James Rielly: Visions and Revisions, Interview

Interview: James Rielly - A Conversation with the Artist on the Occasion of His Personal Exhibition “Visions and Revisions” in Knokke at Buysse Gallery

Date Interview: 15 June 2024

Date Release: 20 August 2024

Location: Buysse Gallery

Address: Zeedijk-Het Zoute 700, 8300 Knokke-Heist

Interviewer: Carmen Casiuc

Interviewee: James Rielly

Summary

James Rielly’s (b. 1956) conversation with Carmen Casiuc on the occasion of his personal exhibition, “Visions and Revisions” at Buysse Gallery (24 May - 17 June 2024), offers a deep dive into the artist’s unique approach to his work. Known for his humour and the slightly unsettling nature of his paintings, Rielly discusses how humour serves as both a shield and a lens through which he interprets the world. The interview touches on his reflections on the evolution of his art, the role of humour in making sense of life’s absurdities, and the way his works are often open to misinterpretation. Rielly shares anecdotes from his career, including moments of controversy and the influence of his early experiences and visual culture on his art. He also discusses specific artworks from the exhibition, such as Tears of Joy (2023) and Wishful Thinking (2022), providing insights into the stories and ideas behind these pieces. Through the interview, Rielly reveals the delicate balance he maintains between engaging with the world and distancing himself from it, using humour and visual metaphors to navigate this complex space.​

Interview

Carmen Casiuc (CC): James, the first thing that strikes me when I enter the exhibition is the humour with which you represent your characters. How does your sense of humour help you in creating your subjects?

James Rielly (JR): I’m almost not aware of it, somehow. I suppose it’s a way of describing the world. Not that you’re trying to be ironic or removed. But there is a screen that you can use to hide behind a little bit. You’re mocking something. You don’t want to be superior; you want to be kind of equal, but also you’re taking the piss or making fun of something. So maybe it’s a way of dealing with things, because everybody wants to be kind or pleasant. But you kind of hate the world. Humour helps in this kind of muddy area. There is no superiority to it. It’s a way of engaging with the world and, at the same time, not letting it soak you up or take you too much. It’s still making you human, but at the same time, you distance yourself.

CC: It’s like making peace maybe with the absurdity of everyday life?

JR: Yes, maybe. And it kind of makes the world a bit more interesting. It’s a way of looking at the world in a curious, kind of interesting way. Where is that saying “Curiouser and curiouser”? I think it’s from Alice in Wonderland, which obviously has a lot of humour and kind of absurdist humour, yet it’s very childlike. But it can be quite frightening or quite scary at the same time.

CC: Or downright uncomfortable.

JR: Oh, yes. You know, I’ve had shows where others tried to ban them.

CC: Really? Can you give me an example?

JR: Well, there’s one painting I did entitled Hold (1997) that was bought by the National Galleries of Scotland. It’s a schoolboy with a red jumper, and he has a scar on his forehead, like a round circle. They had complaints: a schoolteacher came in with some schoolchildren and said the museum shouldn’t show this painting. At that time, there was a massacre where a man went into a school, killed twenty children, and then shot himself. It’s called the Dunblane Massacre in Scotland. It was okay in the end, and the director did not take it out of display. But there’s nothing wrong with a bit of controversy.

CC: I suspect your titles are written tongue in cheek. And I think I found another very good example in your catalogue. The work is called Red on Blue, and you painted two kids holding each other with dampened smiles on their faces, each bearing a bruised eye.

JR: Yes. Isn’t there a saying, “He beat me black and blue”? This particular work was based on a memory I have from childhood. Where I grew up, there were always lots of fights, but there was one time when I’d gone through the whole summer without getting a black eye. Then, I was at the beach with some friends. They were in the water on their knees, pretending the water was very deep. They were saying to come and dive in, so I ran along the rocks, dived in, and just hit my head in the sand. When I came up, I had a big black eye. When I went to school, everyone thought I’d been in a fight, and nobody believed it was an accident at the beach.

The idea behind this is that it doesn’t mean these characters had a bad life. Sometimes you just get a black eye.

CC: If I’m not mistaken, those works are all from the series entitled “Work, Rest and Play,” the same from which you and Louis made the current selection, and which started more than two decades ago. It’s an extensive work where we find many child-figures depicted in slightly unsettling and humorous ways. You have here in the exhibition one particular painting, Tears of Joy (2023), with a child crying rivers, but the smile on his face is enigmatic, to say the least.

James Rielly, Tears of joy, 2023, Oil paint on canvas, 40 x 34.9 cm 15 3/4 x 13 3/4 in. Picture: Courtesy of Buysse Gallery

JR: I saw it as a funny joke on someone who was crying crocodile tears. But the idea is that not all tears come from sad stories. In my art, it’s almost like creating a parallel world and you’re talking about the world in this fantasy world.

