Meet the Artist: The Baron Gilvan
Ahead of our September mixed exhibition Motley Wild: The Baron Gilvan & Guests, we sat down with artist The Baron Gilvan to talk artistic personas, bouffon clowns, and his label designs for our new series of Artefact wines.
The Baron Gilvan in his studio. Photo by Alun Callender.
The Baron Gilvan is a graduate from Central Saint Martins, Academy Fine Art Cracow, Poland, and the Turps Art School. He has exhibited and performed widely at institutions such as: Messums Wiltshire, Flowers Gallery, James Freeman Gallery, the RA, and the Towner Gallery. In 2019, he was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries and became the Glyndebourne artist in residence that same year. He is a tutor at the Turps Art School and West Dean College and his work is in many public and private collections.
The Baron Gilvan leads our upcoming mixed exhibition Motley Wild: The Baron Gilvan & Guests, showing the three original works which decorate our new Artefact wines: ‘Skinny Gris,’ ‘Cabaret Noir,’ and ‘Motley Wild.’ These designs were inspired by each wine’s names, qualities, and colours, the resulting artworks depicting a jazz band of curious characters indulging in a make-believe underground cabaret. These pieces have inspired a new collection of works on paper, which will be shown for the first time as part of this exhibition.
The Baron Gilvan’s expressive paintings are accompanied by Gary Goodman’s playful painted worlds, Julian Brown’s colourful abstract works and Tim Copsey’s opulent and organic ceramics.
Motley Wild: The Baron Gilvan & Guests runs from the 7th – 22nd September.
Talk to us about the persona of ‘The Baron Gilvan,’ where does he come from? How does he look at life?
‘The Baron Gilvan’ is the personification of my creativity. In life I’m a father, a man buying food at a supermarket, a teacher, a partner; I need to be something different in my studio, to allow myself to be creatively brave, so I decided to give my creative side a name. The Baron’s backstory is that he has washed up on the shores of Blighty, clutching only his paintings and his hopes. He is concerned with the intensity of life and the beauty of the ideal. He is a foolish romantic, which gives me permission to be bold in my studio. When I am too ‘myself’ I question things, whereas The Baron isn’t polite, he doesn’t overthink, he can just throw a load of paint over a piece. He punks it up a bit and reminds me to be playful, for ‘play’ is The Baron’s whole schtick.
Composer, oil on canvas, 40 x 30 cm, £420
Where do the characters who appear in your work come from?
Some are archetypes and some are from my own life. I am a narrative painter, but I don’t know the story I’m painting until it appears. My work is a kind of ‘visual opera,’ each painting an act within a larger ongoing narrative. My father was an opera singer in Germany, and I remember going backstage and seeing all the props and stage sets mingled together. This theatrical world has become part of my visual language. My father loved the work of the Soprano Maria Callas and introduced me to her music; she often appears in my paintings as a symbol of him, his life and this connection to the theatre. I’m also interested in exploring specific characters in Greek myth and Renaissance paintings in my work, figures like Narcissus and Echo from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
My character of ‘The Golden Gardener’ who sometimes pops up, is a kind of green man, representative of nature. He developed at a time when I really wanted to make Romantic landscape paintings. The clown, or fool is another regular character. I’m interested in ‘the bouffon group’ a community of outsiders who live outside the (metaphorical) city walls. Once a year they are invited into the city to make fun of our society and the establishment – the army, politicians, the king. A contemporary would be someone like Sascha Baron Cohen, who explores the pitfalls of society through his characters. I feel like the fool examines the bathos and pathos of life, the comedy and the tragedy, which is why I enjoy using them in my work.
Slapstick, oil on canvas, 51 x 61 cm, £1350
Can you take us through your process?
The four categories of making work are: research, experimentation, analysis, and making. If you do 25% of each, you have a nice, balanced practice. Research is incredibly important. Something might snag my attention, say, the images of ‘falling’ in paintings or the bouffon clowns, and I will expand my understanding and knowledge. I have this big tome of research where I collect images, some found, some made, creating worlds around my themes. I sketch a lot at the research stage, as a way to get to know my theme, but the action on the canvas is separate; I don’t work directly from a sketch.
The actual physicality of making the work lies in automatism; in the doing is the knowing. I can sometimes start a piece just by painting wet oil paint into wet oil paint straight on the canvas. Lots of incidental things happen organically, with all my research elements helping each other to build a world. That’s what a painter is – someone who is reinventing the world through paint. I love this idea of going on an adventure into your imagination and bringing back forms and characters and describing them on the canvas – like an explorer going to a new place and bringing back artefacts.
Cabaret Noir band, oil-stick on newsprint, 64 x 90 cm, £222
(Study for Artefact label design)
Speaking of artefacts, what excited you about collaborating with Artelium on an Artefact label design?
The passion Artelium has for making wine is akin to the obsession I have for making paintings. Plus, the label brief was really interesting.
I was originally captivated by this idea of the ‘wild ferment’ and that all three of the wines were experimental and unusual. I started to think about ‘wildness’ in art. This took me to The CoBrA Movement, a European avant-garde art group active in the late 50s. At the time, they were the new ‘wild’ painters, inspired by children's drawings and outsider art: myself and fellow artist Gary Goodman are very much in their artistic gene pool. They really wanted to make art that called to the wild self, the primitive aspect, and celebrated abandon and play.
The brief from Mark was left very open, which encouraged my playfulness. I had no idea what I was going to do, but the direction naturally formed itself through the drawings. The idea of ‘wild’ informed the animal-human hybrids whilst the variety ‘cabaret noir’ inspired the inclusion of instruments and cabaret characters. The paint colours were inspired by the colours of each wine; deep burgundy for ‘Cabaret Noir’, zesty orange for ‘Skinny Gris’, and blanched green for ‘Motley Wild.’