Huseyin Sami
After two decades of practice, Huseyin Sami should be feeling comfortable. He has a freshly renovated studio space, a steady rhythm to his practice and a deep, hard-won understanding of his material. But even now, as he tells Jane O’Sullivan, paint can throw out the odd surprise. New paths keep opening, and he’s far from reaching the limits of what it can do.
Image credit: Huseyin Sami, Untitled (Colour Study), 2021, polymer paint on polyester, 183 × 183 cm. Photo: Ashley Barber. Courtesy the artist
“There’s a lot of chance,” says Huseyin Sami about the process of draping paint skins onto the canvas. “I have an idea of how I want to approach it, but I won’t know the actual end work until it’s done. I like that, that I have to think quickly. I don’t have time to deliberate too much.”
The skins have folds, ripples and sometimes the odd air bubble. They’re a moment in time. “It’s quite dynamic,” he says. “It captures that activity and stores that energy in the surface after the fact.” That’s partly why Sami describes himself as a middleman. Not in a channelling-the-muse way. More in the sense that he controls the process but not the results, or not entirely.
“I become more of a mediator between the material and the surface,” he suggests. “The paint, the medium itself, makes the work.” His latest solo exhibition was even called Chromatic Carpentry, as though he’s just working construction and laying down beams. But then, Sami has always been a bit sly about the grand mythos of painting. Over his 20-year practice, he’s made painting machines by drilling holes into buckets and pouring paint through pegboards. He’s also bound his upper body and painted with his feet, and performed with a ludicrously difficult nine-metre brush, distancing himself from the canvas and its aura. He’s always been pushing the limits of what painting is and what it can be.
His practice continues to span sculpture and performance, but there’s a lot of crossover between the different strands and they’re all connected by his use of regular household paint. “I decided ... Subscribe to read all articles in full
