"IT'S A COMPLETE MYSTERY WHAT A PERSON IS": IN CONVERSATION WITH MAL FOSTOCK
- Megan O'Neil
- 1 day ago
- 10 min read
Updated: 3 hours ago
At the beginning of Frieze Week, Mall Galleries hosted the first joint solo show between artists Bushra Fakhoury and Mal Fostock. Fostock’s show, INCLUSION, included one hundred pieces from the past twenty years, varying in medium: line drawings, prints, paintings, photography and sculpture. Megan O’Neil speaks to him about how the show came together, the nature of influence, and his creative practice.
MO: Your photography really reminded me of Brassaï. I wondered if he had some influence at all for your street photography?
MF: I like all those photographers, Man Ray, Brassaï, of course Cartier-Bresson. Brassaï's photographs that he took at night on the Paris streets were very evocative. For a long period of time I would just walk alone, at night, in the streets. I don't drink and smoke usually but during that period of time I did just to help me relax into being in that kind of circumstance. So, to have a cigarette for some reason worked for me. I could just have a cigarette and take a photograph of somebody at the same time without them noticing.
MO: It can be kind of an anchoring device, a cigarette.
MF: Absolutely. A cigarette in one hand, a camera by your side in the other. It seemed to work for me. I do find that there's a potential photograph there pretty much all the time, potentially anybody walking past-- it's just a matter of capturing the right moment, the right angle, right mood.
MO: What compelled you to do this style of photography and to go out there at night?
MF: I wanted to shoot on film especially, so looking at everything in black and white, looking at shapes and abstractions, it makes everything a little bit more abstract, so in that context you've got pure night time that's just black, and then just something appears and it's all it's very theatrical, it’s completely different than shooting in the day.
From left to right, top to bottom: Brooklyn, 2016, Subway, 2016, Rockface, 2020, Mummy, 2020
MF: Cartier-Bresson described taking a photograph to be almost like a gunshot. I never really feel it that way because…
MO: It's immersive for you.
MF: It's very immersive. That's the word I’m looking for. If I'm walking with a camera, the street is my studio, then somebody will undoubtedly come out of the blue or come out of the dark.
MO: There's a layer of anonymity there, right?
MF: When you're walking at night, you're getting this light, directional light from a car, from a truck, from a bus, from a window, from a shop, or a guy selling hot dogs. There's always these lights, so they play on people's features and that attracts me. It's not so much the anonymity because even if I'm walking during the day, when I'm actually taking these photographs I'm entering into a place where I want to just slide into the present moment. And when you're combined with it, you're no longer separate from it. If you're not separate from it, you lose your sense of fear and you lose your sense of self-consciousness. You don't want to go home and stop when you've got the night world and the potential of all that. It's a matter of, if you have the energy to do it, you just keep going. And a lot of the great photographers do that, they shoot at night. They keep working, they do it all the time their whole life, which is something I haven't been able to do. I would like to be able to just do photography full time but then I move on to something in the studio.
MO: You have so many different mediums that you work in. It's an interesting leap from this to your other work.
At this moment we are joined by a friend of Fostock’s mother. Fostock’s mother is the sculptor Bushra Fakhoury.
Woman: I'm going to kill your mother now. Because we were supposed to meet at 12. She overslept. [To me] I'm sorry, he's like my son. Because his mother is one of my best friends. Oh, yes, yes, he's my baby. And he's a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant artist. I'm so excited about this because he never wanted to exhibit. And he's a genius in it. His mom is the one who pushed him. But she's in trouble with me. I called her and I said, what the hell is wrong with you? I said, I'm not going to wait for you. (Laughter)
MF: She’s a painter, also.
Woman: No, no. Don’t listen. Don’t listen to him. But about 25 years ago, when we went to his little flat in Holland Park. I saw his work and I said, my God. And I, since then, have been pushing him to exhibit. Am I right or not? I never forget that day and that beautiful big painting in the room.
MO: So many artists are really shy.
