SERIES, Act 1: Thomas Houseago, Vision Paintings

Thomas Houseago (born in Leeds in 1972, lives and works in Los Angeles) is internationally renowned for his monumental sculptures, for his strangely human monsters (Almost Human being the title of his retrospective exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2019) of apparent incompleteness that sink, stagger, come to life or contemplate. His unique combination of materials, some traditional —wood, plaster, iron or bronze—, other industrial —steel rods, concrete, or hessian—, also places him in a line of sculptors who, from Constantin Brancusi to Bruce Nauman, have focused on the representation of the human figure in space. More specifically, all of Thomas Houseago's work focuses on the embodiment of the human presence, from the anthropomorphic sculptures of his early days (L'Homme pressé, 2011, the giant sculpture that helped make him famous) to the video Cast Studio (Stage—Chairs—Bed—Mound—Cave—Bath—Grave) (2019) in which only the traces of the artist remain. His works thus question the violence of our world and of our daily lives, and how History —stories with their share of affects, even traumas— injures, breaks, and recomposes the body. Hence the recurring representation of chimeric entities with gaunt faces, angular bodies, and flayed skeletons. His ambivalent pieces, that oscillate between two- and three-dimensions, abstraction and figuration, colossality and fragility, offer an interpretation of humanity at its most magnificent and most vulnerable.

In Thomas Houseago's paintings, mainly created during the pandemic, the silhouettes are drawn with nervous strokes —some white and ghostly, others made up of overlayed and entangled drips of paint— and are representative of his practice, filled with energy and tension. The various series of large-scale canvases (Arizona Drawings, Vision Paintings, California Love Songs, Vortex Paintings, Resistance & Hope) are mainly produced outdoors, in places that are symbolic for the artist, such as Malibu, Big Sur, or the Yosemite Valley. These works feature key elements of his pictorial vocabulary such as the sun, the moon, flowers, and the ocean. Executed in bright, vivid tones, they fully express the transcendental, emotional, and restorative power of painting, in its visceral relationship with nature. Above all, they attest that the artist's initiatory journey is as much psychological and inner as physical and outer.

In Untitled (Vision Paintings), the skull, a recurring subject for the artist, is made up of a skeleton drawn in the background with pencil and then covered with gold acrylic ink. In the set of silkscreens produced from this original work on paper, each print is individually enhanced with vibrant touches of paint. This edition has been produced on the occasion of the publication of Thomas Houseago’s monograph, Vision Paintings, in 2023 by Éditions Dilecta, the first entirely dedicated to the artist's paintings and drawings.