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‘WWe live in a moment of irrational destruction,” Caragh Thuring told me after handing me a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit. “Making art at this time is, on the one hand, completely stupid,” he admits, “On the other hand, it’s completely rebellious.”
In front of us is a painting, about seven meters long and five meters wide, in which the portraits of US warplanes are flanked by groups of bombers. The mangled body of one of the planes is transformed into the image of a soldier laid on a grave table, one hand wrapped around the hilt of a sword, a rubber joint sticking out from under the wing of a B-52. The confusion of ancient and modern images, religious art and military art, eternal peace and eternal wars, is confusing.
For the past 25 years, Thuring has been creating images in which floating ships, volcanic eruptions, soaring windows, tartan patterns and brick walls pass through dreamlike landscapes. He moves slowly between styles but returns to the same elements, creating images that are layered and confusing in different ways. That these pictures are interesting and open may be because they do not make ready-made drawings. Instead of doing a pre-existing process, he writes about the flow of his thoughts: “There’s an idea,” he says, “and there’s something that happens when you’re painting.”
We look together at The Annunciation. This hot pink dirty image breaks every rule in the long tradition of painting the center of the Virgin: instead of receiving the angel Gabriel at a visible distance, one of the two Marys kneels dangerously (insolently?) near and sprinkles the flowers that he carries on his crotch; leaves or writings fall into the room like the golden rain that Zeus changed to calm Danaë (another Thuring thing); Phallic pink cacti pushed in from the edge of the site. His confusion of style and writing is at once irreverent, clever and confusing. You think Thuring likes to start things.
The artist is also a patchwork of interconnected stories. Born in Brussels, to parents of Scottish, Dutch and French descent, he moved to the west of Scotland as a child. Sitting on the shores of Holy Loch, he watched nuclear warships sail across the Firth of Clyde and newly built oil rigs being towed out into the North Sea. He talks fondly of the industrial architecture of Glasgow, he has visited the mountains (another recurring image) from Þríhnúkagígur to Vesuvius, but it is London that is right for him. My parents met here, even though they were from different countries, so it feels like home.” His descriptions of the city can easily be used with his paintings. “London is so chaotic, it’s like there’s no order. It is the most powerful city. You have the ability to rebuild.” A living thing held together by its own unstable forces, rather than controlled by a central plan.
We turn to a small, unedited sci-fi painting in space. The lighting of the vertical lights is revealed by the title, Starlink, being the map of thousands of Elon Musk that are now orbiting the earth, tying us in broadband and blocking the night sky. After the Annunciation, the rocket that is looking at the light shows that the spermatozoon is rushing to fight with the egg (these are the strange connections that jump on Thuring’s drawings, if you have them at any time). Indeed, the intervention in human affairs of a supernatural force is the central theme of his work: a nuclear submarine is on the lookout, a god breaks into a women’s bedroom, a volcano erupts. The world is about to change.
As a result, Thuring’s paintings are more like poetry than prose. Instead of telling a story or explaining a theory, he creates a space where different images meet. The viewer must bring their own imagination to the task of connecting the dots, because Thuring will not do it for you. “People want to explain them clearly,” he lamented. “These paintings don’t do that. And I don’t want them to do that.” If his reluctance to give a simple message is a moral principle, it also leaves room for his intentions to be misunderstood. “People read it in their own way. They look at me when I ask if they find it offensive. “That’s not my problem.”
Thuring’s art hovers between the universal and the cosmic. World Trade is based on a photo that was sent to him by a friend because, he tells me with a laugh, it reminded them of his work. It shows the corner of a nondescript office, which is distinguished by a threadbare carpet and two coils of electrical cable. We could be anywhere in the world, if the title didn’t tell us we were looking at history. The effect is to remind us that before towers became symbols of civil strife and ideological fear, they were places where people went about their ordinary lives in unloved offices, just like the rest of us. There’s a powerful and sympathetic vibe to this, made all the more effective by the reluctance to show the loss it remembers.
No part of the world is more important than any other. Thuring said: “I try to be as curious as a child who wanders around in a quarry, digging in the dirt. And so this new body of work connects (in my mind at least) the chaotic office space to the wars in the Middle East, the interplanetary wars, the invasion of other planets, the threat of nuclear war, the impotence of mankind in the face of nature. If you look hard enough at the world around you, or look long enough at Thuring’s paintings, you can’t maybe but seeing the threads that connect one thing to another.
If Thuring is a rebel at all, it is probably (and now famously) a mixture of stupidity and hubris that allows a person to believe that his view of the world is the only correct one. None of them can benefit from these paintings (or, for that matter, from any art that does not reinforce existing prejudices). They want you to think outside the box, be open to new ideas, and stop expecting that art has to deliver a comforting message or ask for your approval. If you’re willing to do that, you can find something that haunts you, that sets up ideas or thoughts that can be with you, that change the way you see the world. “It’s kind of burnt or burned,” says Thuring when I ask him what his pictures can achieve. “That’s all you can ask for: just to light something up.” And as we all know, small sparks can start fires.
