Redemption exhibits at the British Art Fair at Saatchi Gallery in partnership with Sedition, MuseFrame and Flowers Gallery on September 26th - 29th 2024 and immersively at Lume Studios in NYC at the same time.
This interview explores the creative exchange between Laurence Fuller and Peter Howson in their collaboration on Redemption, a project that merges cinematic poetry with the striking visual language of Howson’s paintings. Known for his powerful depictions of human struggle and resilience, Howson has been a towering figure in contemporary figurative art since his early days at the Glasgow School of Art. His raw, Renaissance-inspired works capture the spiritual and psychological complexities of the human condition, earning global acclaim and an OBE in 2009.
Laurence Fuller, a British-Australian actor, writer, and artist, brings his multifaceted talents to this collaboration. With a heritage steeped in art — his mother a painter and his father a renowned art critic — Fuller has carved out a space that bridges performance and visual arts. Known for role HBO’s Minx, where he portrayed David Hockney, and independent films such as Road To The Well. Fuller’s creative journey reflects a deep engagement with artistic history and innovation, particularly the intersection of traditional and digital mediums. Together, Fuller and Howson explore themes of redemption, transformation, and universal human experience in their latest collaboration.
This deeply personal exploration of the universal themes of struggle, transcendence, and salvation, expressed through the merging of visual art, poetry, and cinema.
At its core, Redemption brings together the powerful, raw intensity of Peter Howson’s paintings with Laurence Fuller’s poetry, animated through AI to create a living, breathing dialogue between form and language. Both Howson and Fuller have embarked on personal journeys marked by internal conflict, growth, and a search for meaning. These experiences are woven into the fabric of this piece, where redemption is not just a distant goal, but an active process of reckoning with one’s own past.
Howson’s paintings are known for their uncompromising portrayal of humanity’s darkest moments, and yet, within these depths, there is always a search for salvation. His own journey ~ marked by battles with addiction, faith, and a return to spiritual awareness ~ imbues his work with a profound sense of vulnerability and redemption. In Redemption, this inner struggle is brought to life as his static images are animated, their textures unraveling to reveal layers of emotional and spiritual depth, mimicking the cyclical nature of personal recovery and growth.
Through words, Fuller wrestles with doubt, guilt, and faith, much like Howson’s figures. "For when I transcend, a greater fool takes my place" ~ speaks to the cyclical struggles of generations, the son surpassing the father. The medium itself tipping its hat to Laurence’s father Peter Fuller who championed the truth to materials in paintings and sculpture.
The use of AI animation serves as a cinematic reconstruction of the given, transforming Howson’s paintings into a moving embodiment of beauty. As in cinema, where sequences of images represent the imagination, these animated works create a dream-like space where the viewer is invited to engage with the story of redemption on both a visual and emotional level. Through the interplay of thought, sound, and action, the audience is drawn into a sensual experience where ideas and emotions are reconstructed, creating a dream ~ an invitation for the audience to find their own redemption within the fluid movements of both painting and poetry.
In Redemption, the personal struggles of both Peter Howson and Laurence Fuller merge with the universal desire for atonement, offering a pathway for the viewer to traverse their own journey. By integrating poetry with painting, and animating these forms with cinematic fluidity, we create a shared space where the internal search for redemption is not only observed but experienced on a visceral level. Though this piece draws on the creative legacies of Charles Baudelaire, John Keats, John Berger, and Peter Fuller ~ in their own search for meaning in language and visual art. It is also a reflection of our personal stories, transformed into a universal narrative that beckons each viewer to explore their own path to redemption.
Redemption
For when I transcend,
A greater fool takes my place,
And in that redemption,
I find the road, for my own way,
Casting my doubts out on the rocking waves,
Begging my sins to wash away.
I clutched at the morning,
It dripped away,
There were tingling rumbles in the streets,
I heard sounds like dropping pennies at my feet,
I must pay my penance,
For the guiltless I do menace,
The sins I have witnessed,
I must not play the victim,
Street lamps glowed at me like the moon,
But they weren’t,
Like the eyes of God in the dark early morning,
Piercing my thoughts,
Like a lamp in my mind,
And my words the the discarded scrap paper thrown out the window,
For when I transcend
A greater fool takes my place
And in that redemption
I find the road, for my own way,
Casting my doubts out on the rocking waves,
Begging my sins to wash away.
