Paint, Scrub, and Repeat
For Kadar Brock, destruction and creation are equally important. The New York-based artist is best known for his unorthodox approach to abstract painting, in which he creates frenetic, gestural images and then renders them unrecognizable with the help of a razor blade and a power sander. At Art Basel Miami Beach in December, Brock unveiled the result of a new iteration of that process: a hydrocal obelisk embedded with the flecks of his pulverized paintings. And he’s not done evolving. Before the opening of his solo show at Vigo Gallery, Brock agreed to give W a peek at his next frontier.
Unburial Rites opens January 14th at Vigo Gallery, 21 Dering Street, London, +44.020.7493.3492.
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Kadar Brock in his Brooklyn Studio.
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“The larger trajectory of the work I’ve been doing for the last few years has been taking more traditional abstract paintings and kind of performing a series of rituals on them and with them. Essentially, I take these paintings that I’ve made and undo them. I’m acting on this other relationship to abstraction and turning it into this pleasant void.”
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“Sometimes I’ll see a piece of paint and I’ll happen to remember the audiobook or podcast I was listening to when I had made that brush stroke. I get this weird flashback.”
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“I started a Tumblr for all these paintings no one will ever see. It’s a kind of memorial.”
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“This painting is made from the residue of 10 or 12 other paintings. I like to think of it as a kind of karma. You are never able to escape the moves you’ve already made.”
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“Looking back on the paintings that I used to make, the most successful part of those works was the color palette and the approach toward New Age spirituality through color.”
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“The holes happen in the first stage of undoing. After the initial painting is dried, it gets stretched and I begin scraping off as much of the impasto as possible, sometimes the razor blade gets caught. So, the holes are not punctures or gestures, they are residuals of the process.”
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“My best friend is Matt Jones. His studio is on the other end of the building. We hang out multiple times a week and just shoot the shit. One of my other best friends is in the studio too, this guy Mark Gibson. My girlfriend is in this studio. I feel really fortunate, I have a situation where I get to do something I really enjoy and see people I love everyday.”
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“This is dust I’ve collected from my other paintings. After I sand a piece, I always collect the scraps with the vacuum. Having the stuff around, I started playing with it to see if I could find a way to present it again as a painting.”
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“These bucket shapes were the first iteration of these. I cast them in some the old brush cleaning buckets I had lying around. I liked the way they picked up the information left by the paint residue. Eventually they turned into these more monolithic objects, as I became more comfortable with the process.
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“Deciding when I’m finished is probably the one intuitive-y painting thing I allow myself. I am pretty OCD guy, so if I am looking at something and things bothers me I’ll work on it. I’ll always want to keep squirreling away.”
