It was at the Western Front in the winter of 2010 that I first saw Eli Bornowsky’s paintings in the exhibition, Walking, Square, Cylinder, Plane (26 November 2010 – 22 January 2011). At the time, I didn’t quite know what to make of them. The paintings seemed to move between two competing impulses, a painterly mark that felt personal, even expressive, and a countervailing effort to hold that expressivity in check through a more impersonal, structural logic. Only later did it become clear to me that this work belonged to a broader formation and development, a resurgence of younger painters reintroducing painting into the theoretical conversation in Vancouver: Elizabeth McIntosh, Rebecca Brewer, Patrick Cruz, Nicole Ondre, Tiziana La Melia, among others.

Over the next decade, I moved out of Vancouver only to return periodically. I kept up with Eli’s work and the broader scene as it began to coalesce into something resembling a network whose shape I could only follow intermittently. All the while, Eli also left and returned, completing an MFA at Bard before relocating to New York to work as Cheney Thompson’s studio assistant.

A few months ago, I visited Eli’s exhibition is a knot helpful (October 31–December 13, 2025) at Catriona Jeffries to see his new paintings alongside the work of Jessica Stockholder. Eli was still working in a non-representational mode, now using a computational system to generate new permutations and compositional structures, all rendered in egg tempera, a medium whose physicality seems to resist, or at least modulate, the algorithmic logic of the compositions. A few days after the opening, Eli was in conversation with Christopher Mole, a UBC philosophy professor. During this talk, I asked Eli about his relationship to the discourse around abstraction in Vancouver and about his use of what might be considered an anachronistic medium — egg tempera — within a non-representational framework.

It felt, at the time, like there was more to say. This conversation picks up from there, returning to those questions while also widening the frame to consider the relation between painting and the city’s contemporary music scene — a scene that Eli has not only witnessed but participated in as a friend and interlocutor to many of its key figures. This interview, conducted over email and phone, forms part of a broader research project that contributes to a survey of contemporary Vancouver art and to a longer essay situating these practices within the city’s evolving cultural ecology.

Andrew Witt, April 27, 2025.

Andrew Witt. I’m interested in the persistence of abstraction, both as a mode of painting and as a category of art-making, and in its continued status as an advanced art form from Vancouver. There’s an evolving history of contemporary abstraction here, one that you’ve been part of as an artist and theorist. Perhaps we can trace a trajectory through the circle of people you knew while you were a student at Emily Carr. If we sketch out the terrain, one strand emerges from harder-edge, geometric approaches, with Neil Campbell coming to mind, and another develops from a different set of concerns, such as everyday observation or the reworking of inherited traditions of abstraction, as in the work of Rebecca Brewer or Elizabeth McIntosh. And of course, someone like McIntosh shows how painters can move between these categories or forms — her “knot” show at Catriona Jeffries two years ago is a good example of that kind of mobility.

This may sound like a broad question, but I’m curious: what do you remember about that moment of developing as an artist and painter? As a student at Emily Carr University, your own work took shape within this context but shifted as you attended grad school in New York. How do you understand that trajectory now? How would you describe this history from the vantage point of the present?

Eli Bornowsky. At Emily Carr, I remember being with a panel of students who received critiques from Elizabeth McIntosh as part of her job interview at the University. I’m sure part of her appeal to me was that she was an abstract painter. In fact, she was doing these less hard-edged but still geometric triangle paintings at that time. Before she arrived in Vancouver, I think abstraction was in a very minor key; there was not much of it to look at in the galleries. Certainly, the artist-run centres were not showing abstract painting. And most commercial abstraction was precisely that. Over the years, one can see Elizabeth’s influence on many artists who studied with her. Although I didn’t study with her, in 2010 we both had exhibitions at the same time, hers at the CAG, and mine at the Western Front, and the galleries had us conduct video interviews of each other for our respective shows.

