VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi everybody. I’m Celina with the IMAS and I am the Exhibits Coordinator. Welcome to the artist talk with Christopher Miñán Fitzgerald. I'm going ahead with recording here so you're welcome to leave your cameras off. If you want to turn them on, that's also welcome.

Hi everyone. Thanks for carving out time in your evening to be here. Thank you Celina and Marcelo for this opportunity and all those at IMAS for making this happen. As Celina said, my name is Christopher Miñán Fitzgerald. I am the artist behind the current exhibition entitled Processing and I’m currently sitting here in my studio located in northeast Austin.

I certainly experienced my own share of near-death encounters in childhood, but these themes were not at the forefront of my work until 2009 when my wife and I visited her grandfather within a week of his passing. It seemed appropriate to put aside the artwork I was making at the time and create a watercolor portrait of him.

This was not about remembering him in this particular way, but rather to show that there is dignity at the end of one's life and to magnify his right to be valued in his suffering. The title, Rhythm Unending, refers to both the sound of oxygen pumped through a breathing apparatus and the promise of hope in his life continuing beyond physical death.

Here is Cleo, a public school teacher for most of her life, and the mother of an artist friend of mine, John Cobb. Watercolor as a medium has this beautiful way of staining paper while conveying fragility.

When analyzing artwork (whether it’s subconscious or otherwise), we’re seeking metaphorical connections between the artist’s chosen material, the way that material is manipulated, and the subject matter depicted.

Here we have my Uncle Carl. During the 70s and 80s, Carl was head of the WarnerBrothers fire department in Burbank California, which meant he was on the set of their movies, governing the pyrotechnics with his booming Italian voice and personality. He had a demanding and powerful presence like a 6'5" mobster, you might say.

Not too many years ago, I did these paintings of Carl shortly before he died from chronic leukemia. It's difficult to witness a person going from strength and health to a state of weakness in a brief period.

Dr. Berny Gassler was the founder of the Austin Children's Choir and a professor at Concordia University. It has been a privilege to paint everyone I’ve known personally or through family friends, although limited, because not everyone around me is continually passing away… thank God.

For a few years, I enlisted two surgeon friends of mine who specialize in head & neck trauma (one on the west coast and the other on the east coast). Their normal protocol is to take photographs as they are working to document surgical and patient progress.

Later they would ask the patient and families (on my behalf) if the photos could be shared as a reference for paintings. So I received a lot of imagery of individuals being treated for traumatic accidents and depictions of ICU patients on life-support machines.

Meanwhile, I began to explore these situations through shooting short films with actors, makeup artists, and building staged environments. I used this as a starting point for a few of the paintings, which were quite literal renderings – as you can see from the portrait on the right.

The films themselves became an important part of my investigation alongside painting, for roughly 10 years, not just in terms of trauma and suffering, but also the relationship between the cinematic telling of a story and the narrative devices found in the history of painting. Above is a shot from one of my films and below is analogous composition found in Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ. 

These are a few more of my film stills emphasizing the mystery inherent in technologies grafted into the human body. When I was facing my mortality as a kid in the hospital, these kinds of machines were used to save my life, but at the time I had no idea how the machines worked!

This still greatly intrigues me because it’s like most technology we use – there are very few of us who have a comprehensive awareness of the underlying mechanics. Most of us simply don’t know what to do when our car breaks down or our phones glitch, because we strictly deal with the interfaces and rely on specialists to figure out what’s actually going on.

My work has become about life-saving technology as a signifier for the extent we go to preserve and save those we love. And if you think about the caregivers in hospitals, these patients are often strangers!

When I’m back in the studio working out the small portraits of patients, I’m utilizing a combination of brushes and syringes, soaking or injecting, in a sense I’m putting the image out of control, which forces me to act quickly by blotting, erasing, excavating the surface as I’m trying to keep the image alive. Using razor blades and cutting the surface is a bit like surgical cuts to resurrect an image.

My overall aesthetic approach to painting is deeply indebted to the capturing of light found in the watercolors of John Singer Sargent and the rhizomatic compositions of Joan Mitchell.

Seeing Sargent’s watercolor sketches both at the Seattle Art Museum and then later at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, I realized there could be a unique gravitas if these kinds of marks were magnified to a monumental scale – a fugitive quality that I wanted to see preserved and amplified.

And that’s exactly what I began to do. People often comment about the allusive quality in the larger paintings, noting how it takes time to identify recognizable imagery. The lack of deciphering what one is seeing is analogous to our inability to resolve confusing moments of existence. There’s a certain literalness of imagery required to anchor me as the artist and you as the viewer, but the application of paint (and your reading of it) becomes the mechanism for making sense of it all.

So this perceptual delay is of prime importance to me because it’s not about the veracity or believability of painting pitted against the photograph, or how the image is collectively consumed through contemporary media like Richter or Luc Tuymans work.

