Henry Curchod
Crating works before the opening of his latest exhibition in New York, rising artist Henry Curchod is wary of fate and fortune.
Image credit: Henry Curchod, So not rainbow rhythms, 2023, oil and charcoal on linen, 200 x 200 cm. Photo: © JSP Photography. Courtesy the artist and C L E A R I N G, New York
Fish Island, down-downtown East London, last year. It is the week before Christmas. It is trying to rain. The vicinity is not remarkably aquatic, but it is loamy – for what that’s worth. My soles gather tread-clogging silt into the mix of diesel and silica, embarrassingly leaving ever-sandier excoriating scuffs up the staircase to Henry Curchod’s studio. He likes my jacket, says so – a worn, forty-years-old black woollen Harrington with pearl-grey flecks. It is stippled by mist, unyielding to Scotchguard.
Curchod rubs the pads of his fingers and thumbs together, working at the greasy fondant-like texture of oil sticks pilling from the valleys of his thumbprints, as he guides me upstairs. The London Overground clatters by, wobbling radiator pipes. It is, on all accounts, a very haptic day. So that’s what we talk about.
“I just love that feeling,” says Curchod. “I really love deeply textured surfaces. That textural quality is an important part of my work as a painter,” but paint itself has little to do with it.
Curchod’s signature textural fields of clumpy colour massing like flat scabs, an eczema-like quality, start as rough linen. “All this texture is then built up with oil stick. After, I work at them with a brush soaked in turpentine,” he explains. “For the first few layers, I will soak the whole canvas in turps, then I rub on top of it to bring up these very nice painterly lumps.”
In fact, Curchod doesn’t want to talk much about painting today. “I find the brush so loaded,” he says, intending the pun. “If I have a ... Subscribe to read this article in full
