This week, Arts editors, Harrison Smith, ES ’20, and Matt Reiner, JE ’20, spoke about process and failure, focusing on Reiner’s painting practice and the beginning of his senior thesis project.

Harrison Smith: Maybe we should start by talking about development — both in the sense of longevity and process. Something I think a lot about with your paintings is this sense of their having come out of a set of parameters, which delineate a space for practice. The most obvious parameter is “abstract painting,” but also, the size of the canvas or the material ground you’re using. I wonder how you begin and how you decide you’ve finished, if where you arrive is where you thought you would have.

Matt Reiner: Process is something I’ve been trying to figure out for a long time. Even with a still life it’s difficult to say “okay, I’ll stop here,” because I can always keep adding paint, adding glazes to make the light a bit warmer here or cooler there, or a bit of detail in the flesh of an apple. But at the same time I’m so impatient. If I don’t finish a painting within a couple of days, I’ll get uneasy and obsessive; and if it’s a failure, I’d rather destroy it than put it aside. So to begin is in a sense always to end for me. Not that I have a fixed image of what the thing should look like, but more so that I can’t let the end properly out of sight; I have trouble really risking true and utter failure in a painting. It’s something I’m trying to work on personally and in the studio. Longevity is something I’ve been thinking about this past summer too. Last year I had lost a lot of joy in making anything; the work became very performative and I was trying to outsmart myself for the sake of winning an imaginary game. I realized that it was slowly wearing away at my desire to paint at all. I thought about how to make a practice which can endure because there is meaning outside of the performance or the exhibition or the telling — a kind of private meaning which I would only let escape when I wanted, if I wanted. I journaled a lot, kept notebooks and it helped. I’m trying to keep the studio more private this year. I think that will help, too.

HS: What exactly does it mean for a painting to “fail”?

MR: Yeah (laughs). It’s kind of an ambiguous statement that a lot of painters use to describe a feeling. I have a hard time pinpointing what it means. The best I can do is give an analog: you’re eating a chicken leg and you’ve bitten off a tendon. At this point you have two options — you can either spit out the tendon, or you can chew through and swallow it. A failed painting is kind of like biting off the tendon. Most of the time I spit it out because it’s painful to keep working through. The composition isn’t right or the color is off. Something structural about the way the picture looks just doesn’t quite work. And when you want something to work really badly, sometimes you can try to convince yourself that it does, but there is just a feeling that it’s just not doing it. It’s hard to articulate. It’s a visual sense that doesn’t lend itself to language very well.

HS: I’ve seen some other work of yours that is very technically savvy, where the risk is minimized to a certain extent because the outcome is controlled. Often times these are copies of other artists’ work or observational drawings. I think you would rather call them studies, though. I’m curious what it might mean to flex a certain skill in painting and thereby to “minimize” or “control” the risk in doing it. In a similar vein I’m wondering how you’re going about beginning a thesis project, which is in certain ways predicated on the assumption that you won’t utterly fail, that something will come out of it which can be presented in the gallery at the end of the year.

MR: Making a painting always contains a certain ego trip for me. It’s hard to separate the grand title “Painting” from what I’m doing, which is at best an amateur knock-off of that idea — not to be self-deprecating in any way, but just to point out that that idea of painting isn’t true anymore. That being said, I’m always testing myself to see where I lie within these parameters, like I am testing a kind of validity whose existence isn’t real any longer. At the same time, the only successes I’ve actually felt in making a painting have been when I’ve let this performative testing go — when I’ve actually been able to have privacy and make the work because it felt like what I needed in relation to a “right now.” Of course, it’s difficult to really shun the performative, or the impressive, when you’re working in a class setting and you are being “evaluated” — whatever that might mean in an art context. But I hope that I can get there this year; it’s what the thesis is about in a certain way: to find the private in light of the performative elements in painting. It’s what really good painters execute in such a stunning way — I’m thinking of people like Charline Von Heyl and Jutta Keother, who have found the idiosyncratic within the historical and positioned their skill within matrices of doubt and criticality. I want to be more comfortable with the risk in that idiosyncrasy, or with the private being exposed to vulnerability. It takes a kind of confidence, which I’m developing and which maybe the studies do help to build. I’m not sure.

Artist Portrait: Matt Reiner was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.