01/04/10
Text: Jessica Witkin
David Malek makes his shiny, perfectly composed paintings of color and pattern with industrial enamel paint he buys from the hardware store and plywood he cuts into geometric shapes. The work is at once cosmic and corporeal (I can feel it in my heart but it’s still a mystery) and provides a dynamic analog for light and space, science fiction, pop music, drugs, time travel, poetry, optimism, and the sublime.
David Malek lives and works in New York and is represented by Smith-Stewart. The artist’s work is currently on view in his European solo debut David Malek: Safety Yellow at SAKS Gallery in Geneva through January 16, 2010.
I want to talk about your New York gallery debut at Smith-Stewart last year. The way you installed the work was incredibly dense. Like the works, the salon-style hanging was all shape and color, vibrant and concentrated.
I think that every artist who did a show in that storefront had to find a strategy to confront the space architecturally. It’s so tiny. I remember Nicole Cherubini made a partition and she had her sculptures on both sides of it. Kate Gilmore did this architectural intervention where she made a partition in the drywall and used that in a performance. In terms of a painting show I had to decide how I was going to tackle that space. One strategy could be a more restrained show with one piece per wall, but I decided to go the other way, over the top and just really attack it. I broke the rules a little bit, by putting so many pieces on one wall.
There’s a way that the installation really worked in the favor of the individual pieces too.
I don’t quite know quite how to describe it, but I wanted it to be a kind of installation, an architectural environment, where each painting was still self-sufficient and interesting in and of itself.
They’re all color and pattern, and they have these optical plays, and some of them even have real-world associations for me. There’s this diagonal gray and orange gradient painting that is like a sunset and reminds me of the movie L.A. Story with Steve Martin. It has a Los Angeles horizontal skyline, grey, and orange. Do you know what I’m talking about?
I’ve never seen that movie. My favorite painterly L.A. movie is To Live and Die in L.A. by William Friedkin. There are a lot of super-saturated colors in that movie, so maybe L.A. Story is the same way. The title of that diagonal painting is actually Evening Wavelengths, and it refers to one time we were up in the Berkshires and I was sitting on this huge rock with buddies from college and it was getting to be evening time and because I love light and color so much I just said to my friends, look, now we’re getting into the long wavelengths. It was the end of July, and the sky was getting to that point where it gets red and orange light. No one would ever know that except me, but that’s the specific moment it’s about.
No, I would never know that. The works don’t have that aspect of specificity to them, but they do retain that intensity of feeling. I absolutely feel the sunset in that one. There’s also that blue gradation painting that looks like a swimming pool, like the waves that happen in water, but a really rigid version of that. I love that painting.
Yeah. laughs... That painting is called Starfield Road, after the Sonic Youth song. Apart from the title, which describes a pathway to infinity, what I really like about that song are these huge crashing waves of reverb. So I was thinking about how to make a painting about that song. That song is pretty raw and listening to it again, maybe my picture is too tranquil and your swimming pool notion is closer too the mark...
I wanted to bring up Op Art...
People bring it up. I have no interest in Op Art whatsoever. In my opinion, orthodox Op Art is very dry and is interested in these very acid affects, like using high-contrast color scenarios like black-and-white.
Like Bridget Riley.
Exactly, Bridget Riley, for example. Or, Richard Anuskiewicz, using orange and blue just to use these electric color combinations. I’m not interested in assaulting the eye like that. I’m much more interested in these luminous and what I hope are beautiful harmonies—dare I say it. And painting. I don’t think op Art has any real interest in painting actually. Only in making these surfaces that are pre-programmed for certain ocular responses. What I’m interested in is more mysterious and subtle than that. A painter that I’m very much interested in from that same period is Jo Baer. She does these very sophisticated researches with her color bands that are almost invisible. You have to really look to see the effect.
Yeah, I love her. Her palette is much softer. She also doesn’t work with the center really, but with frames and edges. I think your work is all about the center.
That’s true—but you can’t have a center without an edge; and vise-versa.