CC: Could you see something changing over the years in the way you approach your subjects?

JR: I suppose I’ve just been aware of making the work a bit lighter. I do think a few years ago, my work was quite dark. Not only the colours but the subject matter was maybe a little bit dark. So I wanted to bring in much more gentle humour and quieter imagery, really. Even now, some people think my work is quite dark, like dark humour. But I see it like early “Tom and Jerry” cartoons. They would be cutting each other’s heads off or shooting each other, and then suddenly they get back up and carry on. There is a difficult area to work with because it’s always open to misinterpretation. But then I don’t mind that.

CC: I think that’s what made the YBA famous in the first place. They stirred up controversy.

JR: Yes, they played it up. They wanted to build this, yes. I don’t particularly try to build it up, you know? Usually, if somebody thinks my work is controversial, I’ll speak to them or try to explain it.

CC: But you are aware of the fact that your images are easy to misinterpret.

JR: Yes, but I think that’s the role of an artist, really. There was a time when offending someone wasn’t a crime. Now, it’s a minefield. Everybody’s much more sensitive about everything.

CC: In this regard, I think many of the images and artworks that were made in the early days of your career couldn’t possibly be conceived or publicly presented today.

JR: You’re probably right. Similarly, with a lot of the films that were made in the 70s and 80s, they couldn’t be made now.

I grew up almost at the tail end of the hippie movement, when it was amazing how they used images and how they brought together images from different cultures, like Indian culture or Aztec culture. Look at record covers, like, say, Carlos Santana’s record covers. You’ve got these collages of quite exotic, psychedelic, weird images. I’ve always loved that kind of thing. From 1976, you had the punk movement in Britain, with their own style of using images and the kind of punk attack—aggressive, but with a lot of humour as well.

This rich visual culture was coming from the art world and the music world, with figures like David Bowie. Most music people went to art school, and a lot of them were artists, like Brian Ferry or Brian Eno. Others were at the Royal College of Art in the 60s. I don’t know if Bowie went to art school, maybe he did, but he had this great visual culture, which he would express through his clothes or even the imagery in his work, or the way that he used collage because he was influenced by William Burroughs, who would do the cut-up poems in this manner of the cut-up technique. I mean, he didn’t invent it, but I suppose he made it quite famous. I think it was from The Waste Land, the poem by T.S. Eliot. I think it’s regarded as one of the first cut-up poems, but I could be wrong. The connections of the phrasing or the sentencing become more startling somehow. Bowie was very influenced by this in the way he would write his lyrics. And many others, like Brian Ferry and Roxy Music, and so I think a lot of this influenced the visual culture of young artists in London.

CC: Where does this interest in imagery come from?

JR: I’ve always collected images. Even when I was small, I had scrapbooks, and I remember one scrapbook (my mother still has it, I think) that I made when I was probably 7 or 8. The first part was about the funeral of Winston Churchill, a very important prime minister during the Second World War, and the other half of it was with images of a program that I used to watch called The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which is a very typical spy fiction.

But anyway, the point is, I’ve always collected images, even from a very early age. So when I first started art school, most people were doing life drawing or working from the model or doing abstract art. I was sort of collaging together different images, like I’ve always done, and then I would do paintings of them. In a way, I’m doing exactly the same thing today because now the internet has given me access to even more images. Before, I was spending a lot of money on magazines and books, but now with the internet, I still buy lots of books and magazines, but maybe not as much.

CC: Some figures and references from pop culture still appear in your works, like Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, the famous English comics from the eponymous ‘70s TV show. And the title of that work, you were telling me earlier, Wise One, is a reference to a John Coltrane song. I think we are touching upon a big subject here, which is the rise of pop culture and how the perception of high art changed in the last decades of the 20th century.

JR: Someone like Charles Saatchi, who came out of advertising, had this eye for images, and I suppose he saw something in the kind of young British artists, because a lot of the artists were getting their imagery from newspapers and newspaper stories. This was not considered political as such, but there's an element of politics.

CC: How did you become associated with the YBA group?

JR: By the time the YBA was starting to become a thing, I'd already been having exhibitions in America and Berlin. When I moved back to London, it was at first to become a Buddhist, and for about two years, I didn't do any painting. I was living in monasteries. Then, suddenly, I thought, I want to be an artist again.

I found a studio in London, in ’91-’92, and it was just the beginning of the YBAs. Most of those artists are younger than me, and most of them came out of Goldsmiths College. Luckily, I was just starting to show in London. I think my first show was in Brixton, in Coldharbour Lane, in the toilet of the gallerist's apartment. But everybody came to it, the Tate board came to it, I think Saatchi came, but then he didn't buy anything that time. Then, this gallerist opened a small gallery in the centre of London, which was a squat, and again, everybody started coming. Charles Saatchi came, and he started buying my work. Gagosian came, but I don't think he liked my work at the time. Saatchi was building up his collection and he did the Sensation Show, which had a catalogue published by the Royal Academy of Arts in 1997, and everybody was wondering who was going to be in it. In a way, I was quite lucky; it was a great exhibition to be part of, and the YBA became the trend of the moment, even if that's not the right word to use.

