Tommy Camerno (b. 1992) is an artist based in London.
He has recently exhibited at the Upper Gulbenkian Gallery in London as well as participating in projects curated by The Courtauld Curating program and Antoine Schafroth. He has exhibiting internationally in Italy, Germany and USA.
Prior to the RCA Tommy studied as a guest student with Josephine Pryde at UDK in Berlin and received his BA in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art and Design.
He has used the artist name Tommy Camerno since 2014.
Thinking of art making as a romantic analysis, I look at ornaments, material culture and lighting to question normative social values. Painting is at the centre of my practice and functions as a material index for my research. My work responds to past and present artefacts and develops mysterious fabulations.
I set up anachronisms across the history of art and design through a process of remaking details. I observe how patterns in culture correspond to patterns of behaviour and try to break these patterns.
My work captures objects in moments of decadence, depicting the gestures of falling down and rising again. Images of divas, dandies and balconies are entangled between layers of abstraction. I question codes of behaviour and lifestyles within society - looking at the things that surround us, what endures, what divides and what shines through the gaps.
‘As the street lights dimly lit up in the twilight the pubs lit up far more brightly; long rows of monstrous lanterns stretched out into the street on curling and caparisoned tentacles of wrought iron and underneath them walls of sinuously bending and elaborately engraved glass were lit from the inside by an inner row of blazing globes.’ - Mark Girouard, Victorian Pubs, 1975
In the accompanying text below I had a conversation with curator Antoine Schafroth about my practice and recent work.
AS: The concept of reproduction is essential in your work, as well as developing tools to enable it. The curlicue is recurrent in your recent work. What does it mean to you, and how did you develop this pattern?
TC: One example of the impact of reproduction is the development from wrought iron to cast iron. Cast iron replaced wrought iron at the beginning of the 19th century. The pattern seen in the Curlicue series comes from a wrought iron fence. I was looking at that time in history as the beginning of the industrial revolution and a period of increased categorisation and codification of sexualities. From bending each individual piece and crafting a unique ornate object to making one design and reproducing it as much as you like. I’m putting my stencil on the surface of the canvas and then filling the gaps with metallic paint as you would pour metal into a mould. Through the process of casually reproducing the pattern, deviations occur as organic profusions on a spectrum from cast to wrought.
AS: You relate a lot of your work to architecture; however, looking at it, it seems that you are not interested in the structural part but the ornament, an interest in frivolity. How do you consider ornament in your practice, how do you reference it and did you consider some writing such as Adolf Loos' Ornament and Crime?
TC: I think it’s necessary to have a position against Ornament and Crime but also it connects to a lot of things. One of the essays that was formative for me thinking about this was ‘Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism’ by Craig Owens and the idea of the relationship between being a homosexual or non-heteronormative member of society and how that can be perceived as a kind of anti-position. In Ornament and Crime, Adolf Loos was trying to say that there’s a good and a bad and bad people make ornaments. If bad people make ornaments then I’m gonna make ornaments. If gay people make ornaments then I’m gonna make ornaments. So it’s the idea of asking what is this hegemonic theory rejecting, who is it rejecting? Oh it’s rejecting me. It’s like reclaiming the word queer, this is something that modernism is telling everyone shouldn’t be done, but it’s not just a practice it’s also an identity type. Making culture is a way of practising your identity. The idea of ornament as being a frivolous element to architecture is like misbehaving at a party which I want to do.
AS: You are a painter, and you decided to go into the painting department at the Royal College of Art, but you still show sculpture between the paintings in your graduate show. How does the metal work relate to the painting, and how do you inform your practice as a painter with the sculptural part of your practice?
TC: I explored this quite closely in the show in Kensington where the sculpture was used to make a trace onto the painting. I’m working with objects in the paintings such as the chandelier, which I treat like still life. I’m observing objects, and sometimes remaking them in the metal workshop or painting them. I’m embedding the object into the surface of the art work, which actually kind of funnily happened here where it looks like the sculpture is growing out of the painting. Showing painting and sculpture together draws attention to the facture of painting in its objecthood. Wrapping the sculpture in rhinestones can be the same as putting an extra layer of paint onto the painting. Not just frontal, not just an image, you’re negotiating the sculpture in the space which then leads you to the painting from a different angle. The sculpture is a way of bringing you back into the architectural space and experiencing the painting as part of the architecture.
AS: The chandelier is a symbol of the past, it’s not something that is often produced today and I don’t think you will find a lot of chandeliers in contemporary houses. Why this subject?
TC: People want the past to stay in the past. They think if you’re reproducing something from the past that you’re somehow creating something fake or inauthentic. Firstly, fake is fabulous. A lot of modernism was claiming to forget the past while appropriating from other cultures so it was in reality taking its ideas from somewhere else’s past. My work also has to do with pilgrimage, so in the painting Curlicue Dandy 04 the chandelier is taken from Sanssouci in Potsdam, a palace that was built by Friedrich the Great. When I’m trying to bring that back into the work and trying to remember it on the way back it gets refracted through a contemporary lens. Sanssouci was also a sort of loving imitation of Versailles. I’m interested in the eclectic and eccentric process of looking into the past and finding flamboyant beauty that can be reinvested into new art works.
AS: I see a contrast in your way of representing and using materialities. In your paintings, you have this subject coming up again and again - the chandelier, a fragile object made of crystal or glass and also, to some extent, a representation of degrading social classes. For me, it embodies an idea