The untimely brilliance of Siemon Scamell-Katz

SIEMON SCAMELL-KATZ is an artist who looks—as Eva Figes writes of Claude Monet adrift among his water lilies in the blue-gray hour before dawn in her 1983 novel Light—“at, not through. The bright skin of things, the shimmering envelope.” Scamell-Katz’s exquisitely colored abstract paintings on aluminum are a bit like that shimmering pond in Giverny: At first, they are subtly reflective, sensuous. They change dramatically with the angle of one’s gaze, their proximity to a window, the time of day, the weather.

Their content is determined by the landscape from which they are drawn. His palette comes from both his memory and the preparatory watercolors he makes in the field immersed in a landscape, in which his utmost concern is fidelity to color, which he sees as the distinct signature of place. The paintings themselves are made in his studio through the slow accretion of layers of oil that he adds to the enameled panels and then partially sands away anytime the layers begin to suggest a figure, a process that recalls Megan Rooney’s monumental murals but scaled down, done delicately. Once they “start to feel like an object unto themselves,” he works quickly to finish them, often in a wet-on-wet process that renders them radiant.  

Scamell-Katz began much of the work in his ongoing show at Paris’s Gallery Mercier between 2018 and 2020, while he was living on the salt marshes of the north Norfolk coast of England: a place that, like his panels, is defined by indistinction and opacity. It is a landscape in which, under the great weight of open skies thick with clouds, the earth merges with the sea at every tide. It is treacherous, inhuman, a setting for the contemplation of dissolution, finitude, death. Yet its “numinous nature,” as Scamell-Katz describes it, drew him in; he recorded it obsessively, though he says that it always eluded him. The resulting works are nevertheless luminous fields of color, at times triumphant with the saturation and energy of, say, Helen Frankenthaler’s A Green Thought in a Green Shade, 1981, at others receding toward a mesmerizing depth and darkness that, like Cy Twombly’s 1984–85 “Hero and Leandro” series, feels at once tender and dangerous.

Scamell-Katz’s most recent work hones the instability of his media to dazzling effect; sometimes he enamels the panels in white or covers them in acrylic gesso before applying oil and the finished work “lights up” before the viewer’s eyes as the aluminum refracts ambient light. Other times, he enamels it in black so that the finished panel darkens and deepens the longer one spends with it, like the onset of night.

The work’s troubling of the immediacy that is Impressionism’s key innovation evokes the peculiar durational quality or temporal breadth generally reserved for the literary.

His show “Light Itself” went up in April at Floréal, an intimate gallery perched on Belleville’s great hill and therefore bathed in that rich and changeable brilliance of Paris at elevation. In “Light Itself,” this looking at that I describe, a looking that happens at the surface, slowly gave way to a looking through of another sort: a looking via the work toward that unthought element which always mediates our encounters with the painted surface—the light itself. The show comprised just six paintings, each drawing upon Figes’s detailed descriptions of the light in Monet’s Giverny throughout the day. Yet they do not give us unmediated access to Giverny’s rarified light; they are not merely representational. Rather, they provide a location, of sorts, for observing the light of the gallery itself. As I sat in the gallery with the paintings for the better part of a day, I learned as much about Paris as Giverny. The shimmering ultramarine and umber hues of 22:02, 2023, that emerged as a rainstorm passed overhead receded when the midday sun returned, making way for lemon and ochre and unexpected hints of alizarin. Put simply, the painting turned light into its medium. In this sense the works are unreproducible. My gaze activated them, but it took time.

The work’s troubling of the immediacy that is Impressionism’s key innovation—that magic that perceptually synthetizes Monet’s disparate strokes—evokes the peculiar durational quality or temporal breadth generally reserved for the literary. Indeed, Scamell-Katz’s work does not distinguish between genres of aesthetic inquiry. Claude Monet and Joan Mitchell are as much in the background of his work as Figes and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In some sense this is what I expected of the partner of acclaimed writer Rachel Cusk. His relationship with the literary isn’t a metaphor.

I was therefore surprised to learn from Scamell-Katz that the two seldom talk about the content of their work while it is underway. The correspondence between his work and hers had to be discovered. It was only at the suggestion of Dan Gunn—editor of Sylph Editions’ Cahiers series and professor of literature at the American University of Paris—that the two considered publishing something together. Gunn saw their work as in an intimate dialogue that exceeded mere thematic resonance. This encounter resulted in Quarry (2022): a slim volume that pairs Scamell-Katz’s paintings with an essay by Cusk.

Yet this dialogue predates Quarry. Both have an enduring concern for the status of the past, with the residual: the afterimage, the partial memory, the glimpse, the remainder. Cusk’s latest novel, Second Place (2021), is an exercise in “recycling,” as she calls it, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Lorenzo in Taos (1928): a hitherto forgotten memoir of the years in which D. H. Lawrence lived with Luhan at her New Mexican hacienda. Cusk’s novel has a moral agenda: It considers the male artist’s exploitative relationship to women, his historic indifference to female suffering. It takes up the difficult legacies of archetypal figures like Lawrence, who explicitly attempted to subjugate Luhan—to “break her will”—and Lucian Freud, whose work was too often premised on the sadistic control of painter Celia Paul, his longtime partner. Scamell-Katz’s recuperation of Light—an overlooked novel, though Figes’s personal favorite—is reparative. Rather than exploiting and obfuscating the work of a woman mostly known as a feminist critic, he reverses the expected direction of influence and elaborates her literary project. Excerpts of her text, posted on the gallery wall, dwelled alongside his images.

Sitting together in his studio in a renovated fur factory in Montreuil this past spring, I couldn’t help but think that Scamell-Katz, like Cusk, was trying to get out from under that mantle of machismo, rage, and self-indulgence. Few images hung from the studio’s walls: a small painting of a waiter, two recent photographs of Cusk. Hundreds of jars of enamel and oil lined the studio’s shelves. Upon our arrival there, he offered me a cup of tea and his most comfortable chair. There was no bumping around the studio, no posturing or monologuing or self-assertion, no performance. We considered, together, a half-finished painting that he had placed on a low easel—what would become 22:04. It was a cerulean, lavender, and phthalo-green tableau then; it was about his childhood in Dorset, he told me, which was difficult. He was already at nineteen layers of paint, double what his paintings normally were upon completion. He had just sanded much of it away. It had stymied him; the remembered landscape of that time too readily suggested the figurative or symbolic and therefore departed from bare truth.

If we read classical landscape paintings as a record of the artist’s struggle with that very same extractive desire that promotes the land’s destruction and women’s objectification, Scamell-Katz’s denial of the picturesque gaze, of figure and horizon, might be read as an aesthetic resolution. Scamell-Katz’s work, then, is an earnest response to a historical and phenomenological problem. It is boldly indifferent to trends in contemporary art. Rather, it asks the viewer to “live in correspondence with” the landscape, “so that it looks back at you and incorporates itself in everything you do,” as Cusk writes, in Second Place, of the very same marshland views Scamell-Katz so obsessively painted until he and Cusk left England for Paris. Scamell-Katz’s impulse is to record and evoke rather than to represent and capture; his is not a violent abstraction, but rather an unconventional realism. Behind his work is a deep concern for the landscapes he has known, the changing climate; he and Cusk rarely fly anymore, if they can help it. When he writes me, it is often from a train.

Shannon Forest is a Los Angeles–based writer and a doctoral student in English at UCLA.