Fin-du-Monde Malaise – ‘Paul Winstanley: Reprise’ at Cristea Roberts

Jo Manby

Cristea Roberts Gallery exhibits ‘Paul Winstanley: Reprise’, a collection of new prints and paintings by Paul Winstanley (b.1954) in which the artist interrogates the aesthetics and the artifice of the sublime, on show from 7 June to 27 July 2024 and reviewed here by the Fourdrinier editor Jo Manby.

Cristea Roberts are showing a new body of work in which Paul Winstanley repurposes obscure, historic nineteenth century Alpine landscape paintings, pressing them into new service as a form of reverse speculative painting through a combination of traditional and digital printing. Stolen away from the future, abraded and worn but still somehow intact, before the ravages of time and climate crisis completely melt away the glaciers, Winstanley seems to be engaged in rescuing the sublime from the destruction of the cataclysmic future.

Winstanley is a Manchester born, London-based painter and photographer, known for his hyperreal softly focused paintings of becalmed public spaces populated by rows of empty plastic chairs, Lino floors rolled out in simple one-point perspective, lonely houseplants and gauzy sheer curtains. They are characterized by an intense stillness and evidence deep, meticulous concentration: they are the product of finely tuned paint manipulation and detailed observation. In lesser hands they might suggest an over-controlled mechanistic temperament but these paintings have a minimalist sensibility that belies the richness of collective feeling at their heart.

The original inspiration for this new body of work for ‘Reprise’ began with Joseph Anton Koch’s The Wetterhorn (1824), an oil painting on canvas held in the Collection of the Museum Winterthur, Switzerland. However, in many of these prints he references several such works, all landscapes of the nineteenth century. As he points out in an interview in the exhibition catalogue, these paintings would have successfully conveyed grandeur to their audience at the time, but we see them in a different light now – they appear mainly illustrative. ‘I was interested to see if they could be re-invested with greater urgency and made contemporary again.’

On show are a series of eight photogravure etchings on Misumi white Japanese paper, each in an edition of 15, and each a separate colour, texture and composition, ranging from Alp (Lapis) and Alp (Black) to Alp (Cerulean) and Alp (Indian Yellow). There are five larger format photogravure etchings with extensive hand painting in acrylic, on Somerset Radiant white paper, each in an edition of six and entitled Painted Alp 1-5. Winstanley also shows a series of digitally manipulated black and white prints, The Viewers; an oil on linen painting Large Alp 6, and the smaller Acid Alp 3, also oil on linen.

For the prints, Winstanley experimented by using spirit to transfer an inkjet print to a sheet of paper. This, however, did not prove successful, because inkjet is water based. He then attempted a resist barrier between the paper and the ink and then printing off that; this also produced messy results. He pursued the idea though, and became fascinated by what was happening to the image as he experimented with waxes and waterproofing agents.

A series of granular, scraped, gestural black and white prints evolved. Gulfs of loss, occlusion, damage populate the images, but the revenants of mountain, trees, rocks and water remain. It’s as if they – as pictorial elements, but also as archetypes of the elements which form our natural environment – have struggled and fought to cling on to their existence. They have survived to emerge just recognizable from some planetary disaster.

Having created these various black and white images he photographed them, made a digital file of each one and experimented with colour. He made a colour profile for each image that incorporated the dual function of suggesting a ‘recognisable condition that might be encountered in the mountains. A dawn, a dusk, a grey day, a mist,’ and at the same time operating as a ‘dynamic element’ in itself. In making these decisions, he has ensured that colour works not only in the individual prints but also holistically across the series. This has been achieved by carefully controlling the behaviour and temperature of the hues.

All this sounds quite measured and scientific, so it’s perhaps no accident that the cold, patchy, speckled, globular, histological-looking surfaces of these works bear a resemblance to the effects of biological staining used in microscopic analysis of the various organs of the body. Winstanley’s Alpine scenes are irradiated by lugubrious colours. Painted Alp 5 features mid-tone burnt orange fading to yellow, suggestive of Acridine Orange stain, ‘a fluorescent dye that is cell-permeable and nucleic acid selective, which allows it to enter the cell and intercalate or bind with the nucleic acid present in an organism’ (aatbio.com).

