Mark Lewis: City Streets
Mark Lewis shares his cityscapes this month at Bowery Gallery. To prepare for this post, I listened to the interview that he had with Richard Higgs of KWGS’s show, Folk Salad. He said, “In my observational work, I’m trying to achieve a quality of light that is real. Not necessarily realistic, but real experientially. I want the work to have its own reality…Eventually it will be separated from the subject, and then hopefully carrying on with a life of its own.” I think this is fundamentally the heart of perceptual painting and drawing. I think most artists who work from perception would find that his comments resonate with them. For some reason, though, this feels different. These words land a little bit differently when examining Lewis’s work.
Mark Lewis works from observation, though he also has studio pieces that are imagined and invented. For his large perceptual work, he spends about three-to-four months at each location, coming back each day at the same time under the same weather conditions. While his work is graphite on paper, it is not observational drawing: it’s observational collaging, and he first started working this way when he wanted to make his drawings more tactile. With this approach, he does not have to necessarily start with a viewfinder and commit to a specific composition. He begins them from somewhere in the middle of wherever he’s looking and works his way outward. And, because he is working by joining pieces of paper together, he doesn’t have to be confined by a specific size canvas or predetermined ratio of height to width. In this way, his work is totally organic. He thinks of each piece as if they are like site-specific sculptures, as each work is truly a response to each place. Thinking back on the work being “real experientially” now seems authentically true, as each work is an accrual, over an extended period of time where, over that time, from encounter to encounter, Lewis gets to become more than an acquaintance with the environment–he becomes a part of the place.
Mark Lewis, Lewis and Admiral, 2024
The shapes of the pieces of paper contribute to creating deep space. Not only are there the actual lines–the edges of sidewalks and telephone wires that converge in perspective, but there are the edges of the more trapezoidal pieces that, on the ground, function as sidewalk. In the sky, on the other hand, they often echo those perspective lines, making the sky momentarily feel like interior space, like planes in the sky that feel almost like a drop ceiling. But then suddenly, he interrupts that gravitational pull of perspective towards the center with rectangular pieces that remind us of the atmosphere and height of the sky. His work feels like a stage set, and when I spoke with him on the phone, that is how he described his process. He constructs the scene and then adds the figures after. The collage technique has the same kind of magic that origami does to turning a two-dimensional flat plane into an intricate, three-dimensional form. However, the magic that the paper brings to Lewis’s work is not through bending and folding, but rather by providing a strong and solid structure to the cityscape. It’s the flatness of the paper and the shapes that he uses that reinforce the hardness of concrete and depth of space in the cityscape.
Mark Lewis, 11th Street (Buck Atom 2), 2024
The vastness of the space, the attention to all of the details of the cityscape, and the inclusion of figures and cars make his works feel like a master class in anthropology. How do humans organize space to conform to the activities that they do? His cityscapes provide a new window into how we live. On the left, lots of thin, triangular slices of paper fan out in the directions of the telephone wires, concrete dividers, and curbside edges, creating a region of space that is specifically designed for driving back and forth, walking to and fro, and sending electricity here and there. A van and a long line of people marching down the sidewalk demonstrate this progress-oriented activity. On the right, a restaurant, a large statue of a cowboy, and a pavilion with picnic tables define a more broad, open space. A man demonstrates his ability to casually meander, as he stops to sip on a soda, while another appears to be standing and taking his time to think about where he wants to go next. The spaces seem to be completely divided by a vertical plane that passes through the telephone wires and the guard posts to the right of the sidewalk. This images is the least rectangular of his large pieces, and the piece gets taller and wider towards the edges, encapsulating the entire view, extending out to his peripheral vision.
Mark Lewis, TFM #12 Produce Table, 2023
Mark Lewis, TFM #13, Orange Umbrella, 2023
He has another set of observational collages in the show that are smaller and in color, and much more focused on the figure. Done at a farmer’s market near his studio, the scenes contain pop up tents, fruit stands, and many more people. After learning about his process with the graphite collages, I was confused as to how he could capture so many figures on site, particularly with more detail and color. He works from oil sketches and videos he takes at the market, which allow him to continue to maintain his observational sensibility in his collage.
Mark Lewis, Night Painter, 2022-23
Lastly, his in-studio work is bright, colorful, large, and complex. While they are still cityscapes, these invented scenes are dynamic and emotional, filled with love, violence, catastrophe, and joy. Are these pieces a commentary? In this picture, the artist is painting a cityscape and the image on the canvas appears to be pleasant and ordinary, while the reality in this scene is chaotic and violent. These mixed media cityscapes may be invented, with wild rays of color and fictional sparkly stars, they call to question what is real–the observational graphite pieces and their objective accuracy, or the emotional drama imperceptible to the cityscape artist? Perhaps they coexist as two sides to the same city.
Mark Lewis: City Streets will be on view from September 3-28, 2024.
Eileen Mooney.
