In Conversation with Melissa Gurr, Nadja Sicamore, and Thomas Farol
Victoria Cunningham
March 1st, 2024
We all met in Melissa’s studio in Bushwick. Walking four blocks from the Morgan station to her building, I remembered how Brooklyn can feel like an alien planet sometimes. There were no people to be seen along Harrison Street today, and, amidst the eerie silence, I realized that I had not left the island of Manhattan for over three months. Melissa’s work has always had a magnetic effect on me though, and these questions have been weighing upon my mind for years.
Nadja was at the door when I arrived, as always in a stunning dress, one of her own paintings on muslin having been tailored by a friend, and we entered together. Meanwhile, Thomas was already in the studio, worn corduroy pants and a forest green collared shirt with an aged leather messenger bag in his lap. The scent of yerba mate was faint in the air, and Melissa in her immaculate white linen dress had gourds waiting for each of us, gourds and bambillas. As she had previously mentioned to me before, she originally began studying painting in Buenos Aires.
Melissa’s studio was meticulously organized, every tube of pigment in its place, canvases stored away or elegantly displayed, and walls without a trace of a painter’s presence. It was uncanny in contrast to the trash-strewn streets and graffiti outside. I hesitated to say anything, but Nadja soon commented that she was not sure whether to be more horrified by what she was seeing or by the state of her own studio. Thomas laughed.
I was inspired to bring them all together one night while at happy hour with colleagues. I had been debating which one I should interview, and yet a conversation with only one of them felt as if it would land shy of the bigger picture I have been seeking to understand. Then I remembered a video from graduate school, a tripartite interview with Carl Rogers, Fritz Pearls, and Albert Ellis. Thus, triangulation suddenly became clear to me as the path forward into a deeper investigation regarding fundamental questions in painting that have been gnawing on my mind.
I first encountered Melissa’s work three years ago at a literary salon in the East Village. It was a private reading at the home of an acquaintance, one as similarly reticent and scrupulous as her. The movement in her paintings felt like the ocean at low tide. I experienced a visceral sensation of displacement that unsettled me within the harmony and flow of color. Additionally, the level of sophistication in her work was coupled with the nonchalance she demonstrated in an unforgettable first impression. There were no answers to my queries that night, merely an austere indifference and a redirection of my gaze to the canvas itself. I felt something significant in the painting, and the artist revealed herself to be an enigma whose work I have continued to follow piously. Fortunately, she has promised that today she will be more forthcoming.
Meanwhile, my first encounters with Thomas and Nadja’s work were on Instagram and at Tximeleta in Tribeca, respectively. As funny as it is that social media has become a legitimate place to make it as a painter, it is also tragic. Thomas’s first show that I attended was in partnership with another painter at Resolute Gallery in Chelsea. The other painter’s work was stunning online, and I was extremely eager to see it. However, when I arrived, his paintings were unbearably disappointing in real life—dull, details that felt egregious, something revoltingly disharmonious in the IRL gestalt, and a feeling that I could do it myself, but better—whereas I suddenly perceived something otherworldly in Thomas’s works. They felt as if they danced and were in a process of constant transformation.
Then, regarding Nadja’s work, our first meeting was much more traditional, albeit more recent. A new gallery opened on Walker Street, owned by a friend of a friend of a friend, and I swear one of the paintings appeared to me in a dream the night before the opening. Thus, I stood arrested before her Portrait of a Science, and I felt too overcome to muster the energy to introduce myself. However, Nadja ended up approaching me. As it turns out, she had read a blog post of mine ten years earlier while we were both in graduate school, Five Reflections on Dalí’s 50 Secrets. Additionally, we met for coffee the following week and found ourselves very likeminded, though with some disagreement about whether one is merely an inheritor of a preexisting “current” or a “source” of the surreal. Yet, as I have learned throughout the years, echo chambers only contain partial truths, and this meeting of the minds felt necessary to see beyond one perspective.
Ultimately, throughout the years, each of these painters have perplexed me and inspired my recent curiosities—the influence of dreams and the unconscious, the authority of the thing itself, as well as the advancement of the craft—so it only felt natural to speak with them in concert. I believe[d] that between us, a deeper truth might emerge beyond the obscurity I have been dwelling in myself, one that is greater than any of the subjectivities we have become. Yet still, as one of Melissa’s ethereal renderings continued drying in the other corner, I peered into each of the painters as into a foreign cosmos.
INTERVIEWER
Knowing what little I do, you have all travelled remarkably different paths to making a name for yourselves. What inspired each of you to pursue painting?
