Half a dozen questions for Graphic Surgery

Graphic Surgery have been refining their particular kind of minimalism for years. Out in the world it takes the form of bold, sparse marks in derelict buildings; in the gallery, of carefully made pieces with a precision that has won them steady attention from collectors and other artists. In the summer of 2016 their work was part of Direction / Instruction, the touring group show curated by the Amsterdam artist and gallerist Hyland Mather, which was on at Paradigm Gallery in Philadelphia until mid-September after stops in Denver and Venice, California. Mather put six questions to the pair.

Graphic Surgery are two Dutch artists, Erris Huigens and Gysbert Zijlstra. The twist was in the method. Mather sent the questions to each of them separately and asked them to answer without conferring, in the spirit of an old television dating game, to see how closely their accounts of the partnership would line up. The answers turned out to be remarkably consistent.

On working as a pair

The first question was the obvious one: how often do two artists who share every decision want to throttle each other? Zijlstra thought throttling was putting it strongly, but agreed that they have different views and approaches and do disagree from time to time. He saw that friction as useful, the thing that keeps the work fresh. Huigens gave a one-line answer that split the time down the middle between wanting to strangle and wanting to hug.

An origin story

Asked for a founding myth more interesting than meeting at art school, both men went back to their student years in Leeuwarden, in the north of the Netherlands. Zijlstra said the real collaboration began with screen printing together during their studies, but that the fun was in going out at night to paste posters on the streets. It was not meant to be serious or beautiful. It was the moment the online sticker and poster community was getting going, and it felt good to be part of that early.

Huigens remembered it through the town’s nightlife: they met in the same bars and at the same electronic music nights. Across the world, he said, there was an underground excitement about making work outdoors and putting early efforts in public for anyone to see. For them it became a combination of drinking, printing, pasting and unsanctioned adventures.

Out in the wild

Asked what they are trying to do in their work outside galleries, Zijlstra explained that they now look for remote abandoned places. These are hard to find in the Netherlands. Once they find one, they use its walls and surroundings as a testing ground for ideas, in the way a graffiti writer might try out a sketch on a wall. The pieces rarely repeat, because they are partly intuitive and partly bound by strict principles and rules.

Huigens described the same work as adventure combined with a search for a particular meeting point between decaying architecture and painted architectural and industrial forms. He sees these outdoor pieces as samples of the more complex studio work. Abandoned spaces, he said, rarely need more than a few minimal shapes to set up a conversation with their surroundings, and working this way joins the spontaneity of graffiti to minimal art made for one particular site. He thought the energy spent on those pieces leaves something mysterious in them.

Street and gallery

On how the outdoor work differs from gallery pieces, Zijlstra pointed first to time. Working outdoors limits it, which makes the execution more enjoyable because they have to play efficiently. Gallery work is a different game with many more factors to weigh. He described their studio output as moving in periods: the works from one phase relate to each other, whether public art, murals or small studio pieces, because they come from the same momentum. He noted that the pieces then on show already felt slightly old to them. They had learned so much since that those works now looked like early versions of ideas they were still exploring. Huigens was briefer: the two are different sides of one body of work, and both matter.

Machines and hands

Mather’s fourth question was about tools. He had noticed the pair making increasing use of machine precision and asked about laser cutters, 3D printing and CNC routers, and about the role of automation.

Zijlstra said they have always combined traditional crafts and graphic techniques with digital media. He is particularly drawn to the machine-like accuracy of laser cutting and is no longer much interested in painting on canvas. Moving into collage, assemblage and sculpture has opened a whole new dimension, he said, with a lot to learn: suddenly an artist has to be nearly as skilled as a carpenter, and they now sometimes work with carpenters and steelworkers. He does not like to over-design in advance, so he runs the laser cutter himself, feeding it files made just beforehand. Once every layer is cut they rearrange the pieces, trying different orders until each element is right. Automation comes in, as he put it, through the parameters they set before they begin: the rules that define the work.

Huigens shares the interest in precision. In practice Zijlstra runs the cutter and Huigens assembles, paints and glues the pieces. But he still loves gestural, expressive painting because it is the most direct and honest form of visual expression, and in some works they try to combine the two. That combination, machine precision with a human hand, is where he sees their future. He also expects to rely more on other people’s skills for larger projects, from building facades to big sculptures. He would like them to try painting or collaging directly against each other, going back to back, instead of keeping to the established division of labour.

The dream project

Given an unlimited budget and six months, Zijlstra imagined a very large steel sculpture of the kind they call an intrusive structure, placed in a square or a park, or somewhere remote in rural Iceland. Or on the moon, lit at night by solar cells. He also floated a mosaic across a huge square designed to be seen from Google Earth, and a tunnel covered in concrete relief. Architecture and construction are central to their work, he said, and it is natural that the work itself becomes more and more constructed.

Huigens refused to reveal his dream project. He was confident it would be realised, he said, but perhaps twenty or forty years from now. All he would say was that he wants to make the ultimate minimal work, one that sums up everything they have done up to that point. Less, he added, really is more.