By Sara Bright
Jonathan Wateridge’s studio is a place of quiet contradiction. Tucked away in Tottenham Hale, the two-storey space is dominated by canvases of an immense scale, the smallest a formidable three by four metres. The air hangs thick with the scent of turpentine and oil. Yet the subjects depicted upon these vast surfaces are startling in their ordinariness. In The Bathers, a group of teenagers stand knee-deep in water, their forms almost lost to the night. In Redecorating, an older couple surveys the interior of their home with a palpable sense of weariness.
These are scenes of the everyday, moments of quiet introspection or mundane activity, elevated to the scale of history painting. They are the centrepieces of Wateridge’s new exhibition, Mittelland, which opened this week to coincide with the start of the Frieze art fair. What is not immediately apparent, however, is that none of these moments ever really happened.
“Everything that happens in these works, happens here,” Wateridge explains, gesturing around the studio. Behind me stands a full-size garden annexe, a theatrical prop with its glass doors slid shut on a stark wooden interior. “Everything I paint is constructed.”
A Director’s Canvas
Wateridge’s process is less that of a traditional painter and more akin to a film director operating on a glacial timescale. He builds large, immersive sets and hires actors or art students to inhabit them. He is not seeking dramatic poses, but something far more elusive: the authentic weight of a moment. “Scale creates an immersive effect, like a documentary film,” he says. Actors, he finds, are particularly useful because “they are comfortable with being themselves in public.”
The instructions are often minimal, more like prompts in a theatre workshop. He might give them a simple task and then observe what unfolds. Often, he says, they just complain about their jobs, but even that can find its way into the final composition, a flicker of genuine boredom or frustration that lends the artifice a core of truth. For each scene, he will shoot between 1,500 and 2,000 photographs, creating a vast digital archive of a manufactured event. He then paints from these images, iPad in one hand, brush in the other.
In a sense, his method is a kind of forensic reconstruction of a non-event. He meticulously documents a reality he has built from scratch, searching for the single frame that holds the narrative he wants to offer, but never fully explain. He wants to give the viewer room to create their own story. This approach reached a narrative peak in his recent series, Another Place, which traced a loose plot across seven paintings depicting scenes from a fictional film about the murder of a Hollywood architect. That series, exhibited at François Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi in Venice, cemented his reputation and afforded him the freedom to push his practice further. Today, his paintings can command prices of up to £300,000.
A Detour Through Madrid
It was not always this way. Born in Zambia and raised in London, the 39-year-old artist had a fraught relationship with his medium. While studying at art school in Glasgow, he simply stopped painting. It felt outdated, a form with too much historical baggage. At nineteen, he says, “conceptually, painting felt unjustified.” He dropped out.
What followed was a period of searching. He made what he describes as a “terrible short film,” took acting classes, and even considered becoming a theatre director. He felt drawn to storytelling but hadn’t yet found his language. The breakthrough came on a trip to Madrid. He spent a week in the Prado, looking at Velázquez, and in that short time, he claims he “learned more than in the previous decade.” The sheer power and psychological depth of the Spanish master’s work showed him a way forward. At 32, he returned to the canvas and has not looked back.
Now, sitting on the light-flooded upper floor of his studio overlooking the River Lea, he sees those fallow years not as a waste, but as an essential part of his formation. “The irony is that all of that is now used in my work,” he reflects. “I’m fascinated by stories, but I don’t create them, I offer them. I don’t like to conclude things. I am a midwife of ideas.”
He lives in Hackney with his wife, the journalist Suzanne, and their three-week-old son, Samuel, but moved his studio to this more industrial part of London because he needed the space. His commitment to realist painting is absolute, even in a contemporary art world that can sometimes be sceptical of the form. He is aware of the criticism that it’s all been done before. He just doesn’t agree.
“Some people still question painting’s relevance,” he says, a quiet confidence in his voice. “They say, it’s already been done. But the point is, it hasn’t been done now.” In his constructed realities, Wateridge is finding something profoundly true about the present moment.
