Installation view, I Would Love You If You Looked Like This:, Maximillian William, London, 5 November 2020 - 9 January 2021
The dominant trend in interior design is the “millennial aesthetic”. White walls, gray couch, too many plants. Are these paintings a rebellion against that?
I don’t think of them as being rebellious, they don’t feel like rebellious painting to me. But you’re right, the backgrounds don’t match up with that aesthetic, which can be so blank. I tried to specifically have the couch fill up as much of the canvas as possible and not leave room for anything. I think that aesthetic is about having open space, it’s more about potential—or millennials have this focus on being productive, so the spaces are open for that. I don’t know, I have way too much stuff to have that look for my apartment and everything I buy is off Craigslist.
I think it prioritizes open space because there’s so little of it to begin with.
Yeah, everything’s compact or folds up.
Small, neutral, and that goes back to the paintings being grandiose selections, especially the bamboo one. The paintings are eclectic and it goes totally against what couches are now. They’re either ignored or purposefully unnoticeable.
Yeah, it was nice to actually look at furniture. I never look at furniture because I’m always looking for what is available and cheap. These are all couches that I would never actually buy, but I get to make a decision about what I want to look at instead of the furniture that I actually own, which is based on convenience and availability. It’s nice to actually pick out furniture.
A part of the magnetism of the couch paintings is their unique shape. They have a sense of neat, formal solution. Form and content are merged. Is the canvas long because the couch is long, or is the couch long because the canvas is long?
The couch is long because the canvas is long. The original pink couch painting was that long because it was a text painting before it was a couch painting. And it was a really bad text painting that I just needed to get rid of, and it was just sitting in my studio for years and I thought -- I have to do something with this or throw it away. The couch was a solution to that problem. Haha. Worked out great!
Before these, there was another painting that was text above a couch. A captioned image, if you will.
Oh yeah yeah, that’s how I got the name for this show too. That was originally a sketch that I did in a manically depressed post break-up state. That’s a personal story, but that led to the original combo of the title and the couch where it was a really gross couch mixed with words and I was thinking “She would love me if I looked like a couch," but not a person. I also listen to this dating show. And they have something they say on the show—that you’re competing with someone’s couch when you’re starting to date, because, “I could go on this first date, or I could stay home on my couch and watch Netflix,” which one is more appealing in the moment? Maybe staying home is the better option sometimes.
The paintings are certainly surreal. There’s so much ambiguity to how they could be interpreted. Either room for everyone or a sad distance. To me the art history lodestar here is Magritte. Are the surrealists important to you? What are some influences?
I: I like the surrealists. They’re cool. Magritte’s a cool guy. I don’t think he’s necessarily an influence, but I have some other people that I like a lot. Maybe more of a contemporary surrealist—Seth Alverson, who is a painter that I met in Houston. He’s probably my favorite painter.