Anastasia Bay

Describing Anastasia Bay as someone who sketches figures is akin to calling Giuseppe Verdi a songwriter. She paints big, and with authority, in gestures that are seen, felt and remembered. Among her many interests is opera, which has been crowned the “queen of the arts”—so I’m going to continue in grandiose fashion and coronate this French artist into a most royal court of creatives. In a desire to revive and invigorate the rich magnificence of ancient Greek drama, opera summoned emotion and motive by combining narrative, music, design and dance. Anastasia’s dynamic figures draw from ancient myths as they transcend time, exuding power and passion. Her training in the sport of boxing informs an intimate knowledge of anatomy, movement and power dynamics. She is a contemporary painter who understands that myth is an ongoing libretto that, through the ages, manifests in many customs and costumes. In her latest exhibition, Maestra Lacrymae, she marries emotion and language in a glorious collaboration. 

 

Anastasia Bay: I immediately think of Sérusier's Talisman, a very modest small oil painting created on the back of a cigar box that Sérusier painted under the influence of Gauguin, who advised him to follow his visual sensations rather than copying nature; the painting thus becomes a manifesto of the Nabi movement. Obviously, the story reduces an entire transformation of vision and pictorial thought into a single painting, although that thought evolves over the years.

 

There have been many “portal paintings” throughout my pictorial research, so it’s hard to cite just one. I want to mention Philip Guston because I saw his exhibition at the Tate not long ago, and it plunged me back into a period of complete fascination with him. When I discovered his work, I must have been in my twenties, and I understood that a painting could belong to the critique of a political or social body while being poetic, charged with energy, possessing a tragicomic scope. In working flesh, more unsettling than carnal, he traversed pictorial movements. At that time, I was a painting student, and there was so much seriousness around me, it was shaking up painting. The diversity of his periods challenged those divisive ideas where abstraction opposes figuration, something professors and students indulged in to prove their belonging to an artistic ideology.

 

I was rather a bored child. I had significant concentration issues, and drawing always helped me channel that; without it, it would have been difficult for me to sit for hours on a chair listening to a teacher, although the daydreams I indulged in moderated this need for movement. 

 

In my early childhood, I wanted to become an opera singer. At that time, cartoons and comics didn’t offer many choices for the representation of emancipated women, apart from this recurring image of a hyper-powerful diva able to shatter all the surrounding windows with her voice. 

 

Around the age of 12, when I was old enough to go out on my own, I spent a lot of time in Parisian cafés drawing passersby. Since I had to consume something to stay, I had to start drinking espressos very early on and get used to the taste because it was the only beverage within my budget.

My parents didn’t have the opportunity to study, so it was fundamental for them to send their daughters to prestigious schools. Early on, they understood that they wouldn’t succeed in steering me away from the artistic path, so attending the School of Fine Arts was part of the implicit deal, which suited me just fine. It was a school I had fantasized about a lot in my childhood because many artists I admired had gone there. Upon my arrival, I discovered a school and an atelier system that matched the idea I had of it.

The workshops smelled of oil paint, alcohol, cigarettes, and rabbit-skin glue heating in a corner on a gas stove. Among students or with professors, we exchanged books, films, techniques, and painting recipes. I found a group of painters and sculptors with whom I got along well. Within the building, we had access to exhibition spaces where we organized group shows of "bad paintings" with titles like Aren't You Tired of Being Idiots? or What Do We Do with the Leftovers? We were eager to come together and pool our energies. I think for others, the school was perhaps a place of competition, but the collective spared me from such difficulty.

Before my diploma, I had the chance to go to Chicago where my friend was studying at the Art Institute. The school was open 24 hours a day, and we spent entire nights in the screen printing workshop with coffee and whiskey to fight off sleep. I wasn't enrolled, but I could still attend student evaluations. Such debates on the work were new to me. Students and professors were very frank and discussed for hours the works still in the research stage, and looking back, I think it was very instructive; whereas in Paris, one could really go in the wrong direction, since they let us go all the way in a chosen direction, even if it meant getting lost.

I didn’t have a studio in Chicago, but shared a house in the Pilsen neighborhood where I had some space to draw and paint. I discovered the Imagists at that time, and their works influenced my work.