Crumpled and landing at the port,
On their way out to sea.
What is going on in our world?
I’ll ask the moon before it fades to the sun,
At long last, I’ll climb the ladder on the bridge from the bottom wrung,
I have struggled to reach even the nearest star,
I grazed my flesh, to check I’m still here,
So many poems to write and never enough time,
Never enough time,
And what have I got for my toil and strife?
Splayed out on the wall for all to see,
This arena of humanity,
Violins playing at the degenerates ball,
This grand opera,
An incomplete Iliad,
I left it unwritten, by my pen and note pad.
Washed against the muddy shore,
Wash up the brilliant and trusted oars of a discarded rowboat that left the trash and seagulls flying with empty cans in their mouths and an empty chest where a ticking clock once was,
The tragedy of the evening and heavy breeze of eternity.
For when I transcend,
A greater fool takes my place,
And in that redemption,
I find the road, for my own way,
Casting my doubts out on the rocking waves,
Begging my sins to wash away.
~ Laurence Fuller, 2024
Curation by Makersplace
Brady Walker:
How did this collaboration with painter Peter Howson come to be?
Laurence Fuller:
As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to work with Peter Howson. Peter’s haunting portraits hung on my wall at Drama School, and as I stared into his characters on the wall they stared back into me.
I had acquired seven etchings by Howson, portraits of men on the street Peter had captured, called "Alec and Mac etc." I had acquired them soon before I left London, for my year studying Shakespeare in Bristol, from my now dear friend of 20 years Matthew Flowers, the director of Flowers Gallery and Peter’s art dealer.
I was studying classical theatre at the time at Bristol Old Vic, and I thought of how the bard wrote both for the nobility and the everyman at the same time. His writings transcended social barriers to speak to the human condition. I saw that in Peter’s work too, it is great in its universality. His figures are wrought with tension and striving, they seemed characters in a Shakespeare play like Caliban or Falstaff ~ as much as they reflected the pedestrian lives in Goya and Rembrandt.
Those etchings still hang in my home in Los Angeles, and they still inspire my performances somehow. I’m sure there’s been a piece of them in every part I’ve played and somewhere in every poem I’ve written.
Peter is a very well-known Scottish artist, I recently did a series of adaptations of MacBeth on Objkt that were a great hit, it’s funny that the Scottish school is finding such a home in web3 first with Trevor and Violet Jones, then with Paul Reid, now with Peter Howson. Soon I have to bring in John Bellany as well, I shall have to speak with Matthew Flowers about that.
After things took hold in my journey with web3, there have been some people from my life in film and traditional art I kept in touch with about it. That I believe in it as the best way to own digital art and solved a lot of the problems when it came to formats for video art. Collectors acquiring Matthew Barney’s epic operas Cremaster on DVD for $500,000 cannot be the best format for video art.
So Matthew Flowers was one of those old friends I kept in touch with and he saw what I was doing could be a very interesting experiment for some of the artists he works with at the gallery. As a director of one of the longest-standing international contemporary art galleries, I’ve always admired Matthew’s open mindedness to the evolving dialog of artistic practice, not as an inevitable evolution with technology at its end point, but more as an avenue, down which art may wander for a time.
So Matthew sent me a catalogue of Peter’s most recent paintings and drawings, and we began a dialogue about the work. Peter’s paintings don’t merely document; they inhabit the psychological and spiritual scars of war, war on the battlefield and war of daily life, giving form to the unspoken and unseen. In adapting Redemption, we sought to channel this gravitas into a cinematic exploration of universal themes: suffering, revelation, and transcendence. This universality resonates powerfully on platforms like Blockbook, where the piece has inspired over 20,000 adaptations by artists worldwide in just a few weeks ~ an unprecedented level of engagement and a testament to the transformative potentialities of this work.
