Little White Lies Interview: Paul Bettany

(Originally published on Little White Lies)

Paul Bettany must be the kind of co-star most actors dread. Not bolshy or flamboyant in a quest to get noticed, just a bona-fide scene-stealer. He’s done it to Russell Crowe. Twice. Now in the low-budget Brit drama Broken Lines Bettany gives another standout performance, this time playing an ex-boxer trying to deal with the after effects of a stroke with stunning authenticity. Bettany sat down with LWLies recently to talk about the role that brought him back to his hometown London and the challenges of getting films out there these days.

LWLies: How did you first get involved in the film?

Bettany: I got sent a script by my friend who said, ‘Would you do us a favour and read it, and if you like it there’s a part in it for you.’ And I read it and very quickly realised that it was him doing me a favour and that he’d thrown this great part my way. So I said absolutely, I’d do it. So it was a very simple process.

Were you always in mind for the part?

It was a very long process writing the script and I think it went through many different stages, so I don’t think he wrote it with me in mind. I think they came to a point where they felt they had finished this script and he sent me it with this rather lovely offer. I was so gobsmacked by how great I was, the pair of them had been beavering away for a couple of years on this thing and then suddenly it’s there and it’s beautiful.

What attracted you to the part of Chester? He’s a pretty raw, intense character.

Well, I mean… that, really. It’s nice to do things occasionally that feel they’re about stuff. They seem to be few and far between nowadays. I think that there’s a dreadful sense of shame in Chester and I found that really moving. There was something that I could comprehend in that.

And what kind of research did you do?

I did a fair amount. I did a lot of reading of different firsthand accounts from stroke survivors. I live in New York and I didn’t want to talk to stroke survivors there because there is a real stoic national characteristic that British people have, a reticence. So what I did was I got the filmmakers to interview British stroke survivors on film, hours and hours of footage of these really frank, moving interviews. I watched them, and their responses to the predicament in which they found themselves were really varied, as varied as human beings are.

But, and I speak for myself here, I thought there were some unifying things that all of these people felt which were overwhelming frustration and anger at their body; a fury at having to re-learn simple things; a terrible sense of injustice; and a shame surrounding feelings of dependency. I thought in somebody like Chester that would be so compounded because he’s lived an incredibly physical life, an almost exclusively physical life, and now he is left with an almost exclusively cerebral life and his mind is not a place where he feels comfortable.

Little White Lies Review: Broken Lines

An urban melodrama set against the mean streets of North London, Broken Lines tells the story of a clandestine affair between two troubled hearts played out in Finsbury Park. But with plot holes and character flaws aplenty, it’s a bumpy ride through an otherwise credible depiction of the capital.

Dan Fredenburgh and Doraly Rosa collaborated on a script in which they play the leads; him as Jake, a well-off property developer sent reeling by his father’s death, her as B, the waitress in a local cafe carrying the emotional burden of a recently disabled husband. Jake comes to B’s attention when he orders a bacon sandwich in her cafe, still wearing the kippah after his Jewish father’s funeral.

With the ice broken the two get acquainted and gradually find refuge in each other’s company. Jake’s post-bereavement breakdown puts him at odds with his fiancé in the lead up to their wedding, while B struggles not with affection but passion with her ex-boxer partner who’s now debilitated by a stroke. Both are stung by the guilt of the affair, but proceed anyway... (read more)

FAD Preview: Pipilotti Rist at Hayward Gallery

Very excited about the upcoming Pipilotti Rist exhibition at the Hayward. I'll be making a short film at the press view tomorrow but for now here's the gallery's trailer, which I previewed on FAD




Enter the weird and wonderful world of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist as the Hayward stages the first major survey of her work in the UK this autumn. Known for her lively and provocative work in video, installation and sculpture, she tackles all the big themes of love, loss, birth, nature and the family in playful, colourful yet often challenging ways. This new exhibition brings together over 30 of her works reaching back to the 1980s. Here’s a sneak preview of what to expect…

PIPILOTTI RIST: EYEBALL MASSAGE
Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, www.southbankcentre.co.uk
28 September 2011 – 8 January 2012

Dazed Digital Interview: Tom de Freston, On Falling

(Originally published on Dazed Digital)

Tom de Freston uses the human figure in his paintings as a director would on film or the stage, manipulating the person into a scenario loaded with dramatic tension. Using performance and theatre (along with multiple other sources) for inspiration, de Freston plays out contemporary concerns and historical modes across his canvases, resulting in what he has described as ‘contemporary history painting’. Before his solo show in Clerkenwell this month, the artist talked to Dazed about this dichotomy and the roots of his practice as a painter.

Dazed Digital: Why did you choose to be a painter?
Tom de Freston: I don't know if I did. I certainly can't pinpoint a light bulb moment when I decided to be an artist, it was more the result of a myriad of decisions.