 

I decided to move to Brussels immediately after my diploma. With this small group of artists I met at school, we decided to set up an artist-run space, and the city of Brussels was perfect for realizing this project. It was a logical continuation of these reflections on the group, exhibitions, and the collective. We hadn’t found support from the art community, so we decided to create it ourselves. It was fantastic because it allowed us to quickly meet part of the Brussels art scene, which was welcoming and supportive, really nothing like what we felt in Paris at that time.

In her definition of a boxer, Joyce Carol Oates expresses that, "Boxers will put into the fight everything that constitutes them, and everything will be revealed—including secrets about themselves of which they may not be fully aware." I see many similarities with the act of painting, even though the painter does not risk their life. These are disciplines that involve shifts in consciousness. It requires a lot of concentration and diligence, but also, in a way, a letting go; as soon as you trigger a line of reasoning, you get lost in the sequence. 

 

I very often change formats to disrupt composition solutions that I find and then try to detach from. At the moment, I am mostly working on very large formats, crowds in atmospheric perspective, that I envisioned as the backdrops for my opera project Maestra Lacrymae. I didn’t want to start with a frontal composition, but rather fragments of crowds because sometimes nothing happens except this feeling of being compressed, of being part of it. In these paintings, the eye's journey evolves from one person to another.

 

It’s a question I get asked often; there are more and more women entering the profession of artist and offering a perspective that deconstructs the mechanisms of patriarchal and western domination at work in the arts. In my paintings, I stage characters who have inherited a set of narratives, a psychic structure. They are wavering, desperate figures in transformation that do not conform to sexual assignments.

 

Recently, I've been able to draw on canvas as I would on a sheet of paper, so I've managed to desacralize it in a way. I work on soaked cotton canvas where I can draw and erase, and if sometimes the corrections of lines appear, it doesn't bother me. I like that one can see the process and the path taken to reach the final work. There are no rules regarding the time spent from one painting to another. It can take me a day or weeks, and in the end, it's impossible to see the difference. There's also all the reflection that takes place outside the studio—I can repaint an entire painting in my sleep! 

 

Time is not a foundational element in my relationship with painting.

 

Sometimes I walk to the studio determined to create an entirely pink painting, but of course, things turn out differently. There's an attraction that makes colors call to one another. It's a delicate balance where I often cover certain parts numerous times before finding the exact tone.

I try my best not to exclude any colors from my palette and actually force myself to use a color if it seems difficult to tame. In fact, I find it hard to distinguish a palette as you describe. I feel like a painter's palette is like the smell of a house—when you're inside, it's hard to grasp.

Myths are inexhaustible sources as long as we can decontextualize them. I have always maintained a relationship with the representation of figures from these symbolic narratives, whether Greek, biblical or Hebrew. These are stories that one starts reading very young, and that can be found everywhere around us. I have read them, but I have also discovered many through painting; just walking through the halls of museums makes it clear how deeply intertwined painting is with history and myths.

 

The golem, like many myths related to creation, is one of the themes that cyclically comes back to my memory. It is part of the age-old collection of myths that can be transposed to our time to evoke the human condition. Its interpretation as a novel by Gustav Meyrink accompanied me in the early days of my journey, highlighting themes such as the mechanized man, which are sadly immutable. "It is the terror that engenders itself, the paralyzing horror of the Un-Being that is elusive, without form, and gnaws at the borders of our thought." There is this idea of creation as an incantation that would protect against death.

I sought to create costumes that were as autonomous as possible. I wanted them to exist beyond the paintings. I had the fortune to work with theater costume designers and textile designers like Lili Sato, Sara Daniel, and Camille Lamy, who quickly presented the constraints of textiles and found very creative solutions.

It is precisely through colors and textiles that I was able to intervene. The costume of the Hacker Penelope is made from scraps of painted canvas cut with a laser printer. She embodies the deconstructed painting, like a glitch. The character of Arlequin is made from hand-dyed fabrics. I wanted to avoid using fabrics that were industrially colored. The fabrics are similar to cotton canvas so they have the same materiality as the paintings.

 

In parallel with other research, I continue to work on the opera. I am entering a phase where I would like to develop each character, each being closely tied to a medium. To name just two: “the Daughter of the Father” in ceramics, and Penelope the Hacker in weaving. For the moment, I am embarking on new collaborations in the field of tapestry.

On the musical side, we are working with Joseph Schiano di Lombo on the creation of an album where each of the songs will be performed by a lyric singer, as well as singers from the folk or pop scene. It’s a long-term project for which we are considering stage performances.