The Paperweight of Feeling: Cecily Lasnet’s Thought Wandering

Cecily Lasnet’s paintings take you on a walk through intricately intersected dimensions and spaces, telling a story that enchants and then stops you in your tracks, confounded by a realisation that they are all completely flat. For her first solo show in London at Cecilia Brunson, thirteen trompe l'oeil paintings form Lasnet’s ‘Paper Sentences’: paintings that begin as collages and are translated into still life.

Each unique painting depicts individual collages that Lasnet constructs with extracts of magazines. While the collages are taped and constructed in an intuitive fashion, each painting is discretely and methodically shaped through the push and pull of oil paint. The works portray the collages as though photographed, keeping visible shadows, creases, tears and irregular snatches of light.

This particular body of work springs from a short story Lasnet wrote, ‘walking home’, in which the narrator fuses the colours and emotions that surround her journey, before ending in a moment of poignant desire, asking ‘if you are coming home?’. The paintings are both impenetrable and delicate; they recall seeing paper scattered on the street, floating and flipping in the wind, dodging cars and catching on corners and cracks in the walls. They are caught here in their flimsy irrelevance, and then imbued with a solemn aura.

Speaking to Lasnet in the warmth of her temporary studio, I asked about how the works exist in dialogue with her own writing. 

‘They do respond to different sentences in ‘walking home’,’ Lasnet told me. ‘I worked through each one quite discretely to think about what impact words and memory have, and what I can work with in each particular moment.

Each painting is like a moment in time that is capturing and recording not only colour and light, but also emotions and memories felt at that time, and the way they change in relation to what is seen.

For some of the paintings, I made a lot of collages to begin with. The collaging process has an editing element, and some would have to be repeated, rethought, or rearticulated. This was an intuitive process which was happening while I was painting other ones, but I painted each one individually, in a much more methodical way.’

Lasnet, who recently completed a Fine Art postgraduate at Goldsmiths University in London, began by painting flowers. Much like her layered and meandering process of making work, Lasnet’s route into her current style emerged from a coalescence of teaching.

After years of botanical paintings, a stint at the Royal Drawing School introduced Lasnet to painting from life, or, as Lasnet puts it, ‘it was the first time I brought my work into space…it opened up the horizons of what was possible in art language for me’. While learning classical oil painting at the RDS, Lasnet embarked on a discovery of volume, and of our interaction within it: ‘I realised that so much was possible in image-making, as soon as I’d broken out of the regime of botanical drawings and began to consider the implications of painting empty space’.

Lasnet’s graduate show at Goldsmiths was titled, ‘The Poetic Steps of Eulogised Space’, and took the viewer through a series of geometric screenprints, focusing on the poetics of the everyday, emotion, grieving, journeys and space. This intricate exploration of how blocks of collage and colour interact to unveil internal spaces and narratives continues in the series at Cecilia Brunson Projects.

While the paintings are formed from collaged magazine fragments, I immediately noticed the depth and emotion in each work, their illusionary elements creating a distinct sense of wistfulness and nostalgia. They contain the remnants of life and ghosts of human gesture; the viewer reaches towards something hinted at, and ultimately hidden, by the trompe l'oeil techniques. These are objects from the past. There is a constant and precise tension between the flatness of appearance, and the life it alludes to, including the liveliness of painting itself. I noted this and Lasnet reminded me that despite their abstract appearance, ‘these are also objects, not just colours. There is a dimension of still life in these works, or natura morte, which is essentially “life killing”’. 

‘Sometimes painting can be wonderful and like a dance, but sometimes you are grappling with it. You have to push it around and tangle with it. As I went through each work, there were secondary discoveries made during the process about painting, beyond just collage and writing. I am playing with the painterly frame of reference that has always been there for me. In painting the sky I can do my best to imitate the paintings of Constable that I love, and in some there is a high impasto, whereas others I treat the paint really glassily, always playing with style. The vocabulary of painting history comes into it all.’

Lasnet’s use of magazines stems from an ongoing interest in Josef Albers and his highly influential colour theory. For his classes, Albers would set his students to go and find an array of coloured papers taken from magazines collected over time, rather than using newly produced papers. 

‘It means that the colour you’re engaging with has a relationship to a world outside. Colour changes over time, it changes by what you put next to it, tastes in colour change too. The magazine covers you would find 60 or 70 years ago would be completely different to what we see today.’

In Lasnet’s work, each magazine colour represents a life or narrative that has been abstracted and lost. The colour hints towards this, and then the relationship when it is put next to the other colours forms a narrative - an abstract nonteleological one, but a narrative all the same. Lasnet elaborated:

‘It’s quite hard to get produced colours to become something more complex than what they are - like a box of coloured pastels for example. The pigment is so vibrant and pure. But working in collage, you’re working with colour that has been processed in a different way. It’s already a complex colour because it has that relationship to photography, something photographed in the world, so it isn’t primary, and then there’s the way that it’s printed and the way that the light changes over it when you paint it. There are layers to it. And then what you put next to it changes it.’

Space, image and word intersect; in each work the artist freezes a fragment of the mundane, catching an everyday moment that is slipping away, or sitting in the backlog of memory and sight, and instilling it into poetic form. The paintings struck me with a feeling of déjà-vu; just as how a combination of words can suddenly transport you to a place, so too the collages. Their compositions mirror the way thoughts coalesce and dissipate in the fragmentary world of dreams. Lasnet describes to me her ‘research trips’, which consist of walking without any form of distraction, and entering a mental state where she becomes acutely aware of personal memory and emotion in relation to the space that surrounds her. For Lasnet, holding fragmented memories is all about how you hold space. 

‘In these works I am going back to a story which is about experiencing emotions while walking through space, the images of the outside world become kind of attached on the inside’.

While these paintings are frozen, each collage welded into one by the tricks of oil paint, they are also tender, holding together a delicate coalition of image and feeling. Eulogising this fragile space, they reconstruct the subconscious, abstract experience of attaching emotion onto a place. There is a distinct sense of longing, and melancholy, both in the swathes of empty canvas and in the distillation of collage into still life.

The paintings speak to the evasive nature of dreams, and the feeling of loss that sometimes accompanies the waking moment. But within this, Lasnet grasps onto ‘thought wandering’: made visual, it carries hope, connecting with the subconscious:

‘When you’re walking there’s a kind of music that starts between the conscious and the subconscious and you can start to tune into those wandering thoughts and you can hear something that is going on just below the surface.’

Each painting possesses a subsurface life, a previous and current existence that is both in front of us and hidden beyond the canvas. Through this allusion to the process of wandering, dreaming, remembering, and thought wandering, they have a strangely cinematic quality, despite their ordered, still surfaces.

Together they read as a story, but allow the viewer to make their own connections with each one, rearranging and rearticulating the beginning, middle, and end. Drawn into the lyrical subjectivity posed by each work, we are soothed into the wayward fluttering of paper, the meandering passage of individual thought, and the intermittent flood of fragmentary feeling.

Cecily Lasnet: Paper Sentences is open at Cecilia Brunson Projects until 25 August.