The art installation shown on the raw film above is a piece by Jorge Batista and is called Waiting Box.

I met Jorge in 1996. As I write these lines I can’t stop remembering when I used to roam the corridors of the University of Fine Art in Lisbon, aka Esbal, hoping to understand art, hoping to find the answers I was looking for.

I met Jorge for the first time on a trip to ARCOMadrid, the international contemporary art fair, organized by the Esbal. I was told at the time, ‘the trip is open to anyone as long as there is an empty seat in the coach.’

When I think about my impulse to join them knowing absolutely no one I am glad I jumped on that coach. By doing so I ended up mingling with the next Portuguese generation of contemporary artists. Jorge Batista was one of them.

Recently, I had the opportunity to see the work above, tucked away in his atelier.

Waiting Box is an engaging installation. It made me feel as a three year old with a new toy. As shown in the video above, the main animation is projected against an ice block. The ice block is enclosed in a box that acts as a fridge. To doors opens after pressing a pedal. The period of time between opening and closing is brief, but long enough to see the animation.

“Why does it close so quickly?” was the first question I asked.

The answer was quite obvious. “So that the ice block doesn’t start melting”.

‘You have to let the temperature inside stabilize before the door can open again,” Jorge told me while I pressed the pedal in vain.

When the time was right, after a few seconds, I pressed the pedal again for another brief interaction with the animation. I personal think the animation gives the impression there is some kind of life breathing within the ice block.

It still dazzles me that Jorge was able to put this piece together by himself, when engineering this installation doesn’t seem an easy job to achieve. Walt Disney’s cryogenically preserved body was the main inspiration for this work, but rather than writing about it, as you can browse the internet for further information, I decided to write about my personal interpretation instead.

In its essence this art installation employs a degree of technology in order to keep an ice block in a solid state for as long as possible; and that is what really spoke to me. There is bitterness in that. Regardless of the technology employed the machine will most likely fail one day. A failure that reminds me of our human condition. The effort of keeping an ice block in a solid state is not any different from the effort of trying to preserve the human soul for eternity.

I used to roam the corridors of Esbal wondering about this same question, hoping art would allow me to understand to my mortality and if I could ever find a escape from it.

Waiting Box doesn’t provide the solution I have been searching for, but it alludes to this particular fear that I have been carrying since the end of my childhood. It is an art installation dealing with an issue that concerns us all, hence this post.

David, IAP Fine Art was established almost 20 years ago. How was the world of contemporary art back then, in terms of interest by the media or the public in general?

It was still a time when people talked about whether a work of art was any good, and not how much it cost or was sold for. They were qualitative conversations, with lots of interesting disagreements, and different ‘camps’ within the art world, alas some more fuddy duddy than others. No-one at all held only quantitative conversations about prices and auction prices. That pull of celebrity and money and auction prices was beginning, but not on the scale it is today. You did not go to an art fair and be handed a fair newspaper with a graph on the front page of art sales in South East Asia, as though you were entering a car sales convention. (Unlike at a major London art fair in 2009, when that actually was the first thing I was given!).

There had been a big recession, and galleries in 1992-4 were just trying to crawl out of it. The 1980s had been a mad time of huge bonuses in the City, and the galleries hiked their prices. Then those same galleries, as the recession hit, left some artists high and dry because you could not be seen to lower prices without devaluing the reputation of the artist. So around 1993-4, prices began to be thought of as a measure of the general worth of an art work, but not the only measure, which it seems to be today.

Also, the fashion was shifting away from painting to conceptual art. Even in art schools, figurative painting was beginning to be thought of as an old or even dead art form. Artists never thought that, but critics, curators and lecturers were saying it.

When IAP Fine Art was established the Brit Art group was at the peak of their creativity. Why do you think they were not able to keep the momentum going?

Possibly because you can simply only stay fashionable for so long. Possibly because that sort of conceptual work eventually becomes repetitive, or because the public want something new after a while. Possibly because it has been said that Brit Art was really more a movement in markets, than a movement in art. (The latter an opinion stated on Ben Lewis’s BBC4 documentary ‘The Contemporary Art Bubble’). Everything has it’s time and place, I guess.

