Guggi may paint still lifes, but his own life is anything but. The former Virgin Prune tells Aidan Dunne about his latest 'different' works - and his love of snakes.
Inscribed on one wall of Guggi's studio in Dublin is an outline in the shape of a classical bowl, writ large. With good reason. The humble bowl has become something of an emblem for him. It's a talismanic object that forms his basic unit of pictorial grammar, a universally recognisable vessel that is as old as humanity and as indispensable now as ever. One of the recent developments in his work has been the creation of large-scale, three-dimensional bowls, in bronze, a departure that arose from a request by John Rocha, and one that has proved extremely popular.
There will be one in his new exhibition, which opens on Monday, together with a substantial group of paintings and works on paper. No prizes for guessing that pretty much all of them feature bowls: individually, in pairs, in rows or in rows upon rows. It's Guggi's first show in Dublin in three and a half years. He showed in London last December, and he also scored a notable success at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, in New York, a few years back, winning the approbation of no less an art luminary than Jeff Koons.
In that exhibition he included drawings on rough wrapping paper. On one of them he incorporated numerals stamped on the paper, and since then he has gone on to include numerals, initials and fragments of text in his paintings. At first he used them hesitantly, as though unsure of what exactly he wanted them to do. But, as a painter, the former Virgin Prune has always been a fast learner, and text and numerals form a vital part of his new paintings, employed with great verve and inventiveness.
He sees this new work as different. Standing in his studio, though, looking again as he checks the paintings before they go off to the gallery, he remarks with a wry smile: "Of course, what seems to you in your head as being really different, other people can see as being remarkably similar to what you were doing before." This work, though, is different. Where previously it seemed as if he was edging towards greater and greater perfectionism, towards a high degree of conventional finish, everything shipshape and polished, now it's as if he is taking a step back from all that burnishing and fine-tuning. It's as if he is taking a painting and annotating it, adding asides and observations, introducing a degree of informality, like a monk including irreverent marginalia in an illuminated manuscript. A whole new layer of meaning is introduced. The task Guggi sets himself in this work is to reconcile two aspects of his character, the formal and the informal, the precise and the casual.
"The precise thing of years ago did teach me how to paint. It was necessary. But in a way I began to hate it. I wanted to move away from it, to get into a looser thing." This impulse is most dramatically expressed in some paintings he has made on plywood panels. Not only do the coarse grain and the knots show through; he also allows tentative lines - false starts, so to speak - to survive in the finished pieces. He has sometimes drawn shapes with his left rather than his right hand, to get a shaky, tentative quality of line. The plywood panels suggest fallibility and chance, but they are at the same time very well-resolved, satisfactory paintings.
There is a comparable if less dramatic casualness to the way he outlines and accentuates the finished, polished forms in the paintings on canvas, going over them with layers of fast, spontaneous brush marks, adding cryptic numerals and letters in a variety of styles, from functional stencil to freehand script. The paintings are not about the meanings of these annotations, but the initials and numerals do have incidental meanings of some personal significance. They might be phone numbers, dates, names, even the museological labels that one finds next to examples of ancient pottery in displays - all the kinds of things, that is to say, that one might encounter throughout the day. One set of initials, MB, recurs. He owns up to the source: "It's the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers."
Broodthaers, an influential figure in contemporary art, was a poet who turned to visual art when, he said, he noticed that artists were doing the same thing as him, with the significant difference that they were getting paid for it. When Guggi first visited the home of the parents of his partner, the painter Sybille Ungers, in Germany, he encountered a crate-like sculpture by Broodthaers. "At that stage I hadn't been exposed to anything like that. I was taken aback by it. I couldn't figure it out, but it intrigued me. I kept coming back to it. It's still the first thing I go for even now when we visit. So MB is just my tribute to Broodthaers, a nod to him."
Several Latinate terms have other, specific meanings. "Well," he explains, "they're the names of snakes." He has been fascinated by snakes and other reptiles since childhood. "From the age of 21, I used to collect snakes, and the great thing is that the boys" - he and Unger have five sons - "seem to have inherited my fascination with reptiles. They've sort of taken over. So they do the work, they look after them really well, and I get to play with them."
Their reptile menagerie currently comprises a pair of bearded dragon lizards and several varieties of corn snake, and Guggi clearly loves the snakes. He waxes lyrical about their markings, their subtle coloration and patterning, their texture and muscularity, their touch, as they individually weave their way around his bare forearm and through his fingers.
Although he still has the look of a rocker about him - blond hair worn very long, ear-ring, tight jeans, pointed boots and an enduring weakness for roll-ups - throughout his 10 years with the Virgin Prunes he was intensely interested in the visual side of things. Apart from producing a series of record sleeves and working on devising the band's image, he drew and painted consistently before taking the plunge and turning to painting full time, in 1986.
Since then he has gone from strength to strength. It's perhaps surprising that, coming from a cutting-edge musical background, he gravitated towards the potentially sedate genre of still life. It has to do partly with his respect for the nuts and bolts of technique. "I still believe you have to have a good grounding in technical ability, no matter what you're doing."
The way he took and stayed with a few basic, domestic, utilitarian forms recalls the great William Scott. Like Scott, Guggi has used the elegant outlines of bowls, urns and jugs to explore a world of pictorial possibilities, spurred by limitations. And, as his latest work demonstrates, he is still using them with tremendous freshness and ingenuity.
New work by Guggi is on show at the Solomon Gallery, Dublin, from Monday until November 23rd, www.solomongallery.com