Artist Story: Simon Le Ruez

Please give a brief introduction to yourself and your artistic practice

As a child growing up on a small island, I constantly felt the need to escape and making art, at first simply drawing, was something I could do alone and lose myself in. It took some years to process the reality that this kind of creative pursuit could be a career path and certainly much longer to fully appreciated the scope and potential of where I might take things through the language of visual art. I dabbled with a few other options, I enjoyed working in gardens most of all, the solitary nature of this and the visual change one can bring about in a few hours, but from an early age other pursuits always felt like pastimes, something you did to get by and secondary to the activity of making art. There was and remains a sense that practicing as a visual artist is the clearest and most acute way I can communicate my thoughts and feelings about the world. Place and situation influenced my work early on and continues to do so, that formative need to escape imbued with a longing for elsewhere somehow feels embedded in my psyche and it’s a recurring theme that runs through all the work. In many ways, it’s a theme that gives licence to imagine and to dream, as opposed to some kind of faintly disappointing reality.

Your work is marked by a very considered use of materials, creating complex juxtapositions of shape, texture and colour. Can you expand on this intense interest in the materiality of your work?

I am fascinated by materials and their inherent associations. Through my wide-ranging use of them, a lot of the time I am looking to play with these associations, to subvert them in order to bring about or evoke another kind of proposition or sense of renewed expectation. For instance, it fascinates me that concrete, so often associated with permanence and rigidity, through its usage, might propose an air of levity and fragility. In addition, I love the fact that form presents a lot of complexity, the inside and the outside, the hidden and the reveal and the multi-sided surface. What really interests me is bringing all these elements together to create a kind of choreography with the work, a choreography in the staging but also in the viewing. Colour is something I have started to think of as a material in itself and I use it to instil an emotional resonance in the work but also to emphasise a physical presence. Ever since I started making things I had an interest in materiality. It could have come from a very simple place, such as what do I need to make something stand up, but then, like any language, things evolve and I’ve grown more and more curious, not only about materials but what I can do with them through process and combination. Intense is an apt word as I am always trying to set a charge through juxtapositions of form and material combination.

In earlier work the sculptural pieces often contained miniaturised figurative elements: small trees, fences, ponds, etc. Does an interest in model-making figure in your work?

In essence, no, because for me model making connotes a kind of replication that I’m not so interested in. Those earlier pieces harnessed elements that a model maker might use, but the context or ‘setting’ for those elements was often very subversive. I was more interested in conjuring a sense of the impossible, a floating landscape – for instance, or a kind of bird cage made out of copper piping – and combining that with more tangible miniaturised parts. I think the theme of escape sits large in those pieces but it’s a conflicted one and that’s what really interested me.

Much of your sculpture has a strong architectonic/architectural feel. What is it about the built environment that interests you?

I am constantly looking at architecture. Aside from its capacity to present ambitious forms and structures, what interests me about the built environment is how we as humans interact and engage with it. I think this comes back to a sense of choreography, how the spires of a cathedral are made to make one look up at the sky for instance. Fundamentally, interesting buildings speak to our physical being. I am also really interested in the notion of territory and junctions between realms of the interior and exterior. This is why structures which might appear like doorways or windows recur in the work, one of the reasons they are there is to allude to these meeting points, these in-between spaces which are everywhere within the built environment and which might be seen as emblematic of movement and change. I also like how a particular architectural style can harness a time in history or the future for that matter and this is something I have played with in the work. Brutalist architecture particularly interests me, there’s an urgency and honesty I enjoy, alongside the creative employment of concrete, and very often from a hard and minimal resolve stems a tremendous sense of the visceral.

Unlike your sculpture, your drawings and other two-dimensional works often contain human figures. Can you expand on this?

I worked for some years on a long running series, Any given Sunday (2003-08), where I made drawings on to plaster-soaked net curtain and within which a human figure or aspect of one was often present. This was about setting up a series of incidents or mapping seemingly random acts, which needed to be pieced together like memories and once again, with the net curtain, it employed a material which literally acts as a demarcation between the interior and exterior, the public and the private. These works were always shown in conjunction with sculptures or as part of installations and with them I was trying to do something that I couldn’t do with the three-dimensional work at the time, or perhaps do it in a different, more direct way. Figures occur in other more recent works which I like to think succeed in blurring the boundary between the two and three dimensional. They will often begin by an obsession with a particular film or film still and then through a playful form of appropriation and install, take on a new life with an invigorated narrative. I always consider these pieces as a kind of homage to cinema, they work in conjunction with the sculptures, but how is for the viewer to decide.

Cinema, particularly European Art House is a recurring reference in your work. You often use images from films by iconic directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Joseph Losey, etc, and the titles of your works and exhibitions often refer to films. How has this interest in film influenced your practice?