Neil Campbell was certainly a proponent of abstraction, but more so, he was an advocate of learning to grasp the phenomenology of forms, which could apply to any art form. In a way, I became an acolyte of Neil’s, which was easy because he was generous with his time towards students who were engaged. And this support continued after the conclusion of art school as well. (I think Ian Wyatt would also remember Neil as a big influence.) Neil’s phenomenology was extreme: he once told me that he could see how the light from streetlamps changed when his body's electrical field came in proximity. Once, when he hired me to work in his studio, I was tasked with cutting out paper rings with a precision of a 32nd of an inch difference in width, and then we would stand across the room and compare how they looked and felt in relation to a blue coloured ground. His emphasis on learning how to really see — with the eyes and the body — was at loggerheads with Vancouver’s overemphasis on reading and thinking, i.e. an entire artistic tradition of visual artists who privileged thinking, but who were kind of visually disabled, which resulted in precisely the kind of art that merely illustrated theories. (A hilarious work that Ian Wyatt created at Emily Carr in Neil’s class, I think, literally blew up this problem: a stool you would sit on with an accompanying microphone. A powerful speaker for the microphone was built into the seat, and so anything you said into the microphone came out as rumbling vibrations into your butt!) (I wonder if Neil ever visited Lobe Studios?)

To be fair, at its best, the Vancouver tradition was one that emphasized art as a critical tool. Critical of problems in society, critical of art, critical of ideology and habits of mind, critical of power and control, critical of images and media. But to me, the real deep challenge of this critical approach was how to use it as art, rather than merely reiterating or illustrating the strategies already applied in politics and activism, books and theory. By the time of my first big artist opportunity (the group show Gasoline Rainbows at the CAG, (26 January — 18 Mar 2007)), I had developed a discourse on art, via Jacques Rancière, that attempted to articulate how the politics of art had to do with what it was actually possible to perceive and think, versus how power controlled and disciplined the possibilities of perception and thought. If art could provide experiences outside those sanctioned by power, then it followed that a politics of art could potentially be found in, say, the minutiae at the edge between two colours, or the way a picture did or did not direct your eyes across its composition.

Liz Magor’s critique method was also foundational for some of us students. Simply put, before making any conceptual observations about a work, students were tasked with making as many material observations as possible. Then, when it came to thinking about the work, all those thoughts were informed by the actual objective, material qualities present in the work.

I should also mention Eric Metcalf. He was my first drawing teacher, and we shared an enthusiasm for the relation between music and painting. For Eric, this was jazz music. Later, he would host me in the back of the Western Front, and we would eat meat, drink wine and talk about art while listening to loud jazz. We would also paint ceramics together in Port Moody. But his encouragement helped water the seeds of my interest in abstraction when I didn’t see much abstract art being done or discussed.

Also, as a prelude to my current work, I shared a studio with Mat Bushell who had hired a computer programmer to write software in which Mat could manipulate parameters to generate images for abstract painting. At the time I thought computer code was completely inapproachable. But now I see that Mat’s work has been travelling with me unconsciously for many years.
And I think nature was taken for granted somewhat because it was everywhere. It would be interesting to think more about the relation between nature and Vancouver art, because I don’t remember it being central to the discussion. Rebecca Brewer and I certainly discussed it and shared an enthusiasm for nature. Kasper Feyrer was working with mushrooms. Jordan Milner was obviously looking at nature. Jeff Wall and Roy Arden’s local photos imaged nature… of course, Emily Carr. And especially Beau Dick and the entire Kwakwakaʼwakw tradition, not to mention the other Indigenous art traditions… but somehow I remember nature being just part of the fabric, rather than a critical point… hmm… I’d like to hear more of what you think.

