Chris Moon is an outsider artist making serious waves as a painter with abstract work that recalls the intensity of Francis Bacon in its stretching of anonymous human forms into the endless void of the canvas...
Chris Moon is an outsider artist making serious waves as a painter with abstract work that recalls the intensity of Francis Bacon in its stretching of anonymous human forms into the endless void of the canvas. However, it’s too simple to refer to the east London painter as a Bacon acolyte. Although his work tips a nod to the mutilated beauty made famous by his forbear, he has simply come to the same visual conclusions via a personal process of destruction. In what he refers to as a quest for the containment of powerful emotion, Moon captures the uneasy, haunting chaos of shifting identity – inviting the viewer to see their own image in his faceless lumps of flesh. Here, the celebrated young painter talks to AnOther about old-school neighbours, brutal aesthetics and the power of indecision.
“The earliest memory I have of being exposed to painting as a form of expression was when I think I was about six or seven. I was obsessed with drawings by Arthur Conan-Doyle. He was sectioned and I think the drawings I had a book of were from his years in an asylum – these bizarre interactions between human form and insects. Around that time my mum had a miscarriage, so I was shuffled to my next-door neighbour where it was like, proper old school. You know when you go to an old woman’s house and it’s like it’s been stuck in a timewarp? It’s all musty and dark? Well, I remember this really daubed, impressionist painting she had made of her garden, and I think that has sort of stuck with me. My headspace was filled with this completely traditional form of painting infused with the completely surreal. I think if you were to put me into any sort of bracket it would be Art Brut, because I come from outside of the art world – I’ve never been taught really. I’m self-trained. I come from the same sort of heart as that movement, but basically, I’m just trying to tell my story via paint. I can think much better in paint, and, in a way, painting keeps me calm. Back in the day, I was painting and going, 'Yeah… That’s really pretty…' I was actually getting quite successful at selling but for me it had no heart; no soul. That’s why I stopped showing in public for years. Now my aesthetic actually comes from the amount of work I’ve destroyed in the past, which other people could probably have made a career out of. I just wasn’t getting that chaos and feeling from inside of me into the paintings, and it only started coming when I started destroying my old work – then the painting became fluid and sort of indecisive. Let’s say I was doing a portrait, I would destroy it and then sort of contain it with one colour, and that’s when I started getting excited, because it was almost like the chaos of indecision was being painted, if that makes sense? I get compared to Bacon and I used to hate the comparisons, but now I kind of see it in a different way because I think we do cross paths in terms of style. In a way, his work is also about containment – he’s containing his chaos and his violence of the flesh on the canvas, and I kind of come from the same path. Technically as a painter he’s not brilliant, but what he has is emotion in his work and that’s what I’m trying to hunt for. I think subconsciously that will come in the end because I do love his work. I think you can sit there for hours looking at a Bacon painting – it’s the free flowing of marks. Irrespective of how he got there or what it meant to him aesthetically, it’s beautiful because, again, he’s almost an indecisive painter, but the indecision is contained.”
Home by Chris Moon is at Imitate Gallery until Friday.