Alp (Umber) and Alp (Blue-Violet) are part obliterated, as if streaked with the fallout of a nuclear winter, calling to mind shades of Haematoxylin, ‘a nuclear stain… used with a mordant, stains nuclei blue-violet or brown’ (Wikipedia.com) or Cresyl Violet acetate, ‘used in Nissl staining of sections of the spinal cord and brain… also suitable for the demonstration of nuclei and Nissl substance in neuroanatomical investigations’ (sigmaaldrich.com).

These stains and dyes (there are numerous varieties and hues) are used to highlight areas of the body requiring microscopic investigation, in order to distinguish the site of damage or mutation. Winstanley’s ink drenched mountains appear to have undergone similar scrutiny, as if the artist was tracing, tracking, divining and predicting the fall-out of climate apocalypse. Some look as if they have been peeled off their paper backing in a limning process, or like the colour that remains on sellotape after its been ripped off birthday wrapping paper.

The oil on linen painting, Large Alp 6 is a paradoxical image. Imposing in its size and redolent of the grandeur of the Alpine scenes so beloved of Ruskin and his contemporaries, it would stand out if it was hung in a gallery next to works by Koch and other Romantics of the period. It has a strangely sour green tinge like a register of radioactivity: its colour softly fluorescing as it hangs in the pristine gallery space. Both the paintings, and the prints, have a compelling effect that draws the viewer in.

Winstanley allows, in the spatial dimensions of his image making, room for the viewer to collect their thoughts and discover their own meanings. In this sense, Koch’s Romantic sublime, academic painting seems didactic. It’s telling the viewer how to feel, in the same way a Romantic poet might command our attention. Winstanley’s prints are tremulously on the brink of communication – there are the pictorial equivalents of long pauses, broken sentences: in places whole paragraphs have been all but erased. Much room is left for us to infer meaning, rather than have it laid out before us and explained.

I wondered whether switching from painting to printmaking allowed Winstanley as an artist new thinking spaces:

‘Printmaking is quite different to painting both in terms of the processes involved but also in terms of how images are ultimately read. The viewer is always aware of the manual accruing of paint in a painting and the time involved in this. Time, slow time, becomes part of the content of painting and the surface you are seeing is the one the artist has worked on. It is physically all there in front of you,’ he explained. ‘Printing can be the product of many different types of processes some which may be fast or instantaneous. And a print is an impression of work carried out on another surface (a plate, a stone, a block). It therefore contains a very different sense of time and intention. The viewer, whether consciously or not, is aware of these differences and adjusts their sense of meaning that the work might have for them.’

Did the change of tack itself open up new vistas to him as an artist? ‘Printing has opened up possibilities in painting. I have been influenced by the effects of process on image and of colour. My work has diversified in recent years as a result of this.’

The title of the current Cristea Roberts show, ‘Reprise’, is most commonly recognized as musical repetition or recurrent action. However, in its archaic form, its etymology can mean to take back, or recover by force, from the Anglo-French ‘seizure, repossession or expense’. At time of writing, the BBC suggests that  Venezuela is possibly ‘the first nation in modern history to lose all its glaciers after climate scientists downgraded its last one to an ice field.’ Glaciologists at the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative and the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development report that ‘the latest projections show that between 20 and 80% of glaciers globally will be lost by 2100 (with significant regional variation), depending on the emissions pathway followed’. Paul Winstanley’s Alp prints assume the status of secular prayer, imploring providence to leave at least some of our mountains alone.

Approximately a hundred and fifty years ago, the philosopher, writer, art critic and polymath John Ruskin (1819-1900) underwent the personal equivalent of the contemporary mass nervous breakdown brought about by climate change. His was a grief-stricken variation on fin-de-siècle malaise (he died on the turning point of the century in January 1900), whereas the collective nature of our own disorder ranges from grief to reckless abandonment of all responsibility.

