The Untimely Genius of Siemon Scamell-Katz

SIEMON SCAMELL-KATZ is an artist who gazes – as Eva Figes writes of Claude Monet adrift among his water lilies in the blue-gray hour before dawn in her 1983 novel Light—« at, not through. The shiny skin of things, the shimmering envelope. Scamell-Katz’s exquisitely colored abstract paintings on aluminum are a bit like that shimmering pond in Giverny: at first they are subtly reflective, sensual. They change radically with the angle of the gaze, the proximity of a window, the time of day, the weather.

Their content is determined by the landscape from which they are drawn. His palette comes both from his memory and from the preparatory watercolors he makes on the ground immersed in a landscape, in which his primary concern is fidelity to color, which he considers the distinct signature of the place. The paintings themselves are made in his studio by the slow accumulation of layers of oil that he adds to enameled panels, then partially sands them down each time the layers begin to suggest a figure, a process reminiscent of monumental wall paintings. by Megan Rooney but scaled down, delicately done. Once they “start to feel like an object in themselves”, he works quickly to finish them, often in a wet-on-wet process that leaves them looking radiant.

Scamell-Katz began much of the work in his current exhibition at Galerie Mercier in Paris between 2018 and 2020, while living on the salt marshes of England’s North Norfolk coast: a place which, like his panels, is defined by indistinction and opacity. It is a landscape in which, under the great weight of an open sky laden with clouds, the land merges with the sea at each tide. It is treacherous, inhuman, a setting for contemplating dissolution, finitude, death. Yet his “numinous nature”, as Scamell-Katz describes it, attracted him; he recorded it obsessively, though he says it has always eluded him. The resulting works are nonetheless luminous, sometimes triumphant fields of color with the saturation and energy of, say, Helen Frankenthaler. A green pansy in a green hue1981, at times straying into a fascinating depth and darkness that, like Cy Twombly’s ‘Hero and Leandro’ series of 1984-85, feels both tender and dangerous.

Scamell-Katz’s most recent work hones the instability of his media to dazzling effect; sometimes he glazes the panels white or coats them with acrylic gesso before applying oil and the finished work “lights up” before the viewer’s eyes as the aluminum refracts ambient light. Other times he glazes it black so that the finished panel darkens and deepens as you walk past it, like the onset of night.

The work’s concern with immediacy, which is the key innovation of Impressionism, evokes the particular quality of duration or the temporal expanse generally reserved for the literary.

His “Light Itself” exhibition was mounted in April at Floréal, an intimate gallery perched on the great hill of Belleville and therefore bathed in the rich and changing radiance of high-altitude Paris. In “Light Itself”, this look To that I describe, a look that happens on the surface, has gradually given way to a look through of another kind: a look via the work towards this unthought element which always mediates our encounters with the painted surface – the light itself. The exhibition included just six paintings, each drawing on Figes’ detailed descriptions of light in Monet’s Giverny throughout the day. Yet they do not give us immediate access to the rarefied light of Giverny; they are not simply representative. Rather, they provide a place, of sorts, to observe the light of the gallery itself. Sitting in the gallery with the paintings for much of the day, I learned as much about Paris as I learned about Giverny. The shimmering shades of ultramarine and shadow of 22:03, 2023, which emerged as a rainstorm passed overhead receded as the midday sun returned, giving way to lemon and ocher and unexpected notes of alizarin. Simply put, painting has made light its medium. In this sense, the works are non-reproducible. My gaze activated them, but it took time.

The work’s concern with immediacy that is Impressionism’s key innovation – that magic that perceptually synthesizes Monet’s disparate traits – evokes the particular quality of duration or temporal expanse typically reserved for the literary. Indeed, Scamell-Katz’s work does not distinguish between genres of aesthetic research. Claude Monet and Joan Mitchell are as much removed from his work as Figes and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In a way, that’s what I expected of acclaimed writer Rachel Cusk’s partner. His relationship to literature is not a metaphor.

So I was surprised to learn from Scamell-Katz that the two rarely talk about the content of their work while it’s in progress. It was necessary to discover the correspondence between his work and his. It was only at the suggestion of Dan Gunn, editor of the Cahiers series at Sylph editions and professor of literature at the American University of Paris, that the two considered publishing something together. Gunn saw their work as an intimate dialogue that went beyond mere thematic resonance. This meeting resulted in Career (2022): a slim volume that combines the paintings of Scamell-Katz with an essay by Cusk.

However, this dialogue predates Career. Both have a permanent concern with the status of the past, with the residue: the afterimage, the partial memory, the glimpse, the rest. Cusk’s latest novel, The second place (2021), is a “retraining” exercise, as she calls it, Mabel Dodge Luhan Lorenzo in Taos (1928): a hitherto forgotten memoir of the years when D.H. Lawrence lived with Luhan at his New Mexico hacienda. Cusk’s novel has a moral agenda: it considers the male artist’s exploitative relationship with women, his historical indifference to female suffering. It picks up on the difficult legacy of archetypal figures like Lawrence, who explicitly tried to subjugate Luhan – to “break his will” – and Lucian Freud, whose work too often relied on the sadistic control of the painter Celia Paul, his partner. for a long time. Scamell-Katz’s recovery of Light– an overlooked novel, though Figes’ personal favorite – is restorative. Rather than exploiting and obscuring the work of a woman best known as a feminist critic, he subverts the expected sense of influence and elaborates on her literary project. Excerpts from his text, displayed on the gallery wall, cohabited with his images.

Sitting together in his studio in a renovated fur factory in Montreuil last spring, I couldn’t help but think that Scamell-Katz, like Cusk, was trying to get out from under this cloak of machismo, rage and self- indulgence. A few pictures hung on the walls of the studio: a small painting of a waiter, two recent photographs of Cusk. Hundreds of enamel and oil pots lined the shelves in the studio. When we arrived there, he offered me a cup of tea and his most comfortable chair. There was no jostling in the studio, no posturing or monologue or assertiveness, no performance. We thought, together, of a half-finished painting that he had placed on a low easel – what would become 22:04. It was then a cerulean painting, lavender and phthalo green; it was his childhood in Dorset, he told me, which was difficult. He was already at nineteen coats of paint, double what his paintings normally were when finished. He had just sanded off a large part of it. It had blocked him; the remembered landscape of this period too easily suggested the figurative or the symbolic and therefore moved away from the pure truth.

If we read classical landscape paintings as a testament to the artist’s struggle against that same extractive desire that promotes the destruction of the earth and the objectification of women, Scamell-Katz’s denial of the picturesque gaze, the figure and the horizon, could be read as an aesthetic resolution. Scamell-Katz’s work is therefore a serious response to a historical and phenomenological problem. He is audaciously indifferent to trends in contemporary art. Rather, it asks the viewer to “live in correspondence” with the landscape, “so that it looks at you and becomes part of everything you do”, as Cusk writes, in The second place, of the same marsh views that Scamell-Katz painted so obsessively until he and Cusk left England for Paris. Scamell-Katz’s impulse is to record and evoke rather than represent and capture; it is not a violent abstraction, but rather an unconventional realism. Behind his work hides a deep concern for the landscapes he has known, climate change; he and Cusk rarely fly anymore, if they can help it. When he writes to me, it’s often in a rush.

Shannon Forest is a Los Angeles-based writer and PhD student in English at UCLA.