Text occupies a special place in Sebastiaan Schlicher’s art (*1975): When the Dutch-born artist talks about his work, he repeatedly draws on concepts from literary theory. In his dense drawings, teeming with grotesque figures, letters and entire sentences are found alongside abstract strings of characters. His work titles also tell stories. You will probably look in vain for a designation like "Untitled, 2023" in his catalog raisonné. To make Schlicher's sense of language and writing visible, this conversation developed over email – as a written exchange between Berlin and Amsterdam, where the artist currently works.

SMAC: In the upcoming exhibition at SMAC, you will show works on paper created in 2022 and 2023. What connects these works?

Sebastiaan Schlicher: My works are all part of an ever expanding whole. Individual works are not meant as singular statements that each on their own deal with specific topics; they belong to a larger abstract narrative that is out of reach.
Each work simultaneously adds to this narrative whilst sabotaging our understanding of it.

What influenced them? Were there films, music, series, or real-life encounters that went into your process?

SS: My process is driven by intuitive mark-making and associative narration. Things that go into the work are often improvised and spontaneous; words taken from a song that happens to be playing in the studio, or a phone call, news headlines, memories, dreams, things that excite, depress, anger, sadden or confuse me: whatever went into these works was what was interesting to me at that moment in time; I don’t make a point of preserving these exact origins because it is not my intention to produce a historic record of them or to relate the works to actual events in such a direct manner. The fleeting nature of things is more important.

When you talk about your practice, words like "autobiography" and "fiction" come up. Sentences and word sequences appear now and then in your works, and your titles also play with text. What role does language play in your work?

SS: Writing is drawing and vice versa. I use language as a tool to move the mind similar to the way I use visuals to move the eye. A tool for manipulation as much as a mode of expression. There is a lot of interplay between those. Titles matter as much as any other aspect and are integral to the work. I feel the need to engage with the thing I am trying to sabotage: language, stories, memory.

What can texts do that images cannot?

SS: I don’t think there is a lot that sets them apart, ultimately, but if I have to mention one thing I would say text can function as a short-hand to introducing wildly oppositional perspectives to the established narrative strands within a work. Of course, there are a lot of visual tropes that can be exploited: handwritten text, all capitals, mirrored writing, explicit language, class-coded language, all of which are more difficult to achieve using abstract gestures.

Which term best describes your artistic practice – painter, writer, someone who draws, or multimedia artist?

SS: I like how graffiti painters will refer to themselves as writers. Not so much in a literary sense but in a primal sense. Cave paintings aren’t really paintings, are they? They are writings.

Many artists have a dual talent – in addition to painting or sculpting, they work with text: They write poems, stories, and novels. What is your attitude to writing?

I have in the past published short stories in literary magazines. This was before I found my voice as an artist. I wanted to become a writer after graduating from art school. Eventually I realised my writing is visually oriented: my best writing is not inside my drawings, it is my drawings. Once I figured that out, it became clear to me that I am not even that interested in the literal meaning of the words that I write - to me, it is not what I write, but how I write it and how the written interacts with the other visual components and how these elements function within the larger framework of my artistic output. It is totally free-form. I think I have reached a point where I don’t necessarily acknowledge that individual words have meaning. I will write down anything as long as it is possible to negate its meaning.

You have said about your creative process, "I am a spring, I go from birth to rebirth." Do you consider the way you create art as a "stream of consciousness" – to use another literary term?

SS: Yes. A stream of movements, a series of intuitive gestures. That is how it always starts. Back to the well. It is physical, almost performative. Language, as a stream of consciousness, comes second. Or I should say third, because usually abstract gestures segue into figuration before the first occurrences of text, but it feels the same.

You have described "the wild, the unhinged, the irrational part of the human experience" as guiding principles of your art. What attracts you to the sphere outside the so-called norm?

SS: As much as an attraction, it is also an acknowledgement of where I seem to spend most of my life, emotionally, mentally. I think people are much more naturally drawn to the anarchic than they care to admit, even to themselves. It makes sense to me to work from there. It is a place from which all other options become imaginable, and therefore possible.

The literary scholar and art theorist Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin did not see the grotesque exclusively as uncanny and unworldly. For him, "the grotesque discloses the potentiality of an entirely different world, of another order, another way of life. It leads men out of the confines of the apparent (false) unity, of the indisputable and stable." The grotesque also plays a recurring role in your work. Which qualities does it take on in your images?

SS: That is a great quote. The characters featuring in my work are not representations of real people, but abstract versions. They are caricatures, theatrical exaggerations; monsters whose emotions are melodramatic and simplified. Their features often reduced to amalgams of eyes, mouths and fluids, their purpose is to drive and upset the narrative. The grotesque in my work is an agent of intensity and disruption.

What does a day in your studio currently look like?

SS: I listen to music, read, and alternate between working on drawings and experimenting with electronic noise machines I am building to accompany the drawings. These machines are a recent development within my practice and will also be part of the exhibition as a further contextualization by way of "expanded drawing".

You've worked in Berlin before. How did the city influence your visual cosmos?

SS: I work in Amsterdam at the moment, but it hardly matters in terms of my visuals. It is my mental cosmos that gets affected. I do feel my work is rooted in the experience of the city. I have lived in London and Berlin, and it was mostly the same. I think it has to do with the movement of people, like blood being pumped through a body. I am in the bloodstream.

Interview: Laura Storfner
Fotos: Eva Roefs