Redemption comes to us at a moment of transformation, a moment before revelation. It is not the angels falling from the sky to save us — that comes later. It is the first peek at the morning clouds parting, through which that glow may speak, after the ravaging night we left behind us.
Web3 has enabled us to engage our audience with this universal concept, on the Blockbook platform with Story IP, where the piece has inspired over 25,000 adaptations by artists around the world in just a few weeks — an unprecedented level of engagement and a testament to the transformative potential of this work. Its visceral appeal to the human condition, that is the power of poetry when in communication with art. Where the language of words and of visual symbols are in a symphony with each other.
It is the quiet of a late-night harbor, where homeless drunks grill rats, mongoose, and scraps of fish over glowing coals. It is the dust of dreams rising from the fallen rubble of the playhouse. Revelation follows close behind, and with it, the opportunity for transcendence. It is for those still standing, after the fall.
BW:
At what point in the process did you write the poem?
LF:
Perhaps it started to form in my dreams after watching Peter’s portraits before I went to sleep at night, at drama school. And I started to dream of Redemption for myself.
A dream of some other life when all these human flaws I have will drift away.
Yet I always start a poem from where I am, from where I stand. Without a net or screen to save me from the page. Just a hope that you see in me, that you read in my pages, all that I could be and can become — and that makes you proud. That’s where I started writing it. Thinking of Redemption as the subject of the poem, and the value of humility in great works of art.
I recently re-read Peter Howson’s article in Modern Painters where he talks about Frans Hals. And that many of Hal’s gifts could not be taught, particularly his observations on the relationships between the painter and his subjects — the patrons of the art, who paid good money for the art to be made by their commission.
This aspect of Hals’ work has often been commented on throughout the art criticism of the 20th Century — some, such as John Berger, chose to reduce the entirety of Hals’ output to this exchange, while others like Peter Fuller saw such reductionist theories about the art to be missing the point of the humanity in Hals’ art which has inspired generations of museum goers for centuries and ironically the only commercial value that remains in the paintings themselves, as their subjects have been forgotten with time.
Hals’ portrait of Willem Heythuysen sold for $11 million, yet was later found to be a forgery. Perhaps these subjects were immortalised by Hals’ brush, as without Hals’ voice attached they would be virtually unsalable, while even the simplest of Hals’ paintings of a Fisher Boy would fetch millions at auction.
“The Fisher Boy looks as if it had been done in a couple of hours; it is the sort of thing I used to do when I was short of money and I wanted to try something commercial, something I knew people would adore to sell. And yet I dearly love this painting. It captures a boy’s character with great freshness. Look at those teeth! They are rotting, and yet they are beautifully painted. Of course, this is just minor work, but I love it. I prefer even a picture like this to the more formal works. I feel there is a lot of character in that face, and it’s not so put on… He’s a good painter, a great painter even, but not the greatest. He’s not first division.” Peter Howson, Modern Painters 1990
Peter spoke too of his love for Goya, and how Goya used his traumas to change his art. I thought in that instance about the persistence of memory, that memory is like a subjective jar we’re all trapped inside or maybe more like a hall of mirrors that we’re sheltered by.
In contrast to an artist like Picasso, who was one of the wealthiest people in Spain during his time, accumulated his vast fortune from the market for his artworks, sketching a wide range of subjects, from muses in chairs, Guernica, The Minotaur, to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Both Fuller and Berger were at odds about Picasso as well; Fuller often argued that great art transcends its socio-economic context and speaks to universal human experiences. In his view, Picasso’s work, particularly pieces like Guernica, represented a powerful engagement with universal themes of human suffering, resilience, and creativity. Fuller felt that Berger’s critique underplayed this aspect of Picasso’s genius by focusing too narrowly on his later career and his commodified success. Fuller celebrated Picasso not just as a product of his time but as a transformative force whose work continues to resonate on multiple levels, beyond the confines of ideology.
I don’t think Howson was brought down by commercial success either, after being collected by David Bowie, it never seemed to have commodified his aesthetics nor detach his from the plight of the human struggle, certainly never a departure from spiritual matters. In fact it was Howson’s depiction of the Bosnian war that Bowie acquired.
