Stephen Felton,
The Wind, Love and other
Disappointments
The Wind, Love and other
Disappointments
MAMCO
10, rue des Vieux-Grenadiers
CH-1205 Genève
www.mamco.ch
18 February-10 May 2015
Photos courtesy
of the artist and MAMCO
of the artist and MAMCO
Seriously flippant, radically relaxed,
awkwardly spontaneous, readily complex: such paradoxical descriptions of
Stephen Felton’s paintings are disconcerting. Freehand drawings in a single
colour on a large canvas, and a simplicity of sign and execution that suggests
children’s drawings, cave paintings and blurred pictograms in which symbol and
icon, figuration and abstraction are indistinguishable — the birth and death of
the signifier all at once.
awkwardly spontaneous, readily complex: such paradoxical descriptions of
Stephen Felton’s paintings are disconcerting. Freehand drawings in a single
colour on a large canvas, and a simplicity of sign and execution that suggests
children’s drawings, cave paintings and blurred pictograms in which symbol and
icon, figuration and abstraction are indistinguishable — the birth and death of
the signifier all at once.
The main motifs in this economical iconography are arrows, staircases, ladders
and stars — for they resist the habitual classifications of representation.
Beyond their semantic effectiveness, they above all reflect the speed of a
gesture. Detached from virtuoso authority, and accessible to all,
Felton’s painting expresses a certain composure, a calm disrespect for whatever
might be thought of the painter’s profession and his various schools. The
artist Dan Walsh, whose assistant Felton once was, likes to describe his
initial works as Peter Halleys painted by Philip Guston: a rigorous composition
‘loosened up’ by a style suggestive of cartoons. Again, Felton’s painting could
be described as Martin Barré painted by Keith Haring: a pursuit of sobriety and
fragments expressed by means of figuration libre.
Yet we should not see this as some postmodern game in which references are
ironically erased. Felton’s (and indeed Walsh’s) work displays a belief in the
process of painting rather than its completion. As the critic Jill Gasparina
has written, ‘Assembling colours in a certain order on the flat surface of a
prepared canvas … is not a way to obtain an artefact fit to decorate an
interior or occupy vacant space in an art centre, but a total activity that
organises the whole of life.’ Here painting is understood first of all as a
banal activity, on the same level as those that mark the artist’s everyday
life, subject to the whims of his moods, of time, the people he meets and the
things he reads.
Felton’s exhibition at Mamco, entitled The Wind, Love and other Disappointments,
thus presents a hitherto unpublished series inspired by Arno Schmidt’s novel Scenes fromthelife of a
faun. In this masterpiece of post-war German literature we follow,
in three chapters (February 1939, September 1939 and September 1944),
the life of Heinrich Düring, a public official in the small town of
Fallingbostel who is sickened to see Nazi stupidity infiltrating people’s minds
– including those of his own wife and son.
He seeks refuge in the detailed study of village archives, where he
learns of the existence of a deserter from Napoleon’s army who had once
terrorised the area, and actually finds his hiding-place, a shack in the midst
of the forest. The narrator turns this makeshift shelter, unrecorded by
surveyors, into a place of retreat and remoteness from the world that finally
allows him and his lover to escape the Allied bombardments.
learns of the existence of a deserter from Napoleon’s army who had once
terrorised the area, and actually finds his hiding-place, a shack in the midst
of the forest. The narrator turns this makeshift shelter, unrecorded by
surveyors, into a place of retreat and remoteness from the world that finally
allows him and his lover to escape the Allied bombardments.
Günter Grass said of Schmidt ‘I do not know any writer who has listened
so closely to the rain, so often talked back to the wind and given the clouds
such literary surnames.’ The novel combines an erudite, terse cynicism with
grand, elated outpourings about the moors, the moon and the wind. In formal
terms it consists of a succession of short paragraphs full of neologisms, plays
of punctuation, onomatopoeic nouns and coded references, in a ‘narrative
cascade’ of memories and fleeting glimpses arranged ‘as if a spasm-shaken man
were watching a thunderstorm in the night’.
so closely to the rain, so often talked back to the wind and given the clouds
such literary surnames.’ The novel combines an erudite, terse cynicism with
grand, elated outpourings about the moors, the moon and the wind. In formal
terms it consists of a succession of short paragraphs full of neologisms, plays
of punctuation, onomatopoeic nouns and coded references, in a ‘narrative
cascade’ of memories and fleeting glimpses arranged ‘as if a spasm-shaken man
were watching a thunderstorm in the night’.
We can imagine how this way of writing in accordance with ‘the lines of
movement and the tempo of the characters in space’, in which all is fragments
and speed, had a special resonance with Stephen Felton. Taking this mysterious
book, which he only knows in English translation, he in turn presents a series
of forms that do not necessarily illustrate a particular passage, but instead
reflect a memory of his readings, his daydreams and the dreamlike fertility of
a literary experience.