Woman: Yes, he's one of them. He's the biggest shyer [sic]. (Laughter) The truth is he does it because he loves it and he doesn't want to show what he does. And that's the problem. And he is not going to hide anymore because now you've done it.
MO: It's very exposing. There's always something of you in your own work legible to others, perhaps in a way you don’t see yourself.
Woman: Darling, it's fear. It's fear. It's fear. It's always fear.
MO: Artists are often incredibly self-critical.
Woman: Oh, absolutely. It's kind of an irony almost. And his mum is a brilliant sculptor.
She says her goodbyes to Fostock and wanders away, looking at some of the paintings while she waits for Fakhoury.
MF: She used to sit with Lucian Freud for lunch. I never had the opportunity to join them.
MO: I do see a bit of a Freud influence, especially in these portraits.
MF: Yeah, let's have a look.
From left to right: Jenny with Curls, 2016, Study of a Man, 2012
MO: I think the anxiety of influence exists for most artists. What are your thoughts on that?
MF: I can't remember if it was Matisse who said that you have to just work through all your influences. And if you just get killed in the middle of it, then that's just too bad. You can't actually move through it. But you have to try. You can't shy away from any influence. I see somebody like Lucien Freud. He helped me to just go: okay, I can see what he's doing. He helped me to enter into that world of being a painter. And I enter into that, like you fit into a glove. I've always been good at having a model in front of me and responding to a model... It's nice when you have somebody coming to see you once or twice a week for maybe the whole year or half a year or many months. You get involved in their lives a little bit. And for them it can be a pivotal moment in their life where they're reflecting what to do next, and then they move on. Sitting in a studio, it's very quiet. When I contact them afterwards, they say, oh, I just got married, or I've decided to study archaeology, or be a writer, after that period of incubation almost.
MO: People avoid sitting in silence like that most of the time, don’t we? Maybe you were giving them something.
MF: Yes, you're giving somebody space. And you're not intruding into anybody's life. You're giving them a lot of space. It's like a sacred space to me. And often I play beautiful music like [Satie], what's playing now. Or we start off with some Bach and then into this wondrous music and then into maybe some film scores, maybe they like to listen to a book. I may be up for that.
MO: You mentioned last night that you curated this show yourself.
MF: Yeah, I curated this myself and I did what I could to represent all the different aspects of my work. There was so much to do that I, in hindsight, I would have contacted someone to do it. I did it by just walking around the space, counting one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, counted the number of pieces I thought might work and then just had them all framed and brought them over here. I didn't know where I was going to put anything. When they all arrived in boxes, they were boxed and leaning against the walls from the floor, and the lighting went all the way up to the top. The space looked massive. I thought maybe I had completely miscalculated and my work would get swamped in the space. But as we took them out and you can actually see what they are, they have a force and energy. And when you put them up on the wall, they then take on another dimension. For me, any medium that I use is valid, is equal as any other.
We stand in front of a portrait of a seated man, different from the rest. The brush strokes are more furious, the subject more nebulous and unreal. In all of the other portraits, the subjects are more clear, but they glance away, not quite meeting the eye of the viewer. Here, despite the murkier appearance, as though he were separated from the world by a veil, he stares out of the painting, formidable and saintlike.
MF: Gideon. What did you find about this piece?
MO: There's something of Francis Bacon here. He's got a very different quality to the other portraits.
MF: He was a neighbor and he was blind. So that's why I approached it this way. I approached it completely differently. I thought: how do you capture something of that?
MO: What is your process for how you title your pieces, and how do you feel about the role of a title?
MF: A title really should just be pointing somebody in the right direction. It shouldn't be more than that. I did go a little bit overboard with the line drawings because I felt like I'd like to write poetry. I think poetry and painting are the same thing, really. Painting is like poetry, but just creating through her visual language. A lot of poetry evokes imagery and is very visual.
MO: You quoted from Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn [at the opening] last night. Specifically the line, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. Does that inform your philosophy?
