Wall to Wall Colour: Damian Elwes and the Legacy of Henri Matisse

We survey two exhibitions that book-end the life of Henri Matisse, as seen through the colourful lens of his studio spaces: Matisse, The Red Studio, at Paris’ Fondation Louis Vuitton, and Studio Visit, on view at our London gallery until 23 September.

In his quest to paint the studio spaces of other artists, Damian Elwes physically tracks them down. His travels have taken him to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Coyoacán, Mexico, inside the New York City apartments of Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and to the South of France where he was conveniently able to snoop around one of Henri Matisse’s later studios after the current owners had put it up for sale.

Often the most immediate result of this practice is the way stylistic references to these late greats seep into Elwes’ own work – rather than standing on the shoulders of giants he is standing in their footsteps, seeing with their eyes.

In Studio Visit, Elwes’ second solo show with Unit, the visual legacies of Roy Lichtenstein’s dots, Damien Hirst’s flicks and splashes and Keith Haring’s cursive doodles live on through Elwes’ works. He has recounted the many efforts to which he and his daughter had to go through to recreate the polka-dot effect of the twin figures in his Roy Lichtenstein, New York (2024), capturing not only the same miraculous aesthetic but also providing an insight into the working process of the renowned Pop artist.

However the two canvases in the exhibition dedicated to Matisse, Matisse’s Studio, La Regina, Nice (2024) and Matisse’s Studio, Vence (2023) do not require technical devices to convey the personality of their previous inhabitant. Elwes has a much simpler trick up his sleeve: colour.

In filling his two canvases with expanses of bright tones, one blue and one pink, Elwes draws a parallel to the visual association we already have with Matisse’s interiors; an association dictated by Matisse himself thanks to two revolutionary paintings he completed in 1911 of his studio in Issy-les-Moulineaux, on the outskirts of Paris. Named The Pink Studio and The Red Studio, these twin fauvist masterpieces set a precedent for the studio environment to become a place of inspiration and genesis, an extension of the artist’s vision.

Studio Visit coincides with the latest iteration of the touring exhibition Matisse, The Red Studio, which is currently on display at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris until 9 September 2024. The exhibition centres around The Red Studio as a verifiable masterpiece, and contextualises it with the other paintings and sculptures that Matisse has depicted in The Red Room itself. Before the first iteration of the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, this collection would only have been seen together in situ over a century ago. By all accounts, the momentousness of the occasion has not been lost on audiences.

President of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Bernard Arnault, writes about The Red Studio, “When creating this strange “studio portrait,” Matisse carefully selected the works to appear in the painting, because he wanted to show his atelier not only as a place where he lived and worked, but as an imaginary museum displaying the first portion of his œuvre.”

This appraisal ascribes a totally different function to the studio as had been previously seen, most crucially in Arnault’s use of the term “imaginary”. Historically, paintings of studios had been representational scenes, designed to augment the stature of the artist in the same way a self portrait might; they ranged from honest appraisals of practical environments like Rembrandt’s The Artist in his Studio (c.1628), to Gustave Courbet’s more elaborate The Painter’s Studio (1855) in which the artist is surrounded by everyone from illustrious clients to allegories of divinity. Courbet said of his work, “The world comes to be painted at my studio.”

John Elderfield, the previous Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, writes about the history of studio portraiture in conjunction with Matisse’s The Red Studio, and considers how the French master may have revolutionised the genre, 

“Paintings of studios empty of human figures had existed before The Red Studio, but not many, and usually modest in kind. It cannot be said for sure whether Matisse’s picture changed this, or whether, rather, it was the first important example of a change that arose from a change that arose from the narrowing of the pictorial space, the collapsing of foreground and background, in early-twentieth-century painting.

“Abstraction was the result of spatial compression so extreme as to make background and foreground seem interchangeable – with the growth of abstraction came the decline of representation, and therefore of paintings of artists’ studios.”

Forsaking perspective depth and focussing instead on abstract planes of colour, Matisse was among the first to draw inspiration from and project his artistic vision onto his immediate environment simultaneously. Moving away from Rembrandt and Courbet’s studio self portraits, Matisse and correspondingly Elwes have pioneered a genre where the presence of the artist in their studio is more potently felt than ever, despite never being seen. 

The only figures to appear in the works are those recreated within the interior artworks themselves. Pictured in Elwes’ Matisse’s Studio, La Regina, Nice is Matisse’s La Musique (1939). One of Matisse’s later masterpieces, Elwes was drawn to understanding the context in which it was made, which in turn led him to Nice to find its point of origin. Standing in the same spot as Matisse had decades earlier, gazing out at the same panorama, it is possible that Elwes has channelled the presence of the artist into his own work.

From the blood red walls of Matisse’s Parisian studio, to the lighter tones of Elwes’ Riviera pads, these artworks stand as testament to the way both artists grapple with colour to balance observational commitments against increasingly abstract techniques, and imbue empty rooms with the same vitality and wonder as the artworks made within their walls.