Cerith Wyn Evans: Future Perfect

A discussion with Cerith Wyn Evans is a journey into deep thought, punctuated by playful references and sharp observations. As he flows between musings on punk rock, particle physics, famous last words and psychoanalysis, one quickly begins to see his immense capacity for communicating complex ideas in the clearest of ways. The Welsh artist’s conceptual practice, which spans over 25 years, distils linguistics, psychology, phenomenology and philosophy into highly refined and seductive forms, activating the possibilities of perception and creating relationships between objects, ideas and the viewer.

“Even though the work might look very sparse,” he explains, “I think the abundance is somewhere else … Allow yourself time to reflect and see that things don’t all happen at the same time; on reflection and on return to something it will have changed and it will have transmogrified. Things don’t keep standing still.” His philosophical and phenomenological interests stem from his study of linguistics. As he notes: “The future anterior tense is always very important to me, the sentence that says ‘by which time we will have already’. It has an extraordinary way of projecting into the future.”

This is exemplified in a work from 2010, Elective Affinity. Here, suspended on the wall, a line of text in neon quotes novelist William S Burroughs and asks us to: “Look at that picture, how does it seem to you now… Does it seem to be persisting?” We are directed to retrace our steps and reconsider our previous encounters. The title is derived from Goethe’s 1809 novel Elective Affinities and is the scientific term to describe how substances combine selectively. Goethe employed the term as a metaphor to suggest that chemical laws govern human passions. However, for Wyn Evans the title of this neon piece is a humorous nod in the direction of Goethe’s supposed last words: “More light.”

“I’ve had a lot of fun playing with titles over the years,” he explains. “Somehow the title is also part of the material … Very often they are quotes from different things and the trainspotters amongst us can go and find it somewhere else.” Following the trail that Wyn Evans leaves could lead you anywhere from Guy Debord to John Cage, from the work of conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader or the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose writing has been an ongoing influence on his practice.

This April will mark the first solo exhibition of Wyn Evans’s work to be staged in Australasia, with a major installation across two collaborating Auckland galleries, Hopkinson Mossman and Michael Lett. It is astonishing that Wyn Evans’s practice has not been more widely exhibited in the region, two exceptions being a 2013 commission for 161 Castlereagh Street in Sydney curated by Barbara Flynn and an appearance in Gary Carsley’s Take a Bowery at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney in 2004. The upcoming – and aptly as yet untitled – Auckland show seeks to redress this absence, including both new and existing works and benefitting from the experience of gallery directors Danae Mossman and Andrew Thomas, both formerly of White Cube, London, where Mossman was artist liaison for Wyn Evans.

“It is exciting thinking that connections are being made that are fresh and bonds are being made between the two spaces,” Wyn Evans enthuses. “Given that things are at a certain distance or at a remove … new meanings emerge.”