AW. Since returning to Vancouver in 2022, I’ve noticed that much of the city’s more advanced work turns, in one way or another, to nature and natural phenomena as a kind of theoretical scaffolding or armature. Aesthetic experience remains difficult to articulate, and in the face of that difficulty, artists and curators increasingly lean on ecological writing to account for artistic process and the aesthetic encounter. One no longer turns to Theodor Adorno or Walter Benjamin to name these sensations, but to figures like Timothy Morton. At times, the logic verges on tautology: ecology as aesthetic theory. This is maybe just a slightly overdetermined way of saying that ecology has become a go-to framework when things get conceptually dense. At times, it edges toward a kind of “metaphorical environmentalism,” or what might be called an “allegorical ecology.” It’s surprising how recurrent this has become in Vancouver exhibitions. A lot of it sits just one step away from a kind of performative ecology. You see this on Instagram all the time — artists lugging canvases out to the beach in the rain, hair plastered to their heads, faces fixed in solemn concentration, letting mud and saltwater and pigment do their thing, and then traipsing back with a landscape painting that stands as an icon of place.

Perhaps an instructive example was the inaugural exhibition at SFU’s Gibson Art Museum, Edge Effects(September 20, 2025 – February 15, 2026). The term comes from ecology, where it refers to the active zones that emerge when two environments met. At SFU, it gets repurposed as a metaphor for art-making and the aesthetic encounter, in which the museum is framed as a threshold where communities and disciplines overlap (and where that overlap is, more or less, presumed to be generative, which is a nice institutional hope). Ultimately, what you end up with is a concept that feels explanatory without ever quite having to explain anything — or, more to the point, without having to test whether any of it actually makes sense in the production and reception of artworks — a kind of intellectual multi-tool that converts, almost frictionlessly, into a description of both the work and the conditions under which you’re meant to experience it.

Along a different but parallel trajectory, I’ve begun to think of Rebecca Brewer’s work in terms of what I’m calling “bog formalism,” a sensibility also present in Vanessa Brown and Michelle Helene Mackenzie’s 2018 exhibition, Veils of a Bog at the Western Front. We can think of “bog formalism” as naming an ecological mode of attention as much as a formal logic: a way of structuring and arranging aesthetic form so that ecological processes are felt in both the visual and sonic elements, guiding the rhythm and interplay of compositional forms across painting, sculpture, or sound. For instance, in Mackenzie’s composition Post-Meridiem, the synthesizer begins to resemble wet ground or standing water, absorbing and reworking material through saturation and decay. The piece layers field recordings of bog life with a low-frequency drone that reflects and folds back into the space, gradually thickening into an enveloping atmosphere. In this spirit, I’m reminded of the description of Hotspring’s (Scott Gailey’s) album, Obit of a Sunshade (2020), released on the Mood Hut label: “digital technology half buried in the soil, transparent emotion in the intertidal zone; ferns growing by night out of a 4x4 flatbed.”

It’s hard to say how much this is a sound and how much this is an image. Whatever it is … I like the description. It is perhaps no coincidence that the cover art for Obit for Sunshade is by painter Simone Jarvis. The work closely resembles Rebecca Brewer’s paintings avant le lettre, sharing that same swampy eeriness, where the lines in the painting glow from within. It should be noted that this work is not conveyed through a representational medium — no ferns, no truck, no swamp — but rather through an abstract and non-representational form.

EB. If I understand you correctly, “a concept that feels explanatory without ever quite having to explain anything… without having to test whether any of it actually makes sense in the production and reception of artworks,” is a deficiency in institutional discourse that shows precisely why I am attracted to rigorous formal analysis. For it is in the experience of the form of an artwork that a viewer comes to participate, not merely in judging if the artwork “makes sense” but as a participant who actively makes and remakes sense with their body and mind.

AW. With that in mind, and to shift our attention more directly to abstraction and painting, perhaps we can go back to 2017. During the conference held alongside the exhibition Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures (December 3, 2016, to April 17, 2017), I remember feeling that the exhibition marked a defining moment in the conversation around contemporary art from Vancouver. The exhibition sought to map a new body of work emerging from the city, and the conference provided one of the earliest attempts to articulate how that work might be understood. You delivered a paper on abstraction, and footage of an octopus played on a screen behind you. The paper drew on Robert Linsley’s Beyond Resemblance: Abstract Art in the Age of Global Conceptualism (2017), both as an homage to Linsley and as a way to frame your own orientation toward abstraction.