There is something about interesting film making that has the ability to distil a narrative, often inside the duration of a couple of hours. I am often astounded by this aspect of cinema, how a life or plight can be acutely evoked and how as a viewer, we can be drawn into a web of meanings and reference points. Like every artform, the more you look at it the more discerning you become. I remember the first time I saw Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), I almost wasn’t ready for it, but it was electrifying, and it may be an exaggeration, but it sort of changed the way I looked at the world. There was drama, humour and sadness all exquisitely weaved together in a complex flow of imagery and with a very particular point of view. I think the notion of suspense often conjured in cinema really interests me and this has profoundly influenced my practice. I often look to harness a sense of suspense in the work and, through its installation, how a series of elements might be positioned or brought together in order to evoke a state of excitement or anxious uncertainty, because that’s the way I feel much of the time. Like styles of architecture, I also think certain films define a particular time and place and I’m interested in playing with this, momentarily transporting the viewer elsewhere and then relocating them in the here and now.

There is an intense introspection in your work. The visual, aesthetic tensions seem to reflect an interior, psychological tension. What can you say about this?

I think this is something I thrive on, the visual articulation of this introspection. When I say thrive, it’s more of a need to do it, in a way which when it goes right, excites and fulfils me the most. It’s important to me that making art is difficult and if I am ever conscious of knowing exactly what I am doing, I tell myself that I am probably not doing anything interesting. This is distinctly different to intent, I think this needs to be there, but its right that the psychological tensions often required to make stimulating art with an individual resolve should reveal themselves in or through the work, for me this reveal, however subtle, is a mark of their success. I often return to Giorgio Morandi’s still lives, which for me are full of psychological tensions, objects arranged together but not touching often close to the edge of a surface, they speak about denied intimacies, fear, longing and so much more.

There is often a dream-like quality to your work. Is there a surreal element to your practice?

In many ways I think there are surreal elements at play, but I am a little reluctant to categorise them. I’m definitely interested in tapping into the subconscious and challenging any kind of orthodoxies, I think that’s the role of an artist to make others look at the world in a different way. For me, surrealism is at its best when it succeeds in a proposition of conflicted feelings and where any one meaning is a little hazy, that’s definitely something I’m interested in. Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936), the fur-lined teacup and saucer, achieves this and is an influential work for me. It nails a sense of playful transgression and is simultaneously peculiar, uncomfortable, funny and sexy.

What do you see as the ‘deeper meaning’ or narrative in your work?

I think the deeper meaning in the work is open to interpretation and surely that’s the essence of interesting and challenging visual art, to invite that participation and to stir up an emotional investment in the viewer, that’s what I’m striving for. Even though the aesthetic might appear very different now, there are revolving concerns at play today which I can trace back to works made twenty years ago. That said, what seems important is for the ambition of the work to grow and for it to resonate in different ways with our times, that remains a constant. I think it’s really important to be aware of what constitutes contemporary visual practice now as well as constantly looking back, viewing and experiencing other work is equally as important as making it. I want an audience to be affected by the work, it’s about my experience, my hopes, dreams and disappointments enveloped in the joy, difficulty, complexity and celebration of making.

Your titles are often as complex as the work itself. Can you talk about your use of language as an element in your work?

I often view the titling of work as a further opportunity to open up its experience and to propose new and unexpected tangents of thought. Language is powerful and evocative and it’s important for me to use it playfully and with a similar panache that I hope the work possesses. Sometimes, the titles just arrive or come very quickly, other times it’s a waiting game. Literature and music play their part, very often there is a line in something I am reading or something said in a film that moves me and is ripe for appropriation, or a lyric in a song that is played in the studio and this whole glorious process of cross fertilisation takes place. There are authors and poets I love that are clever and mischievous with words, perhaps too many to mention, but Gabriel García Márquez and Rainer Maria Rilke are special to me, their words leave a residue and aftertaste which is evocative yet elusive and that’s what I am trying to achieve with my titles.

Do you have any particular memories of your experience of working with Vane?

I had my first solo exhibition, ‘When the Quarry Calls’, with Vane in 2007. It was a time when things were really starting to happen with the work, which had recently been included in some notable group shows. At this point the gallery was in Kings House, just behind the main train station in Newcastle. I had visited the space before and was immediately taken by the charming wooden parquet floor. When I suggested to Paul and Chris that I would like a large section of it lifted so that I could set a work within it, I expected a ‘no’, instead it was a ‘yes, we can work with you on that’ and in many regards this has come to define my professional and personal relationship with Vane. There is a can do and will do attitude, which is rooted in an ambition for the work and testament to the long life of the gallery. I have had three further solo shows with Vane to date and each one has come at a transitional point in my career and artistic development and without doubt each one has led to further opportunity. I recall Paul and Chris visiting me in Berlin when I undertook a year-long residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. They visited the studio early one morning during a heatwave and seeing them was a little emotional. Many other studio visits have occurred and very often it’s the poignancy of what isn’t said as well as what is. They have been responsible for taking my work to art fairs and including it in group exhibitions in New York, Miami, and Cologne to name a few. I will be forever grateful to Paul and Chris for their support and championing of my work and look forward to Vane continuing as a vital advocacy for visual art for many years to come.