Claes Gabriel, Circe, 2016, 72 x 52 inches
“Do you know those nails they used to make canvases with? The tacks with the flat heads going into the stretcher bars?”
The Haitian-American painter Claes Gabriel had construction on his mind. His father, Jacques Gabriel (1934–1988), was a modernist painter of some renown in Haiti and francophone circles abroad. Jacques’s oeuvre is sophisticated and varied, entertaining both Stuart Davis-like abstraction and flat-planed pictorialist approaches. Claes — who was named for the pop artist Claes Oldenburg — sometimes extends visual ideas found in his father’s work. I naively asked Gabriel, when he first identified as an artist, when he picked up a brush. Three or four, he answered — can any child, especially the child of a working artist, remember a time before they had a crayon in their hand?
“To me, really it all goes back to those nails, the sound of construction. That’s where it begins.”
The work of the artist goes back much further than the paint, he observed. A painting is fine art, but it is also fundamentally work — and it begins with sweat and wood and nails and hammer and canvas. Like any job-site: hard-hats mandatory.
First you build stretchers, then you stretch the canvas — then you paint. This was Gabriel’s introduction to the fine art of painting, and it made it difficult for him to embrace the concept-driven art of his namesake, Claes Oldenburg. Oldenburg is famous for monumental sculptures of everyday objects — five-story lipsticks and thirty-foot shuttlecocks.1 Gabriel had a hard time embracing that legacy: if it’s a concept, then why does it even need to exist?
“It took me a long time to accept, a long time. But finally I came to realize it’s all conceptual art,” he tells me. All art is fundamentally about an idea, and Oldenburg’s ideas about scale, surprise, humor, and disorientation find voice in Gabriel’s work now, too. But even so, he continues to think in terms of a concept made manifest. Ideas floating out there in the ether are just fine, but he holds in higher esteem the idea so profound that it must exist.
He speaks with easy pride of Haiti, the first Black republic in the Western hemisphere. That heritage, too, is an idea made manifest: a self-determination dearly bought, a people building a nation almost out of the idea of freedom itself.2
That legacy, of self-determination at any cost, renders a nuanced worldview for Gabriel. He is proud of Haiti’s self-determination, and proud of the passport that his French fluency provides. He is circumspect in his views on national and ethnic identity, taking the complicated legacy as foundational — a place on which to build.
The building is literal and metaphorical, often at the same time. Making his own stretchers, he says, is how he came to work in three dimensions. First you build the canvas — but who says it has to be two-dimensional? The wooden framework, common to most paintings of the last half millennium, grew forward and outward until it became the skeleton for a more elaborate painting. Upon these structures, Gabriel stretches canvas and paints — he considers these paintings, too, though at a glance they look like elaborate masks.
A metaphorical construction rises from these forms as well. Gabriel observes that he feels that he is sometimes expected to look only to Black sources — his Haitian heritage, African carvings and African-American artists. He understands and admires these sources, but he also looks to other forbears of shaped canvases. “What’s wrong with looking at Frank Stella? What matters to me is their idea.”
(He finds himself, again, accepting the value of the conceptual.)
II. Forbears.
He mentions Jean-Michel Basquiat — also of Haitian descent — and Jackson Pollock with a cautious appreciation. We talk about their achievements like those of mountain-climbers: Pollock and Basquiat and other expressionists — they found their mountain to climb, now go find yours. And anyway, mountain climbers don’t build the mountain: it supports them, they don’t support the mountain.
But he spoke with profound admiration about Romare Bearden, the African-American painter who was known at his death as “America’s foremost collageist” (sic.).3 In the 1980s, Bearden was producing works around Obeah, a Haitian Creole spiritual system. Bearden was raised in the United States, but he was interested in these alternative belief systems of the African diaspora — through-lines of Black experience that moved from pain and loss to life and joy. After going through a period of wandering and self-actualization, Bearden hit his stride, and seemingly any cultural heritage became available to him as a source material.
Gabriel found special significance in Bearden’s interpretation of Homer’s Odyssey, rendering his own interpretation of Bearden’s Circe, the sorceress that turns Odysseus’s men into animals. Where Bearden’s work resonates as a metaphor for the obstacles in finding one’s way home, Gabriel’s treatment re-centers Circe as a plausible protagonist of the tale — an empowered Black woman on a remote island navigating a perilous encounter with a European adventurer. The magical elements resonate with Gabriel’s experience in Port-au-Prince:
“Mythology—that comes from my childhood in Haiti. I grew up hearing the voodoo drums in the background. We talk of spirits as if they are a real thing.”4
III. The Borderland Between Idea and Deed.
I mused that the shaped canvases must take an immense amount of planning — but he tells me it’s just the opposite. Two-dimensional works are laid out meticulously in advance, but the three-dimensional works are much more improvisational. He doesn’t know how the surface will be painted until the canvas is stretched over the armature — it’s a very free compositional device, in spite of how designed they appear. In this, they share something with Claes’s namesake: like a high-gloss lipstick forty feet in the air, Gabriel’s shaped canvases look like they came right out of the box. They appear to float out of the wall, a concept invading the material world.
Thanks for reading. Claes Gabriel lives and works in Philadelphia. His website is currently under construction but check out his instagram for recent images.
Jonathan Spies
New Haven’s Ascending and Shuttlecocks at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.
The New York Times has published a series in the past few weeks exposing just how expensive that freedom was: the newly-formed nation found itself paying reparations to the slave-owners, payment that would go on in some format for centuries. “In this case, the victors — who had first thrown off their shackles, and then defended themselves by beating back Napoleon’s forces — were the ones to pay.”“A Land of Riches, but Not for Its Own People,” The New York Times, May 22, 2022, Section F, Page 2.
Interview with Stacia Yeapanis, full text here.