What stayed with me were the key ideas that surfaced in that talk: abstraction as a form of “difficulty,” and the “radical meaninglessness” of abstraction as a conceptual category. What I appreciated was how your paper departed from the broader conversation around Ambivalent Pleasures. Much of the writing published in the catalogue was quite short (often under 2,000 words) or leaned toward more creative or associative modes. As a result, it neither offered a sustained description nor developed a clear analytical position. The curators of the show and other panellists invited during that conference didn’t do much more to articulate a clearer position either (as you mention in your talk, the curators didn’t define their terms beforehand, and you were forced to do most of the heavy lifting). This is an all-too-common occurrence in Vancouver: a scarcity of publications and venues dedicated to surveying the field, as well as an apprehensiveness among curators, critics, and art historians in charting a comprehensive account of what is happening now, however partial or flawed any attempt might be. Even so, the exhibition’s effort at a survey warrants defence. Nearly a decade on, the Vancouver Art Gallery has cut its programming and staff budgets by thirty percent and has effectively abandoned its commitment to a contemporary biennial, one that Ambivalent Pleasures: Vancouver Special at least tried to inaugurate and set in motion.
Now, almost eight years later, I’m curious: do you still stand by the arguments you made in that original paper? How has your position on abstraction changed or stayed the same? Has it shifted in the context of your move to New York full-time, or in relation to the debates around abstraction that emerged with post-internet art and the discussions of “zombie formalism”?

EB. I still stand by the arguments.

And I would consider the arguments useful in defending my position against both an over-conceptual approach and against the zombie-formalists. For example, today, when institutions reward artists for mere virtue-signalling and by the market for vulgar retail emptiness, I still find Robert Linsley’s rigorous book extremely helpful. And I think the argument also shows that critical engagement with art need not necessarily be based on conceptual theories. That said, I want my thinking and sensing in equal measure, and below, in my answer to some later questions, it should become obvious that the intellectual and materialist traditions I first encountered in Vancouver have been fruitful for my relation to Cheyney Thompson and his particular mode of abstract “conceptual painting.” But again, Robert’s provocation that the best abstract art is extremely difficult and radically meaningless is the kind of affront to convention that I get excited about.

AW. If we go back a bit further, you were one of the few painters in Vancouver who also wrote about contemporary painting and its relation to contemporary theory. I can’t think of many others doing that in the 2010s. Theory was central to the exhibitions you curated and the artists you wrote about, especially at a moment when there was a tendency here to resist work that simply illustrated an idea, a concept, or a mode of criticality. I’m thinking, for instance, of that short pamphlet you published with Artspeak, where you pushed back against painting functioning as an illustration of a critical position or a definitive idea.

Writing and theory were such defining elements for the previous generation of artists in Vancouver, and part of what is compelling — though for some, contentious — about that moment is how those artists developed an art history not separate from their work, but one that ultimately fed back into it, where it culminated in their own work as its most advanced form. In effect, they wrote an art history that culminated in their own work as its most advanced expression. In your own writing, however, there is also an aporia that emerges: you often used these pieces of writing to show how the work you were invested in exceeded theory or outran its elaboration.

What role did writing play for you at that time? Do you feel the same way about writing and theory now? Do you see it as an extension of how you develop your titles for your most recent paintings, titles that almost appear as captions, some of which are very long and elaborate?

EB. I would never deny the influence of the Vancouver artists’ tradition of book-learning and writing. I was hooked within my first year of arriving in the city: back then, it was Deleuze and Guattari, Badiou, Agamben, Žižek ... And it just happened that I enjoyed writing. But let’s face it: an art show that literalizes its own grant application is rudimentary at best and, at worst, not even art. I really enjoy participating in discussions, sharing ideas, books, and writing, which I see as the perfect accompaniment to a life in art. But in the end, being an intellectual is not necessary for art. In Vancouver, the intellectual tradition proposed erasing the mystery of art with an evangelical form of Marxist materialism. In response, I wrote polemically to defend specifically the territory of art that is impossible to measure.