My concern is primarily with how the image is constructed in the human mind and assigned personal significance; something like a mental portal.

On the one hand, there’s a delay in perception – at first thinking “This is a pleasing puzzle, but what the heck am I looking at?” You then have subject matter gradually functioning as metaphorical carriers of information (the human face, the psychology of the cinematic close-up, the life-support apparatus).   

I’m intrigued with near-death encounters, broadly defined in colloquial terms as having an experience that renders your own mortality in sharp focus. I’m not necessarily approaching these pictures through a supernatural lens or from a strictly medical-scientific framework, because I believe the power of painting categorically resides in-between the psychological and the conceptual.

In other words, when a painting is successful, the experience of both making and looking at it transcends the emotions and the logic-based language we use to describe it. And this is why painting can remain archaic and low-tech while also contemporary and challenging.

In the middle of the pandemic, our closest family friends (a husband and wife) died in the inferno of a head-on collision with a truck. This was another turning point for me. If you’ve ever had someone close to you pass away, all of the sudden there comes a clarity of what is important in life, what really matters to you, and what is worth pursuing with your time – since more time to be living is not guaranteed.

My personal clarity of vision came with blending our families together (adoption), and professionally it was the conscious decision to focus entirely on painting rather than the hyperreal techniques of filmmaking.

And that brings us to my current work. If it’s okay with you Celina (or Marcelo), I’ll share a few thoughts about my new paintings and then move around and show you the studio?

This is a painting in progress, so I’m still portraying patients, but I am also beginning to expand my subject matter to include epic environments in which these events come about.

The process of painting (which is essentially the title of the exhibition) is my way to think through reconciling the often-simultaneous feelings we have of awe and terror, beauty and disgust, wonder and horror. Creating a picture is a stripped-down method for confronting this tension of cognitive dissonance.

I’m tempted to say that if you want to move beyond merely appreciating paradox and mystery – to actually make contact with what is transcendent-good, true, and dare I say beautiful, you must spend time focusing your attention on what is undeniably tragic.

Okay, so here we have a black-and-white digital sketch for my newest painting, which is 12ft wide by 9ft high, my largest to date. Instead of referencing a specific event, this comes from my imagination – so that street does not actually exist, nor do those trees or the bike burning. It was all collaged together and I’m now embarking on a series of these large-scale paintings.

Celina (or Marcelo), did you want to interject anything before we take a brief tour around the studio?

Can you say again what medium you used for this one?
A jamming together of many images, photographs from which I pull online through license-free imagery, images I take myself, and then some sketches and watercolor studies all merged together in Photoshop… which can take a while, by the way. It’s not exactly a quick process.

STUDIO TOUR
After I’ve executed the small watercolor preliminary work where I was just sitting (and any additional manipulation in Photoshop), the next step involves premixing acrylic colors as tinting agents for the gesso/primer. The goal is to have the large canvas-underpainting take on the appearance of a stained or faded image on paper.

Then I proceed to spray the pure white gesso over the entire image, creating a semi-transparent veil… as you can see in the painting over here.  For me, it’s a method for describing bright light and as way to achieve a kind of phantasmagoria: the dream-like state that comes with waking up after surgery.  An atmosphere of manifold nuanced-light presents us with what we cannot entirely see or understand. These paintings set up open parameters in constant oscillation between overexposure and the process of becoming an image of the knowable.

And finally, I’ll use water-soluble oil paints for the detail work providing an entry point into the veiled space, like an anchor so that you’re not entirely lost. The brushwork is rooted in my experience of working with watercolors. Although, I don’t always feel it is necessary to spray the painting first… and I may not spray the newest one over here. This painting is also not complete, but in progress. Now, if I reverse-engineer my own intuition about this painting, it has to do with some recent incidents involving people close to me, also my own decision not to buy a motorcycle out of safety concerns being a husband and father, and a connection to where I spent my formative years – the environment represents the sublime forest areas of the northwest.

Paul Virilio, the late French cultural philosopher, famously said something like the invention of the automobile is equivalent to the invention of the auto accident, and the construction of the ship is the construction of the shipwreck. That is to say, technology has a built-in promise of progress and it comes at a cost.  But the cost is even higher when you accelerate to greater speeds of innovation – with industry and ecology in the 20th century and now with biotechnology in the 21st century. Some argue the COVID-19 pandemic was an example of this, and it even relates to our situation this year of high-profile innovators signing a petition to halt the next development of ChatGPT until we have greater evaluated the risks involved with AI.

So this painting comes out of thinking about our societal notions of progress crashing around us.
The underlying motif of all my work is this collision of the natural with the technological, both when they coalesce and when there is tragic failure.

