated vaginas offers a counterpoint.

“The work is not primarily about sex,” she says, “In fact, for me, sexual desire and arousal is one of my least pressing concerns, though it wouldn't be fair to say it is not present in the work at all, of course.” She gestured to a number of boxes containing more canvases, wrapped neatly in plastic, all ready for her group show, Electronic Superhighway, at the Whitechapel Gallery, curated by Omar Kholeif and Séamus McCormack (29 January – 15 May, 2016).                                                                                                                                                                           

Hempton, who was born in 1981, completed a BA (Hons) Fine Art, Painting at Glasgow School of Art in 2003. She followed this up with an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2007.  “My parents are both artists, so growing up I had that going on all around me.  I paint, but I consider myself an artist in the broader sense rather than a 'painter'.”

In 2008 she was awarded the Sainsbury Scholarship in Painting and took up a two-year residency at the British School in Rome. Also in Italy, in 2014, she painted Ejecta, a series of small canvases depicting the lava-spewing crater of the Sicilian volcano, Stromboli, made in situ, at significant risk of injury.    

   “In Rome I was struck by the frescoes, which often depicted landscape imagery – so the sense of inside and outside was blurred. I was particularly interested in the dining room in the Villa of Livia.” In her exhibitions at Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome (2014), and Galerie Sultana in Paris (2015) she made references to these frescoes by painting the walls in colourful stained patches and then hanging her small canvases against this. Images of these exhibitions remind me of the scene in Federico Fellini’s Roma (1972) in which archaeologists break into an ancient crypt where they discover magnificent Roman frescoes which, due to the suddenly violated atmosphere, immediately begin to dissolve before their dismayed eyes.

 

   Hempton has staked out a compelling territory for her recent work, in which she challenges social conventions to do with privacy and sexual display. Her 2014 exhibition Chat Random, held at Southard Reid Gallery, London, took its name from the online video site on which hundreds of (mostly) men from all over the world set up video cameras to record predominantly sexual episodes, live, for anyone who cares to log on to watch, or to join in. Her method is entirely contemporary: she logs on, sets up her laptop on her work bench next to her canvas, selects a streaming video that interests her and paints the moving image directly from the screen. As the ‘performer’ watches her painting he runs through his physical routine for her, and both of them enter into a charged symbiotic relationship of voyeurism and display, watching and reacting. In this sense the paintings are a kind of collaboration. Each painting lasts only as long as it takes for the ‘model’ to finish his online session. Hempton relishes the random nature of this, because “those works are some of the strongest and contain something truthful, I hope, of that uncontrived moment.”

   “I have found a way of painting that allows me to be free of most of my self-conscious thought, in a situation that feels more connected to 'real' life than being alone in my studio has previously felt. The colour of each painting depends on the technology the person is using. For example, when I am connected to the Middle or Far East the image is often milky-yellow or green. Sometimes it might be quite dark. I paint on a variety of surfaces, such as linen, polyester and aluminium. So it depends on the sort of paintwork I want to have for each work. Obviously, the paint’s going to slide more easily on polyester than on linen, for instance, if I want a really slippery surface.”

 

    As men make up 99% of users of the site they form the bulk of subject matter. The results of these sessions are all around us on the studio walls: an erect penis is gripped in a painterly hand; a man’s head appears coyly above a sheet; here’s a shadowy image where the action is barely discernible; here’s a man bending over to present his parted smooth buttocks, revealing a delicate pink anus and swinging testicles; there is a range of penises, big, small, cut, uncut, pointy, blunt, black, white, brown, curved; from gay and straight men alike - in fact, the usual signifiers of male sexual-identity so familiar to us from gay and straight pornography are here non-existent. As someone who has had strongly adverse reactions to the homoeroticism in my own work, I was curious about the public reaction to Hempton’s frank nudes.                                                                                      

   “People’s reaction to the work sometimes surprises me.  I feel that I’m just painting Nature.” I nod towards the beautiful, wall-sized canvas behind her, which features a close-up image of a big penis lolling in repose against a thigh, and say that I consider it as much a portrait as someone’s face, and that surely it has as much right to be featured in art as a head, or a torso, or hands and feet, or any other part of the anatomy.                                                             “Yes I agree. But I think certain types of imagery are currently very sensitised, and are in flux in terms of how we are understanding and positioning them. I've had some quite violent reactions to some works, actually.”

 In her Paris exhibition of studio nudes people in the street watched her through the large front window, and one young girl mimed that international symbol of lunacy (grimacing face and index finger rotating at the temple) at her.

 As we talked, I kept being drawn to two small, compelling canvases hung in a corner of the studio. They were fairly abstracted works but figures could still be discerned within the buttery paint swipes of both. The images had been taken from Internet footage featuring jihadists beheading their captives. When I mentioned to Hempton that their paintwork reminded me of Manet’s she expressed an admiration for that Modernist painter. As I left the studio and walked towards home I pondered further on this - in their day all the great Modernist artists knew that nudity was the surest way to shock the puritanical bourgeoisie, who fear its power and insist on restricting or censoring it. Sadly, today seems no different. But when I passed a poster in a bus stop featuring the inane face of a B-grade celebrity upon which someone had scrawled a magnificent cock and balls my spirits rose considerably.