Perhaps the recent painting titles are a little joke on this tension. They are generated from a computer program that I wrote that would randomly choose sentences from books in my library to serve as the titles.

In New York, I ended up working with Cheyney Thompson, whose sympathies for thinking, for theory, for reading, for materialism are great. Yet he also knows how to make a phenomenologically satisfying painting and would never let a concept dematerialize an artwork. Just to give you a picture: We listened to and read Eric Hobsbawm’s complete four-volume history of the world while painting and discussed it at length each day over lunch. We wrote computer programs and discussed modern science and mathematics. Like the factory workers who hired readers to read to them while they laboured, intellectual curiosity formed the milieu that sustained long hours of working on paintings. Of course, there are plenty of non-intellectual artists in New York, and its provincial history of Abstract Expressionism means plenty of artists consider their own intuitive process as an end in itself. So, in a way, after being formed in Vancouver, working for Cheyney was a perfect place to land. I may not have been able to stomach working with a purely intuitive or “expressive” artist.

Today, writing and theory — or mostly now just reading — are for me one aspect of being an engaged layperson. I am interested in the world. I prefer reading to YouTube videos by a long shot.

AW. Part of my research on advanced art in Vancouver is inseparable from the city’s experimental music scene. I’m interested in how that scene took shape, and in identifying the points of overlap between artists and musicians. This crossover isn’t only about personal relationships, though those are certainly part of it — it also operates in the visual economy of albums. I think, for example, of LNDRCOY’s Much Less Than Normal or No Gold’s early ST album (who made that painting?).

EB. I think it was Nathalee Paolinelli who did that cover image. I remember consulting on the design…

AW. The argument I’m exploring in the essay is that an artist’s community isn’t always composed solely of other painters; it can emerge through networks in which music and other cultural forms play a central role. You had personal relationships with some of these musicians — friends, roommates, colleagues — who were connected to the development of the Mood Hut label and the new Vancouver sound. That label, in particular, embodies a culture of collaboration through the ways artists actively support one another: playing each other’s music, recording together, and circulating work across the network. There’s a strong artist-run sensibility here: a do-it-together culture that shapes both the music and its surrounding social networks, making music and releasing albums at the edge of the continent, far from the centres of dance culture and experimental music.

I’m also interested in how these networks reflect a search for alternative forms of underground culture in the city: spaces to dance, to “trip out,” and to find communal or depersonalized forms of experience as evidenced in the emergence of spaces like Deep Blue, China Cloud, Paradise etc.. How did this collaborative approach to music inform your work, and how do you see it intersecting with the broader visual culture in Vancouver? What are some of your memories of this scene? Any notable or foundational experiences come to mind? I was just speaking with Raymond Boisjoly, who recalled that in your student days, you described yourself as “a visual artist with an ear for music,” while your friend Ian Wyatt was seen as a “musician with an eye for visual art.”  

EB. Since our Emily Carr days, I have been bonded with Ian Wyatt through our appreciation of electronic and experimental music. When I lived with Ian and Jack Jutson (2011?) I witnessed them replacing their guitars and effects pedals with turntables and computers. This was an exciting development for me to see because electronic music formed a truth-event for me as a teenager and has become, and continues to be, foundational to my artistic development. Once, Jack and I went to the PNE and he showed me the pleasures of riding the rollercoaster while listening to headphones (I listened to Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air), which I experienced as a kind of immersive synesthesia. At first, the Mood Hut crew would just hang out and play records, kind of like the guys getting together in the garage on the weekends, only instead of hotrods it was house music. Later, at the first Mood Hut raves, I couldn’t dance. I was somehow physically frozen. But eventually, I was opened up to move my body in ways that had been impossible before, and I started going to the late-night raves to experience a different kind of synesthetic immersion.