MF: Yeah, it does. For me, I was saying beauty, truth, with a capital T. So truth as another description for reality with a capital R or being with a capital B or isness with a capital I. I love that line in particular of that poem because at that point it's the urn speaking, it's from the urn's perspective. It's the urn speaking through time, through generations.
MO: Speaking in terms of having an archive, there are decades of your work represented in this show.
MF: When I'm working I'm so immersed in doing the work that it's almost like I'm working outside of time. And I really invested a lot of time learning to draw just by doing it. Stanislav Frenkiel, when I was very young, around eighteen, he saw some of my drawings and he said, your drawings are very strong. I'm impressed, I like them. But he said, you have a lot of scope to improve. And I thought: okay. Right. What a challenge.
MO: Sometimes you want a whetstone. To sharpen the knife.
MF: Of course, the artist himself usually has that quality of wanting to push something further. Bacon said that some of his greatest pieces of work were ones that actually no one's going to get to see, because they got ruined, because he just pushed it over the limit and he just couldn't pull it back together again. The foundation of it all for me is drawing. So you really need to spend time to draw. Drawing is the foundation of all my work, really.
Painting for me is much more focused, much more concentrated than sculpture, in the sense that you're using your eyes really intensely. This type of painting comes from Cézanne. It's an approach where you're standing in front of a model, or nature, or still life, and you're using and you're responding to tones of color. It was based on drawing and tones of color. Cézanne created that unique approach to looking. It's almost like a participatory method and more immersive into the whole process of looking, seeing, what are you really seeing there?
From left to right: Crouching Man, 1991, Train, 1988
Here, he turns to look at me in an entirely different way. Until now, he has gazed into the distance as he speaks; ruminative. He has a delicate, almost epicene manner; softly spoken and intelligent. Now, his shyness dissipates, and his delicate affect is momentarily gone. He gazes at me with an academician’s focus, emboldened by it. For a moment he reverses our roles: it is him at work, with me as his subject. Under his gaze, I feel the distinct sense of being looked at as subject matter. It is subtly disarming, but not at all unpleasant. I am more so fascinated by this new look in his eyes.
MF: All I'm looking at is a tone of color. What is that tone of color just below her eyelid? And then how does that relate to the color just above or on the side or to the nose or her forehead? And you're just slowly building it up just by looking at it. You're not participating in trying to capture someone's personality at all. However, they are there, right? It's always obvious to me that I'm basically involved in something that's really outside of my grasp to comprehend. What is a human being? Where are their thoughts? Where are they? Where is that tone of color? If you were to think, if you were to examine it further, you end up being a bit lost, to the point where actually it's a complete mystery what a person is. What fascinates me in painting is how you're able to actually capture so much. Bacon thought that he lacked a psychological depth, that [Cezanne] didn't capture that psychological depth Freud did. Somebody looking at it would say: what have I been able to capture? I find that there's a certain kind of a depth of feeling of vulnerability as well as strength of freedom in the brush marks that somehow point towards something, so that when you're looking at the brush marks, those brush marks actually represent a human being there, and that human being actually kept for you to feel the mystery of what it is that is that human being. It just goes without saying that every artist living, you're always going to represent something of your time, your age, and of yourself.
Opening evening photography courtesy of JPR Media
MO: Brecht said once: New problems appear and demand new methods. Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change. Nothing comes from nothing; the new comes from the old, but that is why it is new. So, what do you think is next for you? What do you think you'll be working on?
MF: I have in mind work that I want to do next, but I'm not going to say what it is. But it's not going to look like anything like any of these paintings. The painting I'm going to do next is going to look nothing like this one.
MO: Sometimes you have to protect what you're working on before it's ready to be.
MF: I'm not going to say, I'm just going to do it. I'd like to do more sculpture. I better stop at that.
Megan O'Neil is a writer and Master's student at the university of Cambridge. She is based between London and Cambridge and publishes her blog, A Pearl Dissolved in Wine, on Substack.