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
When reading about you and your art on the museum website the message I took from it was that you treat your art the same way patients in intensive care are treated by the doctors and nurses, is this correct? 
Just to be clear: this is only insofar as an analogy for undertaking an intense careful process. Literally, my work is nothing like the heroic caregivers who attend to real people. I’m simply creating visual artifacts meant to function as a poetic-response.

One of the submitted comments, to paraphrase, points out the stark contrast between the gallery space and an emergency room… following up with questioning: are the pieces made for viewers to reflect on their own lives and loved ones that have been in similar situations? 
My short answer to this is, no. The pictures are actually intended for people who have not been in these kinds of situations – in order to offer moments of introspection similar to those of us who have. And in regard to showing the work in gallery spaces, I’ve focused mostly on exhibiting the paintings in academic institutions (universities), and only recently have I considered gallery or museum spaces – mostly because the body of work is ready for a wider audience. There's a few more questions, but they can kind of be combined…

A few people asked about cognition, which I already touched on… and what emotions emanate when creating your work? …also in the end, when it is finished?
There’s definitely a lot of anxiety for me before I begin because when I look at previous watercolors, it doesn’t feel like I made them. I think to myself “that could not have been me, I’ve never even learned how to use watercolor.” So every single time, I’m thoroughly convinced I am going to fail.

I try to see that the labor of creating the work is also an act of compassion based on looking, studying, and putting time into imagery of what is painful and suffering for other people and their families, which I think grows in the process. And there’s always a bit of relief when I’m done, for sure.

Could you expand on your statement about making a connection with what is transcendent?
Making the paintings is for sure a way to almost talk about what I can't talk about, or put into words what I can’t say. I will say that I'm also inviting connection with the titles that I use, so I can maybe talk about the titles and how those are an attempt to offer up that connection. Beyond just appreciating something that is distant and other, to use a very postmodern term, otherness… there was Henry Nouwen and I think Brother Lawrence who really said it best, that we all have this kind of running internal monologue going on, and turning it into an ongoing conversation with our creator is a transformative and rich way to live life. So the phrases that I use as titles for my work are chosen to invoke a sense of the private made public. It’s an opportunity in the way that Terrence Malick orchestrates the dialogue in his movies. It’s kind of the inner thoughts made known.

I also use Spanish as well as English because I feel that English, just like titling something “Untitled” or no title, English is a truncation of the experience because it's a very direct transactional language. Whereas, Spanish as you know is commonly spoken and in my household as well, it's just a bit more poetic or open to interpretation. I want to say one more thing about this… going back to where you don't know what you're initially looking at, but maybe there's a feeling that you're looking at something that is touching on beauty, not just pretty, but it transcends to something that is more indescribable. I think once you are psychologically open to what you are looking at and then the imagery begins to come together, you have something that, I would say, imports something true about having compassion for others, even strangers. Because all artwork starts out as a stranger to you. If you think of artwork as another person in front of you, there’s small talk and then there's like getting past that to more.

Yes, thank you for telling us about your process and showing us around your studio. You talked about the clarity that comes along with being involved in this type of traumatic experience or having someone very close to you being taken away suddenly. Given that the viewer has to kind of break down visual barriers to literally create a clear image of what they're viewing in their mind… is this kind of a theme that you want to bring about in your paintings? Do you want the viewer to also feel this clarity of narrowing down what is important to you in life because of that very fragile balance between life and death? Because these images are really what that interplay looks like. We always say that kind of cliche word we walk this “fine line” between life and death, but this is what it literally looks like… maybe you can expand on that.
Yeah, that clarity… I do seek after that Carpe Diem seize-the-day kind of experience for myself. For me, doing this body of work and continuing in the way that I am, I’m taking things less for granted. When I look into the eyes of my daughter and sons, there’s a sense that the temporary evokes even more meaning because they will also die one day.

It’s a very heavy topic, you're dealing with people who are on this fringe edge of life and death and recognizing that yes as humans we are temporary as you just said that life is finite. Even though we have these projects, these offices, and what have you that make it seem larger than life, at the same time these pieces help recognize that fragility.
Also, when I talk about open parameters in terms of the techniques I use, it’s also about inviting the viewer. If they want to look and read the work through more of a spiritual lens as a portal or transition to an afterlife, that's fantastic.

From the clinical history, if read Michel Foucault, another French philosopher, with Birth of the Clinic it is shocking to realize it's such a recent history, that only in the last 150-200 years have we moved the medical field from one of alchemy to an exact science. On the other hand, we still understand end-of-life care more like an alchemist – and perhaps this is fully appropriate. Outside of pharmaceutically minimizing physical pain, there is an entire realm of human experience residing in the poetic, the beautiful and the suffering, the transcendent, and by its very definition, residing outside the framework of just science or what is temporarily meaningful. I appreciate your thoughts and comments.

Thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate you answering questions and showing us around your studio. 

Thank you for showing up. Good night everyone.