Margaux Ogden by Tess Bilhartz

TB These repeated or “scripted” themes remind me that you recently spent time observing ruins during a fellowship in Rome, and I’m thinking about ancient shapes repeating themselves throughout time and in your paintings.

MO Absolutely. Repetition is very present in ancient Roman architecture, and the degradation or evolution of form that happens over time interests me. You start out with a perfect copy, and eventually it is bastardized to a point where you can’t recognize it. It becomes something else. Rome was initially a big inspiration for these paintings, and there are shapes I can point to that came from there, but lately it feels less important. It relates to how I’ve always worked. I’ll find something and create a scaffolding to work within. I’ve always liked Bernard Piffaretti, especially how he splits the surface and makes a painting on one side and copies it on the other. That’s obviously not what I’m doing, but I am interested in what happens when you try to copy yourself. It’s never a perfect replica. This relates to what I was saying earlier about surprise from repetition. I’m bifurcating the surface. One side mirrors the other, but not in a way that is supposed to be a copy or reflection—more like an echo. I’m also painting both sides simultaneously.

TB I’ve always thought that the way you use color is a challenge: working with color straight from the tube, with spectral colors, and with thin paint that you don’t layer. Is the challenge intentional?

MO I think of it as just getting rid of another variable. Part of what I liked about raw canvas and why I initially started using paint straight from the tube is that it felt more direct. I remember being embarrassed at how I would draw when I was doodling or drawing without thinking, which seemed childlike but also felt like those drawings had more energy than anything else I was making at the time. I thought, If I’m feeling more energized with fewer variables, maybe there’s a way I can translate that into the studio. Premixed colors on an unprimed surface was as close as I could get to that energy. The color straight from the tube is an extension of that. It’s a challenge to work within the parameters of color someone else mixes and bottles. How do you find places of rest, places to breathe, variety, and contrast? How do you make them your own and make them feel new?

TB The color in this body of work is extremely luminous. It’s a dominant presence. The brightness feels at odds with a lot of work that I see right now, and the paintings feel emphatically not “ponderous painting.” On the surface, the color suggests a lack of self-seriousness.

MO Totally. If it’s colorful, it’s not serious; if it’s colorful, it’s happy; if it’s colorful, it’s childish; if it’s colorful, it’s feminine; if it’s colorful, it’s bad. My color choices are a way of pushing back against that historical, male “seriousness” part of abstraction.

TB Color cuts in these too. The luminosity overwhelms to the point of psychedelic sensation. Real psychedelic stuff always holds a duality in that there is both beauty and spookiness in the intensity of color and relentlessly repeating shapes. You repeat the shape enough, and I start to read it as a symbol.

MO Colors can access something normally out of reach, but that’s not always a place you want to go. The shapes are part of this bigger inner narrative that can feel anthropomorphic or points to the natural world. I’ve been thinking about Constantin Brâncuși a lot.

TB There’s this spot-on elegance in the paintings that I don’t think can be taught, and other painters with that to-die-for touch come to mind. When I first read Notes of a Painter, I thought it was wild that Henri Matisse wrote something like, “I want my work to feel soothing like a comfortable armchair.” Lately, I’ve thought back to that passage in the context of work that gets attention and work that gets underestimated. Your work in no way feels like a “comfy chair,” but I do think your work is making a similar kind of statement in that it is so distinct from much of what I see right now.

MO I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the last year just because I’ve been getting feedback from strangers who’ll say things like, “Oh, these look really happy.” That’s not how I feel, and that’s not how I feel when I’m making the paintings, but if people look at these and feel happy, maybe that’s not the worst thing?

TB The color is going to affect people in one way or another. I know you as a very politically engaged person, and you switched majors at Bard from art to human rights.

MO I switched majors in undergrad because I was more interested in human rights at the time and didn’t feel like I was mature enough to make the paintings I wanted to make. I also knew that, for me personally, making political paintings wasn’t going to be an effective way to communicate my ideas or make change. I didn’t feel like work that wasn’t overtly political could be political, and because I couldn’t reconcile those things, I felt that it was better to give it up. After college, I randomly ended up working for Damon Dash in the music industry and, ultimately, really missed making art, so I started drawing and painting after work at the Arts Students League and the National Academy. I never thought I could have a career painting; I just knew I needed to be spending more of my time doing it.

TB Well, you’ve turned into an obsessive worker, and maybe partly because of that your paintings hold tension. We started by talking about limitations and the tightrope that your particular limitations force you to walk and the fact that in these paintings you can’t make corrections, you can only react. Is it important for you to feel that tension as you work?

MO It keeps me engaged. There have been times when I’ve wished I could rearrange the composition or shift the palette slightly after, but there is something about that high stakes. Only having one shot. Keeping the painting very thin and allowing the texture of the canvas to be a part of the painting feels a bit like a performance. You’re either going to totally humiliate yourself and fail or it’s going to work out. There may be something that will drive me crazy about every single painting, but it propels me forward in search of a perfect surface, a painting where everything falls into place. The ones that survive come closest to that, but there are a lot of paintings that no one sees. There’s something about that tension of knowing that something is so close to failing and then pulling it back or feeling like you’re about to lose something and then saving it. It’s a fine line.

Margaux Ogden: Tidal Locking is on view at Tif Sigfrids in Athens, Georgia, until February 24.