Do you think Brit Art is still an influential group on the new generation of British artists?

Personally, I think the whole Brit Art thing did a lot of good. Damien Hirst in particular was a brilliant PR for contemporary art, and he skilfully got the UK’s tabloid newspapers on side, by charming them and serving them fish and chips as he unveiled his shark in formaldehyde. In the 1970s, Carl Andre was vilified by the same newspapers for his conceptual work, aka ‘the pile of bricks’ in the TATE. Whereas Damien Hirst and the other Brit Art artists became like pop stars, made contemporary art more popular, expanded the market for it too. Made it ‘cool’ and accessible for a wider audience.

The Brit Art artists, and the acclaim they attracted shifted the centre of the art world from New York to London. Suddenly the cool artists and the opinion formers were here. After a few years, since the collectors followed the cool scene, the centre of the art market shifted from NY to London too. Larry Gagosian even opened a gallery here to be where it’s at, as the saying goes. So for British artists, suddenly it was all happening in their own country, and they did not have to up sticks and go to Paris or New York, as in previous eras.

With regard to an artistic influence, it’s a bit early to judge. It’s not as though they invented conceptual art, it had been around for decades, they just developed it, and also made it make money and get a better press. Before they came, there were some quite conservative people running the art world. So I think the greatest thing perhaps they did artistically was make it alright to say that now ‘anything goes’.

Art pieces from the Brit Art group achieved great values at art auctions which in turn generated a lot of press and interest about the world of fine art. Do you think the current discussion about the value of an art piece in terms of dollars rather than the cultural contribution it has done to the world of fine art is somehow influencing the work of contemporary artists?

I doubt it would do that. Or hope not at least. But I think the money-led culture makes it very difficult to get your work through. To be considered an artist by some in the art world (who also influence collectors) you will have to have a published auction price. But the auction price is impossible to get, since the auction houses won’t touch you without a track record. It’s Catch-22. It’s the commodification of art that is so insidious.
Also, the art market is the last unregulated market in the world, so it is open to insider trading, and there are many rumours circulating about gallery owners and collectors who bid up their own artists’ works. So it might be said the prices may actually bear no relation to real demand and supply.

Since 1994 IAP Fine Art has been displaying mostly paintings when many galleries were displaying conceptual art (partly influenced by the Brit Art group). Any particular reason why you decided to swim against the tide?

I’ve always loved painting and been fascinated by it. I was lucky enough to get to know Chris Gollon when I was only 21, and he introduced me to a whole world of art, particularly German and Spanish painters. We’d been friends for 10 years when I saw he was struggling financially, so I decided to become his agent. It meant I could also actually then work in the arts. I have always enjoyed paintings and I respond immediately to the great ones and always find them exciting and hypnotic. Unlike photography, in a painting you can get multiple and subjective viewpoints as the artist works on different figures and over time.

I think that in general great paintings (and sculpture) have a different time release to conceptual art and also a sensuality and life–like no other visual art form.

'Girl By The Shore' by Chris Gollon (60" x 40" acrylic on canvas 2012)

IAP Fine Art displays mainly the work of Chris Gollon. Would you recommend this strategy for the survival of a gallery considering that most art galleries prefer to invest in a considerable number of artists?

I would not necessarily recommend our system to a new gallery, it has to suit the owner’s personality. For me, it all started with a friendship with Chris Gollon, who then also had a young family. I think there are only a few great artists around in any period of history, and if you have one, you should look after that talent and set it free to work and explore possibilities. Also at that time, many commercial galleries insisted on having ‘exclusivity’, yet would only give an artist one solo show every 12 or 18 months, which he/she could not live from.  Exclusivity is fine if the gallery makes an artist enough to pay the bills and feed his family and buy materials. If not, why sign your work away? As Chris’s agent, I could not sign him to a gallery who would neither pay a retainer nor guarantee a decent living for him.

