BC: You're listening to Yale Radio, W-Y-B-C. This is Brainerd Carey with the lives of the artist, architects, curators, and more. Today on our show, I'm talking with Aglaé Bassens. Aglaé, thanks so much for being with me today.
AB: Oh, thank you. It’s great to be here.
BC: Aglaé, we're going to talk about your show, of course, at HESSE FLATOW Gallery. And I'm excited to talk about this show for a number of reasons, but I'm. Well, let's jump right into it. So, I want to talk about the different works in here and in your approach. But I also love the title, "Vacant," you know, it seems like a kind of marker for what could be. And I know it's been written about as a kind of these sort of actualist scenes, you know, this sort of emptiness of the subject matter. But it seems vacant and has a lot of meanings, right? Can you tell me a little bit about that?
AB: Yeah, I do like to usually go for titles that both work in a very plain sense, like it is what it is. And that don't sound too opaque and just refer to the theme. But also like it when it has a potential, more psychological reading. And while I think of the word "vacant," I always think of someone who has a vacant style, who's like staring into the distance, and so all the way that you can imagine to fail what seems to be an empty space. So, I think that was part of it and also, to me, there was also like an association with the motel and vacancy, and also this idea of transience with traveling rooms and so it kind of has a few connotations that mean something to me for my personal life and the things that I look for in my works.
BC: And when you talk about vacancies in hotels and transience, if I can ask that, how does that relate to your past life? Is that part of experiences that were meaningful to you or the opposite?
AB: Well, I have quite an uprooted childhood. I moved every three years from age three to twelve, living in different countries, sometimes in a new language. And so, I feel like a lot of the way I look and crop and approach still life is sort of from looking and from outside, which is sort of how I felt through a lot of these moves, just when you don't speak a language, you rely on observation to understand what's going on. And I feel like there's been so ingrained in me that when I approach something, I just kind of try and question what it could mean other than the obvious thing. So, there are no object subjects in a way, like maybe that's why my paintings are often of quite plain everyday objects, because I think there's always some cultural context. You know, if it's a window, a window that doesn't open the same way in Europe or in America, or it could be like an AC unit. It's like these slide things that give you clues about where it could be or not be. And that kind of speaks to me. And so interesting, you know, I've had friends that, and known people that have moved that often, you know, usually because of a family with a military background, and that always seemed to me hard to understand how a child adapts so quickly, one friend who said, you know, his biggest goal was just to be normal, to not have an accent, to not be the kid that stands out. That also seems like an impossibility to me, you know, how to not be the new one.
BC: And when you talk about observation being such a big part of it, I would imagine that's also a cultural issue, right? We're going to talk about observation in your work here, but also as a child moving around observation is also about, and just correct me from wrong, but it's about the culture at large, how to communicate with these people, how to feel like you belong, how to not feel like the other, the new kid.
AB: Yeah, definitely, and also just sort of figuring out how the people do things, you know, try and figure out how people react. A lot of it is also just reading emotions. If you can't figure out what someone's saying, how can you still say that something awkward just happened in the room, or that someone's upset, or like it's much more about reading cues in faces and environments and relying on words, which is, you know, kind of what painting does so well.
BC: Absolutely, so to talk about the works in the show and your process, as I understand these, all start with polaroids. Is that correct polaroids that you're taking?
AB: That's right, in this particular exhibition I started from polaroids. Previously I started also from photographs, but it was always a mix of my own photos, mostly taken on a camera or on my phone, and sometimes I would twirl through websites like reviews on Amazon or TripAdvisor to find, you know, some candid picture of a hotel room detail that I could use that felt like it was fair game to use that image. And I realized that I wanted to go into something that was more about the materiality of paint and of the photographs itself, and by doing polaroids I was able to think of it more as an object, unless it's a screen, and seeing the way that the colors developed, and giving up some control to some extent about figuring out exactly what I was photographing when I'm looking at you finder. That sort of helped me to think about how to paint them in a different way, so it's quite a small shift in terms of how I work the film, but it sort-of triggered something about the handling of the paint.
BC: Yeah, I love that idea, and to talk a little bit more about polaroids since this is a shift with this show, Polaroid is a curious choice, because it's at once an outdated medium, almost that medium that's been revived in the past several years. It's so fascinating, the kind of arc of polaroids, so I'm curious, again, why Polaroid is it the colors and more in the format, and if so, what kind of Polaroid camera and film are you using?
AB: I'm using. it's a good question, I don't think I even know the name of the model. It's one that I remember I bought because I had a flash, one of the new models, and it has a flash option, because I really like when I use photography that have a very strong flash, and that's kind of come back in fashion really now, but for a while I was looking for pictures like that's a e-bay, so great, these people take awful pictures of things they sell, where it's really harshly lit, and the flash is on, and very soft shadows. I kind of like that kind of hardness to the image and define space so well, when there's not much information, it gives steps to the painting and where the line stops, and so I bought that one, that model, that reason one with the flash thing, because I thought, oh, maybe that's like a way that I can create this flash effect, and then it was only through using it, I realized that it's actually triggering all these other ideas about how to use my approach to photography differently. But I think the old-fashioned thing you're picking up on is the nostalgic aspect of the Polaroid, it's also something I thought about because I realized that I'm often drawn to painting things that may initially seem nostalgic, like, you know, an old friend with the wire, or an old alarm clock, and I've been thinking about that because I know that I know that I'm not interested, really, I think in nostalgia, but I think I'm drawn to analog sort of hardware technology, because it was clear from the object what it was for in a way. There's something more tactile about it, because I don't have figures in my work. You see a telephone receiver, you immediately think about a hand, you think about what it feels like to hold it against your ear or to leave someone on hold on the phone while you hop and do something and come back. So it's definitely over time, but it's more I was thinking about how everything hardware has a relationship to the body that's clear in the design that is lost now in more modern technology. And so, I think that was one of the things that appealed to me about Polaroid is that it kind-of celebrated that and incorporated that into the process of making. And it's also a format, right? I mean, there's, you know, I mean, to all photography, there's this kind of format that comes in that is peculiar to the medium and Polaroid has its own format, its own dimension.
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