Interview with Rene Morales

Interview with Rene Morales

RM: Denim really is a complex form. It's certainly multi-faceted as a signifier of the USA, of ruggedness, of something that, both like and unlike painting, never goes out of style, even though its meaning has changed so much over time from associations with farm labor and industrial labor to all that it is today. But there's also something interesting about the way you're representing denim here in terms of technique. It's a rubbing process, correct?

DS: Yes. It is an action that manages to bring an image forward by partially erasing the initial paint application. Technically, imitating denim turned out to be a confusing experience, maybe because of the speed of the technique or perhaps because rubbing the surface allows me to change things at the very last minute. Also, treating a painting like denim, wearing it down, forcing it to become a look-a-like, was an operation that was fast, emotional, and yielded enough risk for me to insist on. It risked losing the painting completely as it broke the purity of the field and made it trash, all in one move.

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RM: Something else I find interesting about the rubbing is that, at least initially, your method had nothing to do with a desire to represent denim. Right? It was, at the risk of reading into things too much, a hostile gesture towards gestural abstraction, a gesture of ruination or erasure. Yet it ended up producing a strikingly realistic representation of something. And it turned out that that something could then serve a positive purpose, as a nimble signifier for the attitude of subversion, that ostensible trashiness that you were going for in the first place ! I'm curious about this way of working: From positive to negative to positive, affirming then negating then affirming.

DS: I wanted the paintings to multitask and to be many things at once, so, I had to do many things at once. The denim had to finish, at whatever cost, the works I couldn't resolve for almost 20 years and the paintings had to be abstract works and jeans so I had to do, undo, do until I finally got it right. And as you point out, while rubbing the surface I cancelled something out. This always takes place in my work: A foreign element enters the picture and changes it all immediately. The cancellation isn't negative through, as it implies going full force in bringing forward some aspect of the work and then allowing a random sign to enter the painting, opening it up.  If I think about those paintings, the all-over works would be the artsy ones, the poetic attempt, and the denim paintings would be the functional fellows, and when hung together that gap is what activates both identities.