I had already been developing a theory that everyone is synesthetic to some degree, more or less, like a gradient. Immersion, enhanced sensation, sound and hallucination, visual and bodily cacophony on the dance floor, accompanied by an inner dialogue. And for a minute, I felt that I could square these experiences with the ecstatic worship I had seen and occasionally experienced myself growing up in the evangelical church. In the end, for me, it proved to be a form of escapism that overwhelmed my confused spirituality. Despite the buoyant, mellow vibes of the “Canadian Riviera,” Vancouver is extremely dark. Overcast and rainy, of course, but all the best parties and many of our studios and hangouts took place in the Downtown Eastside, which was exploding with human suffering, addiction, mental health crisis, Hell’s Angels, homelessness, disappeared sex workers, agony in the damp wet streets. The slogan is “Super, Natural British Columbia,” but I’ve always felt it was “supernatural” in the sense of being haunted and demonic — a very bad trip. I think of Gabor Maté’s book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.

Right in the middle of the DTES was the Dunlevy Snackbar, an important site for artists and musicians — the ultimate art bar, really, and a launch pad before the raves. I gave Theo, the owner of the Dunlevy, four prints, which he hung in the restaurant in trade for a massively generous bar tab. The artists and musicians took over the Snackbar to the point that it was more of a clubhouse than a public restaurant. To my mind, it was the epitome of the kind of casual center of cultural social exchange that one reads about in history books about bohemians.

I was the program manager at the Or Gallery for twelve years, and I think I took for granted the ethos of “artist-run,” which was very much a part of Vancouver’s cultural community and history. That’s just how culture was done. It was a bit of a shock to find that a similar ethos was repressed in New York. I leave it in your hands to detail the theory of how the music and the art co-developed. For me, it was one of the great pleasures of the small city, where culture was created for itself, for each other, with very few commercial prospects but the rewards of having a legitimately thriving community. I could mention the time No Gold and I were hanging out in front of a large oil painting, thickly painted, that I had hung in our living room, and I was transported in between the layers of paint… But having artists and musicians around each other was just the flavour of the time. Many of us lived nearby, could bump into each other at bars and cafés, and hung out in each other’s studios. Even before the dance music turn, I played trumpet with They Shoot Horses Don’t They, with Kasper Feyrer on drums and a whole crew of art school nerds.

AW. Can a connection be drawn between abstraction as a model of painting and the development of Vancouver’s ambient and experimental music scenes, both in terms of exploring abstract forms of experience and in producing a distinctive structure of feeling? I was looking back at earlier writing on your work, and Aaron Peck notes that, in your 2009 show at Blanket Gallery, your turn to abstraction emerged through music — specifically through encounters with Autechre, La Monte Young, and Ornette Coleman. He suggests that you didn’t take up painting to represent music but to explore how it operates (although he leaves that idea somewhat open). In a 2014 interview, you described your work as contrapuntal, citing Glenn Gould’s radio lectures as a point of reference. Would you consider the work in similar terms now? How would you describe this overlap or correspondence between music and pictorial thinking and practice?

EB. In short, there is a visual principle from Gestalt Theory that makes the correspondence between music and pictures clear, and that is the principle of “multi-stability.” The famous “Duck-Rabbit” illusion or “Necker Cube,” for example, shows how the mind can’t quite hold both visual possibilities at once, but it can flip back and forth. I hear this same principle with my ears in the music mentioned above. Musically, the principle is most explicit in the New York minimalists like Glass and Reich, but I first heard it for myself in Autechre. And of course, it need not be only two configurations that flip; there could be many configurations that compete with each other in a kind of non-hierarchical cacophony that requires the viewer or listener to make decisions about what part of the form (visual or aural) they are going to direct their attention to. This is especially so in polyrhythmic compositions and ambient music.