The system of paying retainers, after the 1990-93 recession, had disappeared, and no guarantees were to be had either. So I started London’s first one-artist gallery dedicated to Chris’s work. We got sneered at by some in the art world, but our system worked, made money and Chris got good reviews in the press and started getting museum shows. So the sneering stopped. It also meant, as we only showed Chris Gollon, all our energies were directed to promoting his work and selling it, so he made a living and attracted a real following of educated collectors, many of whom still buy today. It became like having a band, putting on regular shows and starting your own record label. I used to like Madness and they did that v successfully in the 80s, as did Jerry Dammers of The Specials in the late 70s with 2-Tone.

'The Was No Remedy (after Goya)' by Chris Gollon (36" x 24" oil over acrylic on canvas 2012)

How would you describe Chris Gollon’s art? How does he go about painting? What place do you think he has in the current British contemporary art scene?

I think Chris Gollon’s work is a new form of figurative painting, and I think he’s at the cutting edge of European painting. Why? Well, I think the greatest artists in history have eschewed fashions or even movements and ploughed assiduously their own creative path, which Chris does. Add to that, the greatest artists also do something new both technically and in imagery. Chris Gollon does that both in the unending fertility of his imagination, but also technically in acrylic paint, which is why Liquitex (world’s leading manufacturer of artist’s acrylic paint) now support everything he does. He even brings printmaking techniques into painting, and vice versa. You can see films of him working here. Thanks to various enthusiasms by young app developers, Liquitex and others, a new Gollon app for iPads is now a world first. Gollon gives away his creative secrets in a new (free) app for iPads. You can see it here.

The imagery some say is unsettling, which is great as it takes us into a new area of thought and feeling. Like a conceptual artist can assemble ready mades, Chirs Gollon can take a Looney Tunes landscape, put a real figure next to an imagined one, add a big subject matter and take us somewhere new totally. He’s taking painting into a new area, which is very exciting. I think it may have been Norman Mailer who said middle class European people get ill unless they can categorize or pigeonhole something. Might he be right? If so, let’s all relax and wait, and just not try to put an ‘-ism’ on Gollon’s work, but just enjoy its innovations and warmth for humanity and its unblinking, honest stare back at us. It might not always be comfortable, but it is always memorable, at times very beautiful in the paint and in the bravery of the image. Imagery and info here.

Finally, what advice would you give to a young artist trying to live off his art?

1. Stay true to your inner voice and intuition. Trust that above all else, then work very hard. Don’t play at being an artist. Be one.
2. Don’t make a big stand on prices until you have more collectors than paintings. Take the gallery owner’s advice.
3. This is hard, but be VERY deeply hurt by negative comments. Then carefully absorb them, analyse them, see if they hold any truth at all. Then either use them positively, or discard them with absolute certainty and a spring in your step. That way you will have learned something.
4. If you do any form of commission, take a 50% non-refundable deposit up front.
5. Be professional and easy to deal with for gallery owners (they shoulder huge risks, so make their work easy), make sure you have a good quality of presentation.
6. Don’t give up, however hard financially or intellectually it gets. That’s all part of it testing your resolve. It’s part of it, make a friend of it being so hard. If it was easy, there would be 97 truly great artists each era instead of only a handful.

David Tregunna, curator, print publisher, art consultant is both Founder and Director of IAP Fine Art, a contemporary fine art gallery based in London. You can reach him by email, or find him on LinkedIn.

Joel, as a contemporary artist, your point of departure was printmaking. As you know printmaking is often associated to cost reduction and mass production, which for many art critics is the opposite of fine art which concentrates on producing unique art pieces. Do you think there is a misconception about printmaking as an Art form?

As a student I studied photography first then painting and then printmaking – I feel all three have influenced my practice – which is more of a roaming style from medium to medium – though printmaking is definitely my base. I feel print is the best medium to discuss the contemporary world, it has its roots in the dissemination of knowledge, it is a technology founded on communication and indeed all of a current visual world has its origins in the historic techniques of printmaking. AND yes there is a misconception about printmaking in Australia, but this will change and a large part of my practice is about educating people.

Printmaking as we know it started many centuries ago. Melancholia I by Albert Dürer is an old reference that springs to mind. Do you think this particular work is mostly famous for the groundbreaking technique employed by Dürer or it is also a fine piece of art in its own right?