Ruskin writes about his observations of a thick dark cloud casting a shadow over his era. When I first heard about this proposition, working as a volunteer on a collection of glass slides in the Lakeland Arts archive after I left university, I thought he meant it metaphorically. But as he writes, from the Midlands, in Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain, in which he reflects on his now somewhat dubious moral and social vision:

‘For the sky is covered with grey cloud; - not rain cloud, but a dry black veil, which no ray of sunshine can pierce; partly diffused in mist, feeble mist… during all this spring, in London, and at Oxford, through meagre March, through changelessly sullen April, through despondent May, and darkened June, morning after morning has come grey-shrouded thus.’

He calls it ‘a plague-wind’, ‘a wind of darkness’, ‘filthiness of lurid, yet not sublimely lurid, smoke-cloud’. He is appalled to find that the dark cloud is ubiquitous across Europe. In September 1882, writing from Sallenches, a commune in the Haute-Savoie department of France close to Mont Blanc, he reports that:

‘By seven o’ clock, the plague-clouds had formed in brown flakes… entirely covering the snowy ranges; the sun, as it rose to us here, shone only for about ten minutes… These phenomena are only the sequel of a series of still more strange and sad conditions of the air, which have continued among the Savoy Alps for the last eight days (themselves the sequel of others yet more general, prolonged, and harmful).’

He’s talking about the Industrial Revolution that brought smog to London and a host of new industrial diseases – sulphur poisoned match girls with yellow faces and hamster cheeks, textile workers with byssinosis brought on by airborne cotton dust and other respiratory morbidities from chemical fumes and residues. It’s a premonitory description of the kind of air pollution overload that still occurs across the globe. The current world air quality ranking puts Kuwait City at the top of the four most unhealthily polluted major cities after Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; Santiago, Chile; and Lahore, Pakistan. Ruskin deplores the destruction of clean air, of the clear blue of the sky, and of the purity of rivers and streams. In terms of his beloved mountainous scenes, he laments the now dull, muddy and muted colours of sunsets and sunrises on snow compared to how he recalls them in bygone times.

To extend the biological staining metaphor, it’s hard not to view Winstanley’s scenes as representations of the diseased and dying natural world. Landscape as a suffering patient, tossing and turning under a baleful sun, choking on particulates, laboured breathing, discolouration, damage, disintegration. We may be capable of measuring the progress of the earth’s ruination (International Cryosphere Climate Initiative; International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development) but putting a stop to it now is a whole other consideration.

To place Winstanley’s work in the context of a younger contemporary image making scene, it sits well with Matthew Krishanu’s vanishing worlds in his paintings of vast idyllic places in his exhibition ‘The Bough Breaks’ at Camden Art Centre, London, on show until 23 June 2024. Krishanu (b.1980, Bradford, UK) has also experienced a form of grief, and like all of us has moved on from the freedoms and innocence of childhood. The title of the show evokes the nursery rhyme Rock-a-bye-Baby, and the boughs of the monumental banyan tree featured in some of the paintings, a major signifier in Indian culture. The idea of the breaking bough references their potential for collapse as a metaphor for the instability of contemporary times. As in the passages of erasure and loss in Winstanley’s Alps, here the distances inherent in Krishanu’s work raise ‘questions about childhood, religion, race, power, and the legacies of empire’ (Camden Art Centre).

I asked Paul Winstanley if his Alp works embody his personal take on climate change, and whether he was depicting the future remains of a partly ruined landscape:

‘For me to declare this to be the case would be to begin to prescribe an interpretation of the work, something I am loathe to do. However such an interpretation by you or someone else would be entirely legitimate. In approaching landscape today our contemporary relation to it, including politically and environmentally, has to  be reflected in the work; it has to reflect our anxiety about it. This is unavoidable and something I hope I have achieved in these new works.’

Rather than the ever-deteriorating representational remains of something already lost to the ravages of an apocalyptic future, the optimistic way of looking at these works is as what has been salvaged, ready to be repopulated afterwards, in the way that both new and pre-existing life forms gradually began to creep over the deadened landscape after the melting of the last Ice Age.