Then there is the synesthetic, which is not just the experience of seeing colours and shapes in relation to sound or vice versa, but also a kind of visualizing of spatial relationships in the mind’s eye between colour and pitch, or shape and timbre, for example. In my own work, theoretical colour models are analogous to musical scales in that both can be understood as spatializations. In fact, the visual aspect of the Ableton software and other computer music setups, for example, is a 2D (x, y) plane that organizes tracks or layers of sound, colour-coded and positioned in space. The music progresses through the 2D plane from left to right, and I like to imagine that you could spatialize this in 3D (x, y, z) as well, in which case a painting of mine could be like taking a slice of the 3D sound “cake”…

Adjacent to the synesthetic is the psychedelic, which is principally a movement back and forth between the micro and the macro. For example, when the very fine edges of a shape or a tone, let’s say the rattling of a high-hat cymbal, are isolated from the totality of the music, they become an entire world of glittering shards, each one described with its own facets, colours, and edges. As far as I understand it, the musicians I know would relate to what I am saying here, even if the music does not intend to directly exploit these operations. Again, much of my discussion around these experiences with art and music was with Ian Wyatt, so I followed the development of No Gold closely, and then Slow Riffs and Local Artist. Jack J was more pop, but he introduced me to a lot of music that I identified with.

AW. I want to turn to your new work, which operates through a computational or procedural system, mapping the possibilities of painting and form. What stands out to me is how this approach isn’t oriented toward transcendence or purity but toward exploring infinite possibilities — treating painting as a site for generating models of form, testing constraints, and opening up new conditions for what a painting can do. It becomes less about solving a problem than about setting one in motion, creating a structure that produces decisions and contingencies.

Do you see your system operating in this register — as a model that delineates a field of possibilities?

And then there’s your choice of medium: egg tempera, which feels anachronistic in this context, since many artists working with procedural or computational strategies rely on acrylic or oil. How does the particular temporality and material logic of egg tempera interact with the computational and conceptual logic of your system? As I mentioned during your talk at Catriona Jeffries, I often think of egg tempera in relation to Renaissance painting, or its revival in 1940s New York by artists like Paul Cadmus and Jared French, who turned to it as a way of reclaiming a form of mastery and authorial control associated with the Renaissance, as well as reinvesting in painterly facture.

EB. Yes, I am interested in the field of possibilities in my studio and in painting. I am interested in observing how much of that field is ideologically composed and how much of it is free or true. I think of the systems I create as ways to test this relation, putting my own subjectivity into question — I don’t trust myself — the romantically “free” artist is now also an ideological construction. Artistic expression itself is subject to a battery of clichés. Writing computer programs became a way to work around my subjective impulses. But I didn’t realize at first that this way of generating images was a combinatoric operation, and I could measure the number of possible images, certainly not infinite, but extremely large indeed – I counted 3.3671984954 × 10⁶³⁹¹ for my show at King’s Leap in 2024. Within the set of possibilities (shape, position, edge, colour, sequence, etc.), selections are made with other systems, like number series or stochastic processes.

Randomness: Cage is a major influence for me, and it turns out that stochastic processes are also a major contributor to the hyperreal simulations we experience in video games and cinematic illusions, CGI, as well as realistic scientific models. Along with various types of noise and algorithms, randomness has formal and phenomenological qualities that are unique to itself. I have been tempted to imagine the random as a new form of the Golden section, where once the golden ratio appeared beautiful, now we have the stochastic.

I use egg tempera because of how it delivers colour in a relatively pure fashion. There are literally more pigment particles per binder ratio on the surface of a tempera painting. And as a binder, egg is less obtrusive to the colour than oil or acrylic. The simple tension between an ancient form of paint and a computer-generated composition is appealing to me. Actually, if one compares the variety of material image qualities that paint is capable of to that of screens or printing, we can see that paint is far more advanced in the type of visual qualities it can achieve. And yes, I am interested in painterly facture. A deep understanding of material and craft is a pleasure indeed, and one that need not be in opposition to the conceptual register of art (In a future life I would like to be a material scientist.)