Definitely one of the greatest artworks of all time and one of the first pieces people look to when they venture into printmaking – technically and conceptually beautiful.

I have noticed that you don’t seem interested in experimenting with the feelings associated with words and sentences through colour and form in your work, am I right to assume that you have a minimalistic approach to your work?

Yes, I think minimalism is a founding/driving force of conceptual art – it reduced visual art to its basic components and spoke more about the nature of art. Its structuralism approach really appeals to me.

“You’ll go far baby” and “Give me some relief” are interesting pieces as both employ tires to print both sentences on the floor. What inspired you to create these pieces?

I am trying to strip everything down to basics, I am looking for ways print technologies have permeated the manufactured world (a car tyre is a relief print) indeed the technologies of the relief and the edition have a major place in our industrial landscape – the edition is everywhere, a car is an edition (sure there are many created but they have a finite number) so I am trying to show people this by using a popular language that relates to the medium, form, technique or situation that I have created the work with/in.

“Art in America” is a piece I don’ fully understand. I believe it can be interpreted as a critique to American art although I am not sure. Could you tell us more about this particular work?

It’s actually America in art – I am thinking about the role America played in big painting particularly through modernism – I paid a signwriter to execute this piece for me and I feel this adds other possibilities to its conceptual interpretations.

Hot Process is a piece of art published in the Art Almanac magazine. I personal think the sentence “printmaking is so hot right now” gives a completely new meaning to a page in a magazine that we often associate to advertisement. Could you tell us how this work came about?

I had wanted to experiment with publications for a long time but I didn’t have the correct work for the medium, when I came up with this piece it was my first work after a long hiatus from art. I wanted to explain printmaking’s role within the broader community and in popular culture. People are so compliant with the printed page and rarely comprehend the origins and nature of the object the handle. I wanted to say PRINTMAKING IS EVERYWHERE, but more I wanted people to think about the production of the printed page and its origins. Also I wanted to reinvigorate printmaking which most people had consigned to a dead historical process of laborious techniques. I was saying print is the most relevant art form it’s here right in front of you, it’s democratic, it’s not elitist, it’s fun – printmaking is so hot right now!

The Dark Horse Experiment is a new art gallery on the Melbourne art scene, could you tell us more about the project?

Dark Horse is the brain child of myself Adrian Doyle and Stephen Nall (who is no longer participating) it is a continuation of a gallery Doyle and I had been operating for a few years – we are dedicated to exhibiting difficult cutting edge art that needs a voice and rarely has a showing in a more commercially operated gallery.

How would you describe the contemporary art scene in Australia and in the world at large?

The underground is on fire, but the bourgeoisie are holding us back.

How do you perceive the role of a contemporary artist in society?

An artist is like any other person except we exist on the fringes of society our lives and influence contribute to a minority – this is not a bad thing – indeed it is historically this way. We are not making entertainment, we are simply sucking in everything we see hear and feel and producing from that experience – something comes out at the other side.

Finally, one last question, do you believe that the importance or influence of an artist can be defined by the value their fine art achieved at auctions?

No I don’t think there is any correlation apart from the traditional process of an artist working for lifetime and their work gaining prominence and respect and that being reflected in monetary terms. Having said that what is really important is the respect accorded to you by your peers. This is the real sign of value, some artists don’t get any monetary return but they are accorded such respect that their peers posthumously elevate them to iconic status.

Joel Gailer is an experimental print based artist working from Melbourne Australia, as a single dad he divides his time between his role as registrar for Niagara Galleries, lecturer in Printmedia at RMIT, curator of Dark Horse Experiment and his PRINT practice. He has several projects looming for 2012, including a solo show at Stockroom, two shows in Canberra including the prestigious CCAS, a residency at the Fremantle Arts Centre in collaboration with performance artist Michael Meneghetti in a 12 hour print based durational performance at the opening to the Fremantle print award. 2012 also sees Joel begin his doctorate of philosophy (PhD) into the role the copy plays in situations of social and economic disadvantage.