The Brooklyn Rail

Molly Warnock: Having grown up near DC with a strong connection to the city’s museums, you have a long familiarity with the painters of the Washington Color School: Sam Gilliam, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Alma Thomas, among others. Do you think of your work as going on from these precedents?

Eric N. Mack: I saw that work regionally, and it informed a lot of specific questions. Moving to New York in 2006 gave me some distance to think through those ideas and find a sense of permission with the precedent of those works.

I remember seeing the Gilliam retrospective at the Corcoran,¹ and then the Louis show at the Hirshhorn.² At the time, I was discovering painterly abstraction and getting excited about the innovation of acrylic paint and this moment that almost fetishized what the paint could do—how it could absorb into the surface. There’s something radical about the fact that the paint is applied and then there’s another time, a time of anticipation, as it seeps directly into the canvas: it’s not just on top, but within, as a material interlocutor. It’s connected in a way to what I ended up finding with fabric dye. A lot of my work has to do with letting the textile speak, and the idea that there’s not just a literal absorption, but a conceptual one. When I work with images stripped from magazines, the dye is a way of integrating the surface; heterogeneous things can be absorbed into a single material object.

More recently, I’ve also been thinking about artists from very different contexts who work with a related language. Take somebody like Giorgio Griffa in Turin. The resonance between Louis and Griffa has to do with the way the works are painted—exposed and with the material still actively in play. And perhaps sized, but not primed. There’s a vulnerability that I connect with. I think of my own work as having vulnerability almost as a subject matter, in some of the more human or handmade or gestural moments.

At the same time, these works invite comparison to everyday life, like ordinary spills or other traces of the body. I think Griffa’s work can be related to the body, to his own body, in a very clear way. Whereas with Louis, there’s always been so much mystery about how the work was made. You’re looking at the finished thing and wondering, how did this take place? Learning to read that work is its own kind of skill, and there’s something exciting about being able to retrace what happened first, what happened next—how the liquid was organized. There are passages where you can see the painting sessions clearly overlaid, like a dynamic compression of time. Absorbency holds that state of becoming.

Warnock: Can you say more about this early period in New York where you were giving yourself permission or finding permission to use these sources? Why did you require permission, and how did the permission arrive?

Mack: I think it was just learning the language of abstraction but not quite doing it right, not quite finding the right rhythm. But at the same time, realizing how active these materials could be—that they had their own components and could speak in specific ways. That there’s meaning in how space is deployed, even on a flat surface. Those are real epiphanies when you’re continually being asked to produce with narrative. Especially as a Black artist who often felt pigeonholed, there was something freeing in having a new framework for what was happening in the studio. The permission was about being able to use what I was learning and metabolize some of the things that I was witnessing and feeling as a viewer of this abstract work. Connecting what was happening in the studio to these historical precedents, seeing that as my inheritance, allowed me to move into my trajectory, move into the work.

I just felt that there was so much to build from, so much that I wanted to see as well. And I think that interest in form has been a constant throughout my research and how I choose to talk about the work and the decisions I’ve made around the work. Formalism affords an interior set of values, this index of values that the work possesses. And that, for me, has been very liberating, in acknowledging the value of ideas and the value of intentionality. It frees me to think about where painting might go and how this language might be reconstituted in a new way.