Nicholas POWELL
Paris, August 1991 (read in French)

Scot by birth and a Parisian by accident, - « People would be interesting wherever I am » - the painter Calum Fraser has worked in the French capital since 1983, a quiet and outwardly shy man who is the author of a savagely beautiful pictural world.

Galerie Lavignes-Bastille exhibited Calum Fraser’s series of large format watercolours of mainly European townscapes, as a ‘one man show’ at the 1991 Salon de Mars in Paris. Very much a continuation of the artist‘s earlier ‘Vedutae’ views in oils, which borrowed extensively from classical artists like Piranesi, those deceptively calm watercolours combined Calum Fraser’s passion for architecture and his acute sensitivity to colour. In his latest works, the subject of this catalogue, he has returned to the denser medium of oil paint and his fascination for the human figure by creating a turbulent and carnal universe of magic and illusion.

Since October 1990, Calum Fraser has worked in a studio within an enourmous disused and dilapidated tobacco company factory in Pantin, an East End suburb of Paris –its rundown architecture directly inspired four of his canvases, which treat themes of nudity and the atmospheric peculiarities of steam and water already touched on in works such as ‘Brimming Pool’ and ‘Drizzle’ of 1988.

The bizarre and violent Moscow circus world of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel’The Master and Margarita’, meanwhile, sparked off the sequence of ideas of illusion and sleight of hand in Calum Fraser’s other latest paintings and supplied certain images such as the severed head and the pistol firing cat in the canvas “Moscow Variety Theatre”.

“I played with the idea of the stage, of real objects and artificial ones – illusion and playing games with reality are part of the painting.  All the good figure paintings I can think of are like theatre sets – in Velazquez’s Las Meninas, for example, or The Surrender of Breda which looks like a painted backdrop complete with horse wheeled onto stage. Or the interiors of Vermeer which seem like rooms made of icing sugar”.

Calum Fraser’s theatrical figures, meanwhile, are as eerily fleshy as the weird, predatory nocturnal characters who haunt the smokily-lit bar room scenes of works such as ‘Golden Lads and Girls’ of 1988: the element of disguise and deception is trong once again, formally expressed in the use of stage costumes. The juxtaposition of naked flesh and material whether it be the coarse textiles of garments or metal and wood is as brutal and as disturbing as ever.

The light in Calum Fraser’s paintings is indirect, or misty, and almost always artificial – dazzingly so in some of the paintings of stage performance. His use of pigment occasionally takes on a lighter, airier touch, although he is still interested in a heavy application to create varieties of tone and texture: in the past Calum Fraser has used sand, sawdust, resin and even straw to thicken paint.

“Time is operating when you paint a picture, it’s one of the ingredients. Paint dries at different speeds so you can paint on top and get a certain drag and resistance. You have to know about the speed, then it’s a question of intuition… painting is a process and the works I admire most are the one in which you can see how the artist’s ideas have evolved”.
And time is of the essence in the creation of illusion.