CC: Now, it is very interesting that you are mentioning your Buddhist experience because some of your works are not that easy to decipher if one doesn’t take into account some visual metaphors and allegories specific to religious symbolism.

James Rielly, Whishfull thinking, 2022, Watercolour on paper, 29 7/8 x 22 7/8 in 76 x 58 cm. Courtesy of Buysse Gallery

JR: Well, it's very difficult to say I'm a Buddhist anymore, but I suppose I am still influenced by Buddhism. There’s Wishful Thinking (2022), which comes from a Buddhist concept, that of the Avalokiteśvara. It's not a god, because there are no gods in Buddhism, but a bodhisattva manifestation, which is someone that decides not to become a Buddha. It is believed to have a thousand eyes and a thousand hands. The hands are to help each human, and they remain on earth to help everybody. Not that this has any bearing on my work. But these are, I suppose, some of the ideas that I think about.

But I love images, happy or sad, unsettling or inspiring. Some people say they cannot cope with all the images, that there are too many images. For me, there's never enough images; I love images. That's where my work is really, I just feel like I'm floating in a world of images.

James Rielly, All day Breakfast, 2023, Oil paint on canvas, 41 x 51.1 cm 16 1/8 x 20 1/8 in. Buysse Gallery

You see All Day Breakfast (2023), that it’s a take on the idea that in Christianity, the saints have a peculiar way of teaching others. There's a really good story coming from The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. One’s saying that there is humour in the Bible, and the other person says there is no humour in the Bible, that the Bible is very serious. And then the first one gives the example of the saints being put on the fire to give up on being a Christian. The saint is saying, “You've cooked me now on my back; turn me over and do the other side.” He's kind of making fun of his situation, so you can see it either as a fun thing or quite a shocking thing. 

CC: I like this word you used, “floating.” I was looking the other day, and your paintings don't have a contour; the figures take form just through your strokes and the colours, which sometimes give the sensation of floating on the surface.

James Rielly, Receiving gifts, 2023, Oil paint on canvas, 41 x 51.1 cm 16 1/8 x 20 1/8 in. Picture courtesy of Buysse Gallery

JR: I suppose I like keeping them quite flat and quite simple. I’m not really worried about being particularly realistic, or not in a photographic sense. Even though they're figurative, they're almost closer to abstract art. It’s kind of abstract art, but with images. It’s the area I love, and this is why I am always more interested in talking to you about icons or early religious art, where everything is flat. I want my images to convey almost like a dream world rather than a realistic world.

Another way of talking about this is magic. I quite like the idea of tricks in art, I suppose, because it’s like magic. This is why I kind of did this Receiving Gifts (2023) painting with the idea of a stigmata, where it's almost like the flowers are going through the hands. But in a way, it's like faking something, like a magician. If the trick is good, you kind of believe it’s magic.

CC: There are quite a few tricksters in the selection you've made with Louis as well. The eyes are a pervading sign in the exhibition, and the looks they give play with the viewer. They have different attitudes, I'd say.

JR: They're kind of hiding, but they want to be in the world, but they're not sure. I mean, sometimes we want to be able to hide. The world gets too much, and you just want to kind of go—whoa!—go back a little bit. But you want to keep seeing what's going on. It's almost like you're caught in this gap or in this dilemma of wanting to be seen and wanting not to see, really.

CC: Magic tricks and icons share something with the genre of cartoons you referred to earlier—they are all related to our belief systems. Why do you think this dimension is important in understanding you as an artist?

JR: Yes. I love cartoons and comics and films, particularly early animation films. This came about just through being exposed to it when I had kids. I suppose then it was the idea of being a father and how you influence your children. But even today, many of my works play around the idea of responsibility—the responsibility of being a parent or even of being a teacher.

James Rielly: Visions and Revisions

May 24 – June 17, 2024

References

Carmen Casiuc is a prominent art historian and writer who collaborates with artists to explore the lasting influence of Modernism on today’s global aesthetics and political landscapes. She holds a BA in Art History and Theory from the National University of Arts in Bucharest and an MA in Cultural Sciences from the Université de Lyon. Carmen’s insightful art writings have been featured in leading art magazines, catalogs, and international publications. Read more

James Rielly is represented by Verduyn Gallery an Art gallery in Wortegem-Petegem, Belgium.
Buysse Gallery is collaborating with Verduyn Gallery on the occasion of his return to the Belgian Seatown, Knokke since the 90s. Read more