Carton Pierre

  

Sometime during the end of summer 2007, I found myself adhering layers of papier-mâché to the backs of my paintings. The original progress of this activity is no longer clear to me: retroactively, it has lapsed into an incremental automatism, having passed from experiment to habit, to compulsion over the course of a few weeks (or months?) It began with my thinking I could use stiff paper as a backing to reinforce canvasses that had been cut off of their stretchers. My method of revising a painting was generally rough, entailing a drama of repeated scraping, so the problem was to reinforce the backs. But at some point it struck me that the backs began resemble someone’s idea of modern art.

 

Papier-mâché has a long history as an ersatz material. Carton-pierre ('stone cardboard') for instance, is papier-mâché that has been patinated to resemble wood, stone, or metal, and was used as a Roccocco decorative device. Papier-mâché is still used in stagecraft, as a resource for more or less durable deceptions. During the 19^th century the firm Waters and Sons made canoe hulls out of it; the firm also made paper observatory domes for refractory telescopes. Papier-mâché (‘chewed paper’) is remarkable for its ability to constitute a structure out of fluid scraps; even as it accumulates in layers it develops tension, becoming more buoyant as it acquires mass.

 

I recognized this process, specifically the sense of its time: at age ten I came home every day to build toys out of paper (ships, planes, tanks, dragons). In our home there were boxes of coloured papers, especially beautiful tissues, that my mother kept for crafts. The paper models never became a permanent substitute for real toys; I didn’t share them with others, and none survive to this day. My fingers were always covered in the drying glue; it became another boyish bodily fluid.

 

This story recalls Paul Valéry’s meditation on sea shells, in which he writes that the mollusc is an artist, exuding its shell, in a kind of repetitious perfectionism that expresses itself through the circumstance of containing its own growth. I find I can no longer resolve the problem of making a painting without recourse to papier-mâché’s resources of tactility and shelter. The tenous issue that links this practice most of all to Valery’s reading of the snail is that I also won’t complete a paper sculpture unless simultaneously constructing a home for a painting. As becomes obvious in the reactions of others, in the facts of exhibiting, the fronts retreat into a culture of their making. The backs, painted in metallic acrylics, become a diagram of painting’s finer intentions, their sheen a sociability of overlapping echoes, their fame.

 

- March 2009.