MELISSA GURR
I am glad we are starting on this one. Your questions usually disturb my preference to let the work speak for itself. I fell in love with a painter while I was studying abroad in college. It was very cliché, but after learning some foundations and getting the hang of it, I ended up giving it up for several years to focus on graduate school and my prior career as a data scientist. There was certainty in numbers, a stable career and the guarantee of creature comforts. However, after a head injury in my late twenties, I could barely sit through a day at the office without breaking into tears. I don’t know why. I kept working through it and concealing it, but everything always felt wrong, and all there ever was to show for it was having survived for another day of the same. Thus, one day I just quit, I took my savings, and I searched for something that resonated with the new broken me. Painting was the answer, a space of color where I could create silence and an enduring sense of balance, the only one I have ever been able to find. I took some classes at the League, I attended a few residencies, and I had the fortune of people taking an interest in my work.
NADJA SICAMORE
I was in college to be a writer before I began to paint. Heartbreak did it to me. The writing all felt trite after months of repeating the same pattern of despair and failing to move on. It was as if my writing kept getting worse too and I was having night terrors. It got to a point where I was not sleeping at all for several months. Additionally, something about the state I was in felt like I would never be able to muster the cognitive energy it takes to write. I could pen these little coherent snippets, but then on page two it would all be fog. I almost had to drop out, but a professor encouraged me to stay and to attack from a different angle. Enter painting.
It was like a sunrise, and everything became clear for the next few years. On the most basic level, the story is that I stuck to it and got into art school, started showing in group shows, and the gallery signed me before I even graduated. However, I also like to say that there was a Painting II for me, like where I really started doing it. Essentially, after starting the graduate coursework, I began having these episodes and thought I was living in a dream, like there were bodies everywhere, but there were no people in them, just like within a painting. I was freaking out, and there was no difference between my dreams and waking life, and I was painting in my dreams too, but I was always pretending that everything was fine. I just kept transmuting it all into art and acting like nothing was happening. Then, in the midst of it all, I remember my mother telling me that I had to choose between my art and my soul. It all felt so ridiculous and terrifying at the time, but I remember deciding to believe that they were one and the same, and I just keep deepening my focus on the work.
THOMAS FAROL
I come from a family of artists. There was never any question. It was just what they raised me to do. I studied sculpture and drawing as a child, and I travelled with my mother when she had performances abroad. I was mostly homeschooled in the arts too, bouncing from performances in places like Cairo to my grandparents’ house in Edinburgh and our apartment in New York City. That said, I always liked to joke that I was going to be a military officer because it horrified my mother. I genuinely wanted to be a painter though. I loved Dalí’s work as a kid and dressed as Magritte’s The Son of Man for Halloween. Then I went to art school. Joan Mitchell’s work was the first that really began to call me into the more abstract field I ended up finding myself within. I went through a lot of different phases of experimentation though, you know, to find my own voice and style. So, here I am today, forty years later and still kicking.
INTERVIEWER
You all operate in the abstract space, but each of you have developed a unique and compelling body of work. In one sentence, what is the inspiration behind your paintings?
MELISSA GURR
Raw human feeling, like lyrical poems.
NADJA SICAMORE
In my case, it is my way of interacting with a mystery I am seeking to solve, something I feel and that I register, but that I do not really understand yet; it just feels necessary, and I keep exploring it more deeply, creating these objects along the way, like windows into a room.
THOMAS FAROL
For me, I take a lot of inspiration from nature, the visual harmony that we discover manifesting itself in shells and trees, as well as from the painters who came before me.
INTERVIEWER
I can see that all vividly in your respective bodies of work, but I want to dive a bit deeper into the process and inspiration behind it all. Specifically, what is your work’s relation to something immaterial?
THOMAS FAROL
Personally, I work to keep my focus on the material. It is something intuitive I have developed through the years, and it is all very tangible and thoughtless. I see the immaterial, in all its forms, as being secondary and my connection to the matter and my manipulation of it as being the central aspect of painting. I am concerned with texture, composition, interaction with light, color, negative space, formal aspects. There is no ritual or process that is associated with anything other than the painting itself. It is just my mind and what I have learned about making art—physical, plastic art.
Yes, as a young man I was fascinated with the idea of painting in “berserk” states, so COBRA—that expiation of energy—was an early influence, and I loved Gutai and Actionism, but everything is just second nature to me now and I keep everything tightly controlled. I do everything with intention. So, ultimately, I would say that the only immaterial aspect that matters to me is that which I provoke in the beholder. And when you say “immaterial”, I find it almost irksome. I don’t subscribe to any mysticism, notions of the spirit or anything like that; I threw that all out a long time ago, to be honest.
