ARTIST STATEMENT
My work primarily responds to the theme of intuition and memory. Whilst living in Holland I was moved by the manner of work of both Rene Daniels and Daan van Golden, who kindly came to my studio. In turn I have also visited contemporary artists in London I admire to witness their practice and look at the role memory plays as part of a creative stimulus.
The visual narrative of my paintings sometimes draws on recurring themes such as the loss of innocence and the hostility of living within in a globalised community.
Paintings shown at KESTER+BLES Gallery (London) were inspired by my immediate surroundings. Forsaken streets, derelict construction sites and obscure playgrounds which offered seemingly familiar but strangely oppressive environments - a testimony to the fact that these places do not always provide inhabitants with what they were designed to offer: access, shelter and recreation.
There was a formal structure to each work aiming to reflect the stranglehold that architecture has on the urban jungle through what is essentially the manipulation of nature. My initial observational studies at the time often became surreal in an effort to balance what I saw with the information drawn from my emotive experience.
For example Ping Pong was developed over months using an old brush to drag acrylic off the canvas as colour and shapes were built up, leaving threads of paint to become etched into the canvas. The appeal of this subject was the idea of failed collective leisure...for most of the winter this solid concrete structure sits grimly and patiently like a small bunker adorning the odd can of lager. In this particular piece I was searching for a sense of control and tension.
Pool on the other hand was far more eclectic using geometric pattern not so much as to create a rhythm but to establish a kind of barrier in the foreground of the painting. I continue to exploit imagery from earlier sources within my work and in this case the triangular shaped shutters relate back to my French childhood home but also to my encounter with Rene Daniels' bow-tie motif.
Recent Work (2024)
Casper Scarth’s equivocal figures invite the viewer into an uncertain exchange. There is a mutuality about them that draws you in. Initially their small scale pulls at you, then their use of colour and detail. Painted in egg tempera on hardboard, they are saturated with intense, matt colour, counterpointed by concise details that stand in relief on the paint’s surface – a woman’s fingernails, a man’s buttons – piques that divert the eye across and into the space. Others, on smooth board, have a dilute, free quality that is mirrored in his line.
In some works this restiveness is explicit in the figure itself, like ‘Swan Song’, which fluctuates between the human and the animal. In others it remains more implicit, dwelling in the detail of an awkward, twisted hand of an ape perched precariously on a globe, as in ‘Terra-Apocalyptic’.
For Scarth, none of the pictures start with a set idea, rather they evolve through the process of painting. Still, certain motifs reappear across his work, such as the primate, a conscious allusion to the quiet horror of a short story by Kafka in which a captive gorilla talks of his accumulated observations of humans and their interactions with the environment. Others include deflating balloons, the ambivalent, enquiring figure of a boy, and the hirsute artist with his miraculous bag of possibility.
Appealing, knowing and at times disquieting, Scarth’s work stands slightly to one side. As such it provokes viewers into articulating some of the more uncomfortable elements of their humanity, and also to consider the position of the artist in relation to inherited traditions, both in the mainstream and outside it.
Casper Scarth in conversation with Sarah Tan (2022):
ST: Looking around your studio there are a lot of green paintings. You describe this colour as ‘surgical green’ the starting point for an ongoing series of paintings which include these four artworks we are looking at more specifically today.
ST: My understanding of ‘surgical green’ is a cool, light shade of green typically associated with a surgeon’s work uniform, customarily known as ‘scrubs’. Scrubs used to be white – the colour of cleanliness. Sometime, in the early 20th century one influential doctor switched to green because he thought it would help reduce eye strain during surgery. The green colour provided a high contrast to the blood of the surgery and prevented surgeons from being desensitised to the human body.
CS: Yes, I’ve often felt my way through painting towards finding specific colours. Growing up in France I was aware of the artist’s ‘bleu de travail’: a uniform of work blue, chores coat and painter’s trousers. Hospital scrubs also play a role in carrying out a specific task, but whereas the artist’s tools are soft bristled paintbrushes and fluid paints, the surgeon works with sterile, sharply pointed surgical blades, precise instruments designed to slice neatly through layers of human flesh. The artist, however, layers skins of pigment onto a blank canvas in an altogether safer endeavour. Nonetheless, rigour exists with in both professions, and balance is found in harmony and continuity. I guess you could say, paint symbolically replaces the life force of blood, it transforms into a myriad of flowing colour that results in regulated or intuitive design. Though all this does sound a bit fanciful.
ST: Words never do quite translate… but I can ‘buy in’ and see the colour ‘surgical green’ lies at the heart of these four paintings we are looking at today. This first painting you’ve also entitled ‘Surgical Green’, employs partial veiling and static portraiture. The subject stares out from behind bands of alternating dark and light green vertical stripes suggesting a world of instability.
CS: Yes, the last few years have steered me in the direction of a narrative preoccupied with the shifting landscape of mental health. The ambiguity of this portrait (emphasised by the juxtaposition of light and shape) lies in the uncertainty as to the identity of the subject: surgeon or patient. Arguably within the context of a global pandemic both identities are a possibility.
