Extract from a conversation between
Simon Callery and Jeffrey Dennis at Simon's Studio, Hackney, London
March 2005
SC: I keep trying to eliminate signs of depiction, so you have
to look at the work in a different way. You can't look at it in
the way you would look at a picture. It's more like trying to
create away of sensing and absorbing the physical properties of
the paintings.... some kind of notion about passive and active.
Normally we put ourselves in a position that appears to be passive
in front of a work that 'informs' us.
JD: Like a document.
SC: I am interested in reversing that flow. Finding away in which we become aware of our perception - not just about the eye but about our physical relationship to the work. When I look at any kind of paintings I am interested in their physicality...rather than their imagery; in how they were made, the kind of marks the artist made. My whole work is about a confrontation with landscape. I come from the Northern European tradition that's about our relationship to the landscape. Sometimes I try to wipe that out and realise I can't do that. It still has vestiges of a relationship to landscape. Sometimes I allow that to come to the fore again, sometimes push it away.
... This new way of working, trying to get material into the surface...trying to keep my coloration close to the colour of the actual material I start with, such as linen, so you have work that finally appears not that different from the raw material you started with. My interest is in trying to make that material real express that aspect of it.
JD: It could be seem a sort of entropy: things returning to their beginnings.
SC: I see it as a beginning really,
only because that reflects the most forceful aspect of it.
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