MELISSA GURR
Mmmm. I work to think less and less about what happens on the other side. Painting for me is deeply emotional and personal. I paint as a means of interpreting feeling into physical form, as if I am translating from one mysterious language into another one. When you asked the question though, I started specifically remembering a reflection I wrote about painting as riding waves that I cannot see, but even after I give them physical form, the wave keeps going. It is all very much about a sense of internal harmony, and I cannot stop painting until I achieve it. Perhaps it is because of my relative lack of formal training, I only studied briefly under a friend, but I care less about mechanical aspects, per se, and I know even less about the history of the discipline. I just care about restoring some sense of balance between myself and the world, regaining control, and, so far, I have merely been fortunate that it has resonated with people, perhaps somewhat unintentionally. Also, dovetailing on Thomas’s comment, I do not see it as anything special, mystical, or anything. It is just my mind and feelings reconciling in an aesthetic form.
NADJA SICAMORE
I guess I am in left field over here. I like to say that I paint energy, so a little bit similar to the “waves” Melissa is describing, but most everything I do is devoid of emotion. It is more intellectual in some respects, although it probably seems highly irrational to others. I do feel something though, usually a heightened anxiety after waking in the middle of the night, something that compels me, but it is driven by an increasingly understood and prolonged conversation with my subconscious and the work itself. It became intuitive to me a long time ago. Patterns began emerging and the paintings and the dreams would echo in the world beyond me during the following days. So, it is also often as if something is in dialogue with me from both directions. In other words, the immaterial and the material are inextricable for me, in the way that within a dream they are one.
INTERVIEWER
As I mentioned to you all before the interview, I have an angle. There are questions that have been haunting me—dreams, the unconscious, and the intersection of the abstract and the surreal—and I would love to hear from each of you on this matter. What role have dreams played in your work?
MELISSA GURR
None. I barely ever have them, and I pay no attention to them. Anything that is unconscious in my work is brought to the surface in the process of creating and expressing harmony between myself and the world. That’s how I see it. Sometimes I might not understand why I feel a certain way at first, but nothing is ever inspired by or linked to anything other than reality.
People say they can see it too. An article was written about the difference between my series after my father’s passing—kinetic, sharp, and abysmal–and the one after my niece was born—warmth, softness, clouds. But that’s just all intuitive and universal. Everyone paints death in black. Rothko said something about it himself, I think. It resonates with people on a subconscious level, part social teaching, part raw nature—think charred flesh—and it was what I gravitated toward mindlessly. I just happen to have invested time into developing my talent to intuitively make it arresting. It is a science, like baking, and the ability lies in becoming intimate with the literal materials you engage. I think dreams and anything unconscious are often just epiphenomenal or, worse, an excuse for bad painters to make their work seem interesting.
NADJA SICAMORE
Coming from a situation that is decidedly immersed in surreality, I actually agree with Melissa. That is often the case, elaborate stories and legerdemain as a farcical substitute for substance. However, I also know that there is a space where unconscious elements manifest themselves in ways that become more significant as one leans into them. Looking to others, the results of automatic painting across individuals and time have always felt like an initial sign that something more is at work beneath the surface of the animal we are, even when we dominate it with rationality and the inherited frames. My theory is that it is like an aperture though, one that can be widened such that the manifestations become starker, and perhaps also more diffuse. In my case, my art, I believe that to be the case.
First, with the episodes in college, I became like a fish stepping out of the river to observe itself. I began questioning what previously felt intuitive and natural to me and I grew accustomed to sustaining a radical doubt. Eventually I could no longer differentiate between painting in the dream state and reality, and even today I feel a permanently altered relationship to the material. Rather than shying away from it, clinicalizing it or collapsing under the pressure, I have always embraced it. Thus, I always engage with my work as if within the dream world. Sometimes it is like I am in a trance, and it feels as if the rules of one world carry from one to the other for me. I tell myself that it is desire, whatever it is I am in touch with, and I let my mind wander into the fantasy. I love the feeling when it manifests itself to me clearly, something emerging from the image the way they do in the dream, and I have consistently deepened my ability to draw them out and harness them in my work. I believe this space—found, created, lived—is the essence of surreality, but it is a tenuous and delicate ens imaginarium.
THOMAS FAROL
Look,I believe the placebo effect is extremely powerful. Mind over matter is a truth, but a limited one. I choose to invest my energy and time into developing mastery in my craft the way engineers build bridges—rules, consistency, adherence to apparent laws, and intentional innovations to distinguish myself within the space bounded by those realities. I respect surrealists and have long admired their work, but as an artist I prefer to be conscious, in the driver’s seat, and fully aware of what I am doing. To my mind, nothing is unintentional. I do not want to leave any room for chance.
I never experienced that level of control earlier in my career and as a student I always experienced a sense of dependence when venturing into those waters. There was probably a period around then when dreams caught my fancy, but in the long-run, no. In those days, there was always something unintended that would suddenly appear a day later, and again after a week, and I worked diligently to overpower whatever was creating them. Maybe, you could say that some of them I worked to integrate into my practice and internalized a long time ago, but mostly I worked to feel in total control of my work. I want my house to be termite-free and would rather gaze upon the waters of the surreal from above, regardless of any fascinating sirens concealed therein. I have no fomo. So no, no dreams for me.