ST: Alongside is a painting entitled ‘Paper Child’. I’ve seen you working with this motif before in paintings, furniture designs, and cut-outs. From memory it started as a simple scissor cutting made from a sheet of South East Asian decorative wrapping paper, found in a chest of drawers belonging to a British admiral.
CS: There is something delicate and yet enduring about wallpaper. I’m using this motif to paint/suggest a scissor cutting poised like a flag above a thin white pole. Central in composition, and doll-like in contour, the cutting accentuates the idea of fragility and vulnerability experienced by so many young people during the pandemic in terms of isolation and social constraints. Echoing a static weathervane, the paper shape fails to indicate how, or if, frailty might be overcome. The background (in which green fades to white) serves as a window: the space beyond hints towards the wishful, ephemeral notion of freedom. I think more than anything I was looking for a sense of stillness.
ST: Moving on to the second portrait in this quartet ‘Shshsh’. This seems quite a loaded title implying the silencing of expression or maybe the static sound of white noise?
CS: I not sure where ‘Shushing’ people comes from? But it is a way of controlling a situation whether within a classroom or conversation. The rules of the pandemic were still rippling in my mind. I made the choice to deliberately shift the mandatory face mask to an eye mask eluding to how humans learn to adapt and ‘hide in plain sight’.
ST: In this case I see a younger person. Teenagers, in particular, are adept at putting up a brave front and masking their perceived ‘weaknesses’ in order to ‘fit in’ and mirror the image that contemporary society, and increasingly social media, demands and expects of them.
CS: There is ‘susceptibility’ at play here. Within the portrait, the outer ‘big hair’ is typical of Western culture purporting to present a strong cultural identity, self-esteem and self-respect. Viewed more closely, the painting serves to peel away these bold exterior layers to reveal the wispy strands of a yellowish, weaker hairstyle, which becomes increasingly prevalent as the outer coat gradually fades away.
ST: The fourth painting, ‘Brush Horse Egg’, is a nod to surrealism in which elements of symbolic attributes are deliberately staged. This painting feels more stand alone, in comparison to the others, like you were running through the mechanics of finding a visual language which served best to illustrate inner preoccupations?
CS: True, Surrealism grapples with the complexities relating to human condition – it presents elements of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non sequitur. In this painting, the ‘paint brush’ represents the artist who has creative licence to explore ideas as observer, commentator, poet and philosopher. Standing above the paintbrush is the ‘horse’, a symbol of courage and power. An element of courage might also be attributed to artists in their endeavour to reflect an emotive world. Finally, the golden-yolk egg is indicative of new life, hope and enlightenment… something we all need!
ST: One might regard these four paintings as attempting to examine how society responds or fails to respond to mental vulnerability in its various guises, as well as the shape shifting tendencies of human tribulations. I can see your ‘surgical green’ paintings seek to provoke a visual debate around mental health and social vulnerability exasperated by the pandemic.
PRESS RELEASE (2020)
‘Dreamscapes’ (White Box Gallery) are a series of recent figurative paintings that represent a new direction in Casper Scarth’s work.
The paintings’ interplay of colour, geometric pattern, and loose, free line has evolved through a three-stage process involving drawing, collage, and painting. The compositions are not predetermined, rather they are the product of the shifts and changes made in response to the processes involved in each phase.
The initial large, labour-intensive drawings are the first stage of finding a visual language with which to think about identity, loss and change. Both alluding to, and wary of, the weight of religious iconography, Scarth’s work draws on personal imagery that has saturated his past – formative book illustrations from his childhood, films he watched as a teenager in Paris, and specific locations where he lives and works in London.
Responding to these drawings through collage provides Scarth with the space to intervene in the narrative impulse, to literally obscure or disrupt that drive through layering or reconfiguration.
The final paintings work to control the graphic surface both to move narrative forward and to push back against it. The viewer’s eye is arrested by the tensions between clarity and uncertainty, between confinement and freedom. We are at once drawn in and held at a distance – like the unexpected animals in the paintings, who appear both ambivalent participants in, and wry observers of, the scenes that they inhabit. (H. Fussner)
QUOTES
'Casper Scarth's works create unsettling narratives that draw upon a series of recurring yet unexpected motifs. His work questions ideas of loss, hostility and the urban, using a visual language that plunders both his past, particularly his childhood in France and later experiences living and working in Holland, and the present, including the streets, building sites, parks and playgrounds of East London. His practice is sensitive to, and in pursuit of, the interplay and tension between assertion and intuitive reaction experienced in the act of making.' (H. Fussner)
'Surrealist paintings draw on recurring themes, often exploring the loss of innocence, lack of freedom, autonomy of the individual and hostilities faced in a globalised community. This is a new body of work that focuses on the artist's locality, where public spaces have been transformed into artificial wastelands.' (Buzz Magazine)
'Prime Cut explores the thin line between hedonism, excessive behaviour and decay. Lifted from various sources of media, these larger than life portraits capture young adults caught in unguarded moments of total collapse. Isolated and stripped of a clear context these colourful yet raw paintings give way to an unsettling sense of inner fragility. Scarth's oeuvre amplifies the insecurities of modern living.' (L. Kester)