Paul Winstanley

In 2013, Winstanley's Art School was published, a monograph of photographs he had taken throughout the United Kingdom of anonymous, vacated art-school studios and classrooms, the bare, perspectival views suggesting an in-between place of history and possibility. The project formed the basis for a body of paintings—monochrome, vertical, compositions generally painted from multiple photographs in a grisaille technique that drew upon aspects of 17th-century Dutch interior painting and geometric abstraction. The images consisted of planes of white and gradations of gray punctuated by identifiable details of art-school activity: improvised partitioned spaces, battered and paint-dripped walls and floors, plastered-over drill holes, baseboard heaters, well-used sinks and random stackable chairs (e.g., Seminar (Grey) or Art School 28, 2014). Critics such as Artforums Jan Astoff suggested the sense of absence and stillness in the paintings became "an occasion for heightened painterly nuance … subtle but compelling dramatisation of light" that was likened to works by Vermeer in which the captured reality of mediated spaces "dissolve into hazy reflections" upon closer observation. • Illustration — Paul Winstanley, Situation 3, oil on gesso panel, 80cm x 86cm, 2020.

Since the late 1980s Winstanley's art has mainly focused on large, realistically rendered oil paintings that merge modernist aesthetics and postmodern investigation with two classical genres, the interior and the landscape. His work balances interests in processes of observation and depiction, the role of the viewer, and the psychology of quotidian, post-war communal spaces. Critics have described his style as an "indistinct naturalism" combining painterly softness and invisible technique, a meticulous dispassionate recording of observation and photographic detail (including flaws such as lens flare and the hazing of contours), and the subjective alteration of composition, light and color from source materials. His approach both points to its basis in photography and asserts independence from it, complicating the work's apparent claims to representation. ARTnews critic Barbara Pollack wrote that Winstanley's approach to landscape was "never entirely natural," but rather, "mediated by human presence, first when he picks up a camera and then brush and later when we, the audience, observe these scenes as invited intruders." • Illustration — Paul Winstanley, Veil 20, oil on linen, 224cm x 213cm, 2007. Winstanley's interiors center on archetypal, interchangeable, transitional spaces in which time passes slowly: institutional lounges and lobbies, waiting rooms, empty studios, corridors and walkways (e.g., T.V. Room, 1991; Lounge A, 1997); a 1998 Artforum review deemed them "mental images in a double sense": remembrances of things seen and depictions of potential, deferred interactions or situations. Writers have characterized the images, variously, as austere, contemplative, filled with ennui, and eerie, often relating their deserted melancholy to the Northern European painting tradition of artists such as Vermeer, Caspar David Friedrich and Vilhelm Hammershøi, or to Edward Hopper. Time Out critic Matthew Breen wrote that Winstanley's handling of cold light and geometric composition brings "a kind of romanticism to the most anonymous of spaces." His images often feature windows as a motif: screens partially obscured by translucent curtains, blinds, fog or mist that function like thresholds into surreal, uncanny parallel worlds, points of interpenetration between interior and exterior realities, or frames-within-frames recalling the Renaissance notion of paintings as windows (e.g., Nostalgia 2, 1999; Utopia 1, 2005). Critics have noted how Winstanley employs certain methods—blurred imagery and repeated but subtly altered scenes that suggest the receding quality of memory and passing time—to introduce affect and temporality into his work and invite reflection. The quality of folding time and space is furthered by the scenes Winstanley chooses to portray: spaces of waiting or transition, whose vernacular, post-war utopian aesthetic has since been called into question, yet may inspire wistfulness. His paintings Lounge (Night) and Lounge A (1997) depict the Friedrich painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818)—an image of the back of a figure gazing into a foggy mountain landscape—wedged on a wall between windows in a lounge with seven vacant seats. Critics such as Simon Morley suggested that the paintings' changing luminosity, setting (a place to kill time), laborious photo-realist technique, and emphasis on viewing pointed to the "call of the transcendent, the potential of a liminal expanse of 'stretched time'" through which to contemplate "the spirituality of the aesthetic." • Illustration — Paul Winstanley, Art School 28, oil on linen, 90cm x 60cm, 2014. Winstanley began producing his "Veil" series in the late 1990s: diaphanous, translucent paintings of mainly vacant interiors focused on light streaming in through or blocked by wall-to-wall and sheer curtains, blinds and large plate-glass windows, which sometimes framed outdoor conditions such as mist. Critics described them as haunting, sometimes unsettling works that emphasised the transience of the interior-exterior relationship, either mediating views of landscape and bright outdoor light (Hub, 2000) or closing them off in ways suggesting the isolation of a cloister or cell (Viewing Room, 1997; Veil 20, 2007). In other images, Winstanley set generic built enclosures against the pastoral (for example, birch trees in idyllic rural settings or untamed brush), invoking a sense of the intrusion of one realm onto the other (e.g., Walter Gropius' Balcony, 2002; his 2005 exhibition, "Homeland", Kerlin Gallery). In the early 2000s, Winstanley's paintings began to include occasional, solitary figures immersed in their own worlds. Standing in front of windows, slumped in front of televisions, or looking out of the picture, they generally faced away from the viewer, introducing a sense of voyeurism into the work. This figurative emphasis came to the fore in a 2011 exhibition at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, which included images such as Enclosure—a man in a gray suit sneaking a cigarette in the greenery abutting a boxy modern office building—or Jesus is Coming, which portrayed two men at the top of a park stairway gazing out of frame.