INTERVIEWER
And if a beholder still felt they had perceived something lurking in your work?
THOMAS FAROL
It’s like a bell curve and I have worked to make it as tight as possible, but 1) I will concede that even one on one, my work can still surprise me, and 2) people are going to see what they want to see no matter what I do. At the end of the day, I operate on this plane for people here on Earth, and anyone else is welcome to delude themselves.
MELISSA GURR
Similarly, I feel strongly that it is merely aesthetic sensibility that resonates with the refined viewer. To the degree that anything subconscious is happening, it is about the way the biological entity is designed to interact with physical stimuli, masterfully executed. On the spot here, I also begin to wonder about the way myth and belief distort aesthetic understanding. It degrades the purity of aesthetic pleasure and transforms it more into an extension of fiction and fantasy, or worse, the intellect, whereas true art, I believe, stands alone in a more elevated space. That is why I generally prefer to remain silent about what is behind my images.
NADJA SICAMORE
Obviously, I disagree, but I also live in a world inverted. On this side of the coin, I crossed a threshold where I began to perceive the world beyond the canvas as equally implicated in art and equally interwoven with the dream world. I also, in contrast to Thomas, perceive myself not as being in total control of my materials, but as operating in dialogue with something that transcends us. I believe that something connects us all, equally so in the dream world as well as within this one. So, to the degree I exercise mastery as an artist, it is in the process I have developed within that perceived intersection of worlds and the application of my eye to bound it into a work of art. I believe that is why I and others perceive symbols, imagery, and sensations that emanate from our unconscious as manifesting themselves within the work of others as well as within the world beyond our canvases. It is beyond our control and constant when we open ourselves to it, but, on the other hand, you can always just ignore it. I think it is like weather though.
I know we talked about this before too, Victoria, but I also feel as if a transcendent unconscious is merely a “current” we can wade into, like a wellspring, but not something which we are actually able to create and generate ourselves. Maybe at one point I harbored that fantasy, but the more I pursued it, the more chaotic and unstable the worlds became. I believe it is something that existed before the individual and that endures beyond one life, something that we can tap into and transform into art. I revere it. The dream world of the unconscious is always there even when we think it isn’t, and I know that it can pull us under and carry us out to sea in a riptide if we aren’t careful.
THOMAS FAROL
With all due respect, any claim to metaphysics is just a blackhole. As a talented painter your work speaks for itself, technically and silently. I can appreciate this eccentricity from a distance, and I am familiar with [Nadja’s] work—I attended the show at Formte last Spring—but I do not want to get dragged into this. This is beyond the purview and scope of painting, and I am no psychologist nor am I interested in becoming one. I am a painter and what matters to me is what I can touch and wield and craft.
MELISSA GURR
I also feel as if this discussion veers us off the path as painters and into shadows that have more to do with mental health. Oh! And Thomas’s comment reminded me of a Virgina Woolf quote. She wrote that a painter’s work “held psychology at bay.” I know people that have experienced psychosis, and my own sister struggled with schizoaffective disorder for years, so I am very sympathetic, and I can absolutely admire that Nadja is transmuting her experiences into art. A piece I saw at Stag Gallery two years ago, I think it was the one titled Nocturne of the Forest, haunted me for months. I can still see it vividly in my mind’s eye. It was the evocation of the colors though, the sharpness of the brushstrokes, and the way its composition introduced depth and perhaps even a slight vertigo. You created this universal language in paint, and I felt it. It overcame me and rushed through me in waves of feeling. I think that is all technical though, the application of skill and the energy we draw from within ourselves that animates us. I imagine that Nadja’s experiences generate a lot of internal motivation to deploy her talent productively to overcome the stress of the abnormality and disorder. Perhaps like me, it is a way of restoring a felt balance through the production of beauty.
NADJA SICAMORE
[Laughing] Yes, I am a ship navigating a sea. I find my bearings along the way. Like I said, there is a threshold where I truly believe it becomes undeniable, this sense of being art and of being dislocated into a new reality, an artist’s reality, but I respect that it is all alien to other people. I learn not to take any of it too seriously. So, I laugh, and I carry it through. Sometimes I imagine the painting, the thing itself, as the artist. I am just the paintbrush. I surrender myself to the work and it reveals itself. I think that is significant though, and more than just energy being channeled in the same way, per se.
INTERVIEWER
Yes, I think we must become more interrogative of what exists beyond the veil of painting. I also feel…
MELISSA GURR
No, we were clear about this. What you are both seeking to do is speculation and performance, fantastic literature. A true painting speaks for itself.
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