Painting Fantasy with Cary Kwok

Cary Kwok is at the opening reception for his new exhibition at Sessions Art Club. He is drinking champagne on the terrace above the restaurant’s stately dining room and watching the patrons below, eating their dinners under the watchful eye of his seductive and charged paintings.

This new body of work, painted over the last few months, is a collection of four paintings and one sculpture. The “usual nostalgia, romance, suspense,” Cary says, with a laugh, when asked what inspired him. There’s a nice frisson to the content of the show, with its muscular men, phallic lampshades and femme fatales, to its placement in Sessions.

It is though, Cary says, simply “suggestive rather than explicit”. It was partly inspired by the glossy, heightened aesthetics of the postmodernist 80s; all De Palma-esque noir and excessive ornamentation. It’s one of Cary’s favourite decades to mine for inspiration, its sense of nostalgic escapism, he suggests, reminds him of his childhood.

"I've always been fascinated by things, objects, the man-made environment, traces that people leave behind that can tell stories."

Cary came to art via fashion, and something of that love of surface, that specific eye for the relationship between function, decoration and narrative remains in his style. Born in Hong Kong, he moved to London in the late 90s to study at Central St Martin’s, graduating with an MA. “Fashion back in those days gave me a sense of grounded reality in a very strange and unexpected way,” he explains. “Now, in my own fantasy world I fancy myself as a fashion, interior, product, and set designer,” he says. You can see something of that imagined gesamtkunstwerk in the still lives Cary paints, which accrue the superficial apparatus of a pleasurable life, all wine glass and ashtrays, coffee cups and bow ties.

“A lot of my ideas are inspired by a mix of many things, objects, fashion, architecture, stories, songs, films, but fantasy is a very important element. It’s escapism for me, and it’s how I survived my childhood and my youth,” Cary says. “This might sound like a cliche but I wasn’t a child who could express myself very well with words so I found a way to escape reality by immersing myself in drawing and documenting my fantasies on paper. I was always drawing. My school books were full of doodles and cartoons.”

“Fantasy is a very important element. It’s escapism for me, and it’s how I survived my childhood and my youth,”

Fantasy is one of the thematic threads that unifies the various stylistic strands of Cary’s work. And there’s an interest in the broadest possible definitions of fantasy. Whether that is the more explicit, biro drawings, or the tension that vibrates through the paintings, a fantasy that often isn’t straightforwardly erotic, but carries a trace of a dalliance, a suspended romantic moment, a freezeframe: lipstick on a glass, a cigarette smoking away in an ashtray, a shirt next to a glass of brandy, two toothbrushes kissing in a glass on the bathroom shelf, a hand reaching for a telephone.

“It is about suspense, anticipation,” he explains, “The painting of the hand picking up an 80s-esque landline phone in this exhibition is meant to evoke the anxiety felt by people like myself who are old enough to remember waiting, in the days before mobile phones, for a crush to call back.”

"I want to take the viewer back to a moment when they said goodbye to someone they're in love with after the first time they were intimate together."

His sculptures are realised in collaboration with fabricators, preceded by hundreds of sketches. The piece at Sessions, a phallic sconce erupting into a frosted glass Deco shade, is the most explicit piece in the show. For the paintings the mood leans towards the quieter registers of longing. "I've always been fascinated by things, objects, the man-made environment, specifically the traces that people leave behind on them that can tell stories."

So the Sessions paintings deal less in bodies than in what bodies leave behind. The erotic charge has migrated from the explicit to the implied. Satiation, a painting of a ripped, nude male torso, is "quietly erotic and sensual" rather than overtly sexual. The figure’s face clouded in a puff of cigarette smoke. We don't see his face. He may or may not have anything to do with the protagonist in the other painting, a female figure, partially obscured in cinematic lighting, a flash of earring and red lipstick. "Or perhaps they just haven't crossed paths yet," Kwok says. "It's open to interpretation. I make art that amuses or is personal to me," he says, "and that I hope also evokes an emotional response from my audience." He makes things that move him, and hopes they move you too.

"I make art that amuses or is personal to me, and that I hope also evokes an emotional response from my audience."

"I'd like to be able to transport the viewers into that world, to the scenes I create." The emotional ambition behind that is considerable. "I want to take the viewer back to a moment when they said goodbye to someone they're in love with after the first time they were intimate together."