I love Cadmus (and Tooker), and I don’t see any reason to oppose representational work to abstract work either. But I also spent a week in a monastery with a master Russian iconographer, learning the ancient tradition with egg tempera: the spiritual connotations of the medium are something I would like to maintain in my abstractions, and something that I am working to keep in a productive tension with the secular, materialist inclinations that have been such a huge force in my intellectual milieu.

AW. One of the enduring problems in abstract painting has been how to make a mark. Painters have often found themselves caught between two poles: investing the mark with personal expression, or finding ways to neutralize or defer that expressivity. Some of your earlier works, such as those shown at the Western Front in 2011, appear to jumble these modes.

EB. I love this description of that show! 

AW. Within the discourse of art history, I am drawn to the conversation around Ellsworth Kelly that Yve-Alain Bois outlines, particularly regarding the non-compositional. The use of strategies of the non-compositional provides a means of not choosing, establishing a system in which decisions are constrained or displaced. Over the past century, this concern with the non-compositional has taken shape through a variety of strategies, including the use of transfer techniques, serial and repetitive operations, shaped formats, perceptual engagement with ‘found’ forms, and procedures guided by chance. In this way, the direct expression of the artist’s subjectivity is limited, and the work comes to operate according to processes that exceed individual control. Do you see these strategies continuing today, perhaps through newer procedures such as computer-generated or algorithmic propositions?

EB. It was hard not to be infected by Cheyney Thompson’s allergy to subjective expression (Yve-Alain wrote for Cheyney’s catalogue in 2010). Working with Cheyney, his systems were so large that on some occasions, we were painters who became like human printers. But the point was to acknowledge how so much of our industrial and postindustrial lives are subject to inhuman systems and measures.

Somehow, I ended up in a middle zone… I deploy anti-compositional strategies like randomness and systems that defer or interrupt my own artistic choices. Yet I am in love with composition, and my love of composition is through my love of music. I love improvisation, which one could also argue is “expressive” (somewhat to my chagrin). For me, the quality of improvisation is measured by a structure or system. In music, this could be a chord progression, a scale, and the player’s improvisation is set in relation to the chord changes. (I heard recently that Coltrane’s Interstellar Space is less a “free jazz” album than a combinatoric deployment of sets and series…) In painting, my improvisations are measured or tested by the systems I’ve invented. In a way, your description of my Western Front show hits the nail on the head. I want my cake and I want to eat it. Why shouldn’t I? As I said before, thinking and sensing in equal measure.

I am interested in both a typology and a topology of painting. Painters are trained to understand figure and ground, warm and cool, for example, but I’ve been interested in sets and categories, in the mathematical sense, or vectors, or matrices, etc. The Grasshopper computer language I use understands everything in terms of lists, and therefore in terms of position in a sequence, noted with an index. These lists can be modified with patterns and rhythms (true, true, false, true, false…) and, of course, there is the common computer function of looping. Could a painter consider composition in terms of inputs, functions, and outputs? Sometimes I worry that we are all just running a script with a set of conventional inputs and outputs, and maybe, if we are really lucky, a novel function. When I read the newsfeeds, I see individuals on all sides of the political spectrum merely running their prefabricated functions. The spectacle itself disciplines us with its protocols. Artists are also acting, sometimes excellently, in their roles comprised of received ideas. Are we just insects responding to stimuli, like Uexkull’s nearly undead tick? This is me at my most pessimistic. However, from this point of view, the non-compositional painter or the anti-subjective painter is not presuming to be free and outside systems of domination and closure; they are just trying to see if there might be a fissure that can be opened without immediately falling into a prefabricated trope.

And finally, as much as I have been informed by Yve-Alain Bois’ work, I would just add that I consider his refusal of the spiritual to be a self-imposed blind spot. In fact, I think of the attempt to temper subjective expression as actually an especially spiritual activity, as in the monk who finds his freedom within the constraints of discipline and self-denial.