PB: As a "composer" of quite lyrical and often three dimensional images, which appear as an interaction, almost an intervention between painting and sculpture - at the same time as this work operates generically between these forms, there also seems a quite traditional element of aesthetics? - In this conversation, we return to balance, what is painting? What is sculpture? Is there a difference? And, therefore, how do you perceive the nature of surface?
JO: Well again, when people ask me if I make paintings, or they "say" I make paintings, I usually say "no I don’t, I make sculpture". And If they say I make sculpture I say "no I make drawing". If I was to deal with it from the point of view that I only make sculpture then I am ignoring aspects of painting that I believe are sculptural. This is an argument I often had with my ex-wife, where she was involved in an idea of painting and it not being a sculpture, or sculptural, and being a part of this history of painting and I can’t deal with that fixed notion myself. I’ve tried to make oil paintings, but I get involved with its surface, that I feel has its own tentative history. But I tend to personally think of all the things I make as sculpture, they maybe things that hang on the wall and have colour on the front, but they are still as much a sculpture of a painting as they are a painting and in that sense every sculpture is really one hundred percent surface. Whatever you get from that work you are getting it from the surface. The surface is the tool. It’s very important to explore the possibilities of how that surface can speak and I think there are a lot more possibilities than I have yet come across.
PB: I feel there is also a temporal nature to this process of interaction between forms and surfaces. With no apparent narrative content (or at least not a narrative content that exists solely in the body of work) the symbolic units can relate in multiple directions. There is no longer a singular linear journey through the works?
In the next article Julian Opie continues the explanation of his work