DD: You've described yourself as a 'contemporary History Painter’; can you explain?
Tom de Freston: I'm interested in the idea of History Painting as a bankrupt notion, and if it's possible to have such a thing as contemporary History Painting. My paintings are not historical in that they are not illustrative of a specific geographic or historic source. Instead they are an amalgamation of numerous sources, fusing timeframes in order to produce autonomous scenes which could be read metaphorically and metaphysically in relation to a contemporary or historical context.

DD: Can you tell me a bit about your literary/theatrical influences?
Tom de Freston: I have worked closely with poets, academics and theatre companies and directors. I don't see the dialogue as necessarily different to that which I have with the History of Art or painting. They are all just sources to exploit and scavenge for new end points.

DD: And the Shakespeare references in On Falling?
Tom de Freston: The painting ‘Bathroom’ shows Macbeth sat upon the loo, with a sense of Bacon's paintings of George Dyer. The figure in the bath could be one of a few characters from Macbeth, but nods to David's Marat and images of the Deposition, whilst the entire structure of the space is being threatened by a swirling, descending estuary of paint. In’ MSND’ Bottom and Titania sit apprehensively on a stage above a foresty abyss with witness figures featured crow headed women, flying pigs head, winged and masked putti and a couple both sporting halos and Marilyn Monroe masks.

FAD Video: Christian Jankowski's Casting Jesus at Lisson Gallery

A recent film interview with artist Christian Jankowski for FAD talking about his brilliant new film Casting Jesus, showing at Lisson Gallery:




If something good came out of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ it was that Christian Jankowski was inspired to make his latest film, Casting Jesus, now showing at Lisson Gallery. For it was the vision of Jim Caviezel dressed as the Big J taking acting tips from a priest that prompted the artist to stage a talent contest, much in the style of X Factor, but this time with professional actors auditioning for the role of Christ in front of a panel of judges from the Vatican. The resulting dual-screen film is often comical, but never disparaging towards its participants, pointing the finger instead at our quick-to-judge, image obsessed culture. Casting Jesus is a must-see, at the Lisson Gallery until 1 October 2011.

ArtSlant Review: Minor Revisions at Tenderpixel Gallery

Found objects take pride of place in Minor Revisions, Tenderpixel’s new exhibition in which works from seven artists reappropriate pre-existing items that have never functioned as art before and turn them into exhibition pieces. Sure, conceptual art is not everyone’s cup of tea and artistic appropriation has had its detractors ever since Duchamp debuted his urinal, but this small group of contemporary artists are by no means the only ones still operating in this particular mode of artistic practice.

What this collection of work does reveal is how many of these modern found objects are two-dimensional printed images, be that a found photo or an envelope lining or a catalogue. The artists tamper with the image, layer up their own ideas onto what’s already there, like Rebecca Chalmers, who adds to the linear insides of found envelopes to evolve them out of pure design and into drawing... (read more)

ArtSlant Review: Look With All Your Eyes, Look at Frith Street Gallery

This year’s summer exhibition at Frith Street Gallery is a very monochrome affair, much like our summer in fact. Again it brings together works from the gallery’s stable of artists in a loosely-themed group show, this time entitled Look With All Your Eyes, Look, examining the concept of materiality and/or illusion in art through painting, sculpture and photography.

It’s much smaller than 2010’s After the Volcano, occupying just the upstairs gallery and presenting work from only eight artists across an open-plan space. But space and sparseness (along with subdued colour) are key here. Just take the sculptures from Sara Barker and Rudolf Polanszky that sit in the centre of the room – both are marked by a distinct lack of mass and a quality of containing empty space within their structures (be that Barker’s spindly aluminium frames or Polansky’s Perspex boxes) rather than being a manipulated mass themselves.

Rachel Adams’ pieces have more of a form but still a sense of lightness – she takes sheets of paper and crumples them into large forms which suggest much more weight and solidity than they actually possess... (read more)

FAD Video: Asbestos Curtain at Galleries Goldstein at Goodhood

Short and sweet! Asbestos Curtain opens this week in Old Street and I grabbed a quick chat with its curator for FAD.

ArtSlant Review: Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography.. at the Royal Academy

Asked to define what makes a great photographer, Robert Capa famously replied that “It's not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian.” And there’s some truth in it. Even a cursory inspection of the most influential photographers in world history turns up a remarkable number of Hungarians, whose aesthetic and innovations influenced every facet of the medium from war reporting to fashion photography to artistic abstraction. When you consider how deeply ingrained the photographic image has become into our understanding, expression and negotiation of contemporary life, this is no mean feat... (read more)

ArtSlant Review: Nan Goldin's Fireleap at Sprovieri

Nan Goldin is a photographer less interested in capturing the decisive moment than gathering snapshots of those people closest to her over a prolonged period of time. Her images of friends and acquaintances since the 1980s, famously including drag queens, club kids and drug addicts, have imbedded in them a sense of time and development of her relationship with her subjects, as well as the way she collates images to create a portrait rather than summing it all up in one shot.

