Frame 61October 30, 2024Saatchi Yates Gallery

Benjamin Spiers

Frame 61October 30, 2024Saatchi Yates Gallery

"I have an intense urge to articulate this sense of being on a fulcrum: hovering between the tough, bouncy pep of my youthful self...and the slower, less wide-eyed, but wiser, more steeped in loss and somewhat dinged-up human I feel myself becoming."

Our interview with Benjamin Spiers, discussing his process and show at Saatchi Yates.
Interview by Richard Starbuck.

Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background? Where did you study?

I grew up on the north Cornish coast. Although it was idyllic, I was impatient to move to London from the age of about 6 when I first visited. The combination of huge buildings, grandeur and squalor, the seamless glamour of department store windows, the grimy magnificence of the churches and cathedrals, the fashion, the art, but most of all the press of people - the sense of lives lived in such varied ways and everyone butting up against one another - It was love at first sight, a gut-deep certainty of home.

I was very frustrated that, having finished school, I couldn’t move straight to the city, but instead had to complete a foundation course in Falmouth. As is often the case when life scuppers your plans, it turned out to be a blessing. That year in Falmouth was one of the most influential periods of my life. It was a well thought through course, with fantastic tutors. Over and over I had the sense of leaping into the unknown and breaking new ground, each time discovering something meaningful and surprising. I realise now that it was a year, spent almost entirely in a state of flow. It also turns out - you don’t get so many of those…

I went from there to Goldsmiths in South East London - a handful of years after the YBA phenomenon, and it could hardly have been more different. It was as though the powerful tail wind that helped me cover so much ground on my foundation course had flipped 180 degrees, and made everything feel absurdly difficult. I think there was something about the legacy of the YBAs, coupled with the pressure to diagnose the next move, and the precariousness of success - as though if one didn’t make it straight away, then one was marked for the bin. London had a fraction of the galleries it has now, and a pathway to success was very much harder to find.

I think I was lucky to have such a strong sense of my own interests, because the constant challenge to them, the sense that they weren’t ‘valid’, that they made me an outsider - all that helped to bake-in the stubborn resilience I would later need to plough through decades of obscurity.

*Kind Hearted Sinners, Saatchi Yates, Paris 2024*

In your exhibition 'Kind Hearted Sinners' at Saatchi Yates, many of your portraits seem to grapple with the fragility of youth and the inevitability of aging. What draws you to this theme, and how do you hope viewers at the show will interpret the way you handle the passage of time and transformation in your figures?

This is such a great observation! I’m so happy this comes across in my paintings. I’m at a stage of life where youth and old age are both at maximum poignancy. My son is at university and his transition into adulthood is profoundly affecting. At the other end, my parents are getting older and their fragility and mortality is increasingly palpable. I’m also becoming aware of signs of aging in myself - externally and internally.

I have an intense urge to articulate this sense of being on a fulcrum: hovering between the tough, bouncy pep of my youthful self - always hungry for experience, full of innocent appetite - and the slower, less wide-eyed, but wiser, more steeped in loss and somewhat dinged-up human I feel myself becoming. The compensation for the sense of loss that kicks in in mid life, is the ability to see possibility and joy through a new lens. One that cracks open feelings and shows the complicated layering beneath the surface. I want to make this awareness integral to my work.

I think this is one of paintings best moves - that it can make a single moment stretch out forever, but the best paintings freight that moment with the intimation of irresistible change, of the past and the future held in concentration, like the segments of a telescope snapped closed. A young painter friend travelled from London to Paris to be at my opening. He presented me with a gift - an egg box containing madeleines he had baked that morning (he had no idea I was reading Proust at the time). The gift couldn’t have been more apposite. It’s almost a perfect symbol of what I want to express - fragility, delicacy, hope, and memory. I was deeply moved.

Your work often blends elements of the familiar with the bizarre, creating figures that seem to exist between worlds. What drives you to explore this tension between the real and the surreal, and how do you think it reflects on our own understanding of identity and existence?

I have thoughts about this question! A lot of the artists who, for me, resonate most deeply operate within a naturalistic mode. They’re also artists who match a tactile fascination for the appearance of their sitters with an acute ability to give voice to their emotions and minds.

These artists I return to over and over: Titian, Velasquez, Holbein, Rembrandt and Freud. However, I know that I’m not that kind of artist. I have too great a need to play, to subvert, to disrupt and invent. Decades of experience, of trial and error have made it clear that my ‘psychic energy’ requires a certain unreality, a pinch of the grotesque and a dose of humour in order to reach its most authentic condition. The more I’ve accepted this reality the more convincingly I am able to say something distinctly my own.

There’s a distinct sense of humor in many of your works, where the grotesque or surreal is presented with a playful twist. How do you see humor functioning in your art, and what role does it play in conveying deeper messages or challenging the viewer’s perspective?

The first part of this question is addressed in my previous answer, but the second part - about challenging the viewers perspective - is interesting. I think that it is impossible to ‘engineer’ a meaningful challenge to an imagined viewer, because the moment you start thinking about challenging conventions, you’re operating within them. The power of any contrived provocation always dwindles, and generally pretty quickly. People are smart and are able to accept and absorb the antithesis pretty much as soon as they grasp the thesis.

I think great art is always a provocation, and remains so despite the passing of time. Rembrandt as much as Bosch, despite the former’s lack of confrontational subject matter. To bring the question to bear on my own work. I don’t intend to provoke the viewer. It’s really never in my thoughts as I make something, but I am not unhappy if the viewer experiences some kind of provocation.

Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?

I work pretty consistently. Generally from about 9:30am to 6:30/7pm. When I’m really inside my work - in the run up to exhibitions, on residencies etc - almost all my thought and energy orbits around what’s happening in the studio. Even my dreams feed into, and are fed by my painting.

I’m working at home at the moment, and I like it. The ability to go and look at my work before going to bed is helpful. Also I hang paintings on my bedroom wall, so that I see them first thing in the morning. To some extent my paintings really are part of me. My mind lives in them and through them, and they demand my attention unceasingly, noisily, naggingly - until they don’t, and thats when I know they’re finished.

What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?

There is a painting by Velasquez in Rouen Musée des beaux arts. I saw it two days before the opening of my show in Paris.

I still can’t get it out of my mind. It’s pure alchemy. The highest, most sophisticated ideal of art: transubstantiation! Spirit and matter blended with such skill, delicacy and vision that it escapes any attempt at decoding. It’s inspiring and daunting in equal measure.

Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?

I’m participating in a group show with some of my favourite painters at the start of next year. I’m planning on making a very large, ambitious and complex painting. If I can make it work I think it will mark a significant development and evolution of my practice.

Saatchi Yates

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All images courtesy of the artist and Saatchi Yates Gallery
Publish date: 30/10/24

Frame 61