Eric N. Mack

Photograph by King Texas for his Blackness series, 2014

Portfolio of Artwork 928-931

There is a removal from considering painting as an object, which was a big challenge for me early on. I thought, “If painting is an object, then how does it speak?” I’m trying to get people to feel a closeness to painting.

from “Painting Outside of the Canvas” by
Antwaun Sargent, Interview Magazine (February 2015)

The following exchanges between Eric N. Mack and LeRonn P. Brooks are excerpts from a previously unpublished interview they recorded on August 5, 2015, in New York.

BROOKS:

So if you could just describe your work, Eric, that would be great.

MACK:

Okay. Well, my practice is material based, so at this point, I have been discovering the use of soft blankets, moving blanks, and felt, and using their materiality to integrate with paint. Painting is sort of an experimentation process of understanding materials around me. It does have to do with a question of surface and reassigning a different kind of framework to paint in. One that is inclusive. One that is special. One that is accessible physically, like immediately accessible. The most important way to keep those structures expressive is through poetic tactics. So these experimentations and these questions that come from everyday spaces are ones that I encounter every day. Ones that I think about every day so they’re not quite about a resolution, but about a contextualization of a question about what the world is made out of and how to do that through this vibration between singularity and collectivity. This practice is very well versed in abstraction, but that’s not a point of limitation or withholding as much as it is a kind of tactical history of the work. I am interested in the growth of this kind of abstraction. In being one that can affect the viewer in real space so it is not as much about secluding a viewer to a picture or place, but one of immediacy in which the viewer encounters an object and kind of has an idea of what it is based on the texture on the surface. But then the viewer is led in a different direction based on optimality, saturation of color, and the integration of textures. At this point this is the immediate thing I am thinking about. I hope these things, these kinds of inquiries, will extend themselves into other framings, expressions, and experiences. So it does come from direct inquiry.

BROOKS:

How much do you think that using actual materials such as clothes or fabrics actually changes the viewer’s relationship to your work? Traditional forms of painting develop “worlds” on blank canvas but by actually using non-traditional materials you bring the outside world to the canvas. Is providing that kind of familiarity through association for the viewer essential to your practice?

MACK:

Yes, absolutely. It is something that goes back and forth because you can’t expect every viewer to be versed in the language of art. So I think there are a lot of ways to approach it in the inverse. I am also thinking about the history and the inquiries of abstract expressionists and trying to find a gesture that is displaced. An example is Frank Stella using aluminum paint as an industrial language that has been framed or re-contextualized because of distancing and the process of art making can that can take place because of that shift in language and identity [from the material’s original context]. I think there are possibilities of there being something really rich in everyday space that still needs to be contextualized and questioned in the sense of what art is and what painting is.

BROOKS:

So I am thinking material culture meets poetics. So you mentioned a certain type of poetic ability in your work. What did you mean by that?

MACK:

I think there is something about the feeling and rigor typically in poetic language. I am thinking about structural formations that will be able to justify any subject. It...