This sense of intimacy and wanting to memorize people through photographing them is key to Godin’s snapshot aesthetic, which she now brings to imagery of children in Fireleap... (read more)

Saatchi Magazine Interview: Wendy Elia for BP Portrait Award and WW Gallery

(Originally published in Saatchi Online Magazine)

When Wendy Elia paints a person they don’t look away. They don’t exist as an object for artistic consumption but as a being, or at least a likeness, who looks the viewer in the eye and raises more questions about her or himself than they would appear to have answered by posing for Elia in her studio. Large scale, crafted in detail and laden with clues and comments, Elia’s portraits register all the enigma and contradiction of a real sitter, not an idealized muse, especially if they’re female. In her smaller, looser and portable paintings that are produced concurrently with these works, she looks to photography or moving image stills as a kind of imprint of a person or persons to then be re-interpreted by the swift stroke of the paintbrush. They may not necessarily be addressing the viewer directly, but these people have already infiltrated our minds through mass media and by painting them Elia makes us view them afresh too. With a painting currently in the BP Portrait Award 2011 at the National Portrait Gallery and a joint show opening at WW Gallery in July, she spoke to Laura Bushell about her work and the pleasures and pitfalls of painting people.

LB: You’ve got two shows with works that are quite distinct from each other, how would you describe your practice?

WE: I seem to work in different painting languages, so there’s the series I do that are my friends and family in my studio with the boarded up fireplace and the laminate floor that are very intense. Within those images that are painted mostly from observation there are lots of small images, which is almost like the outside world coming in. All of these are private, this is the inner world, this is the world that we’re reduced to in a way, shut in the studio coming up with painting. Last year I got a painting into the BP Portrait Award called The Visit V which was a painting of my mother in the studio with the boarded up fireplace and the laminate floor. The laminate floor represents painting really, as it’s a flooring that is supposed to stand for wood flooring, it’s made to look like wood flooring but it isn’t. So in a way it stands as a metaphor for painting that’s supposed to look like the real world but is not. That’s one strand of work and that’s the paintings in the National Portrait Gallery, this year’s one being I Could Have Been A Contender.

FAD Preview: Watch Me Move at Barbican Art Gallery

(Originally published on FAD)

Be prepared to set aside a sizeable chunk of your life for Watch Me Move, because for their summer blockbuster the Barbican Art Gallery have assembled the biggest ever exhibition on the history and influence of animation, and once there its hard to tear yourself away from these colourful, dynamic, sparkling moving images.

So diverse and comprehensive is the show’s coverage of animation, from makers including the Lumiere Brothers, through Disney, Pixar, Tezuka, Semiconductor, Lotte Reiniger, Ari Folman, Roy Harryhausen and Christian Boltanski using stop motion, claymation, puppets, drawing, CGI… that this review is in danger of turning into a list.



So instead of reiterating how great these great names of animation are (as indeed the lesser known names who appear here), it’s suffice to say that to have them all available to view is a great thing, but to have them choreographed over seven carefully themed sections is sublime.

Structured to cover the early development, later technologies, character development, narrative ticks and experimentation in animation, as well as the gamut of themes and concerns within these films from through time and around the world, Watch Me Move is so comprehensive it’s impossible to take it all in during one sitting. But it’s worth a try. There’s something intrinsically magical about animation that captures us from an early age and Watch Me Move shows how mesmerizing it can be at any age.

FAD Video: Interview with David Lamelas at Raven Row & Bloomberg Space

Two video interviews I did for FAD with artist David Lamelas for his screenings at Raven Row and installation at Bloomberg Space. He's a very engaging man, a great interviewee.

ArtSlant Review: Piccadilly Community Centre

Visiting Piccadilly Community Centre is probably one of the most disconcerting encounters with ‘art’ that I’ve ever had. This place does what it says on the tin: it’s a fully functioning, socially enriching community centre bang on Piccadilly in the space normally occupied by Hauser & Wirth’s up-market gallery.

There’s a canteen, a prayer room, charity shop, access to the internet and a constantly rolling program of classes to enhance one’s physical and mental well being – hula hooping, laughter sessions, zumba, aromatherapy; you pick your therapy. More than that: there are people. Yes, actual humans who occupy the space not as paid up components of an installation but of their own volition... (read more)

ArtSlant Review: David Rickard at Sumarria Lunn

The interesting thing about David Rickard’s work is not that he leaves large chunks of its production up to chance, but how much structure and pattern surrounds this surrender to the unforeseeable. In this small yet well-put-together solo show at Sumarria Lunn, Rickard relinquishes part of his artistic control and lets the unknown creep in; the two are collaborators and the results are surprisingly coherent.

Exhaust takes main stage in the show – a performance piece in which Rickard exhaled into metallic balloons for a full twenty-four hours, assembling them into a silver tower of captured breath. Rickard’s need to breathe and the passage of time set the parameters of the aesthetic, but of course he couldn’t foresee how much he would exhale over the day, so the volume and shape of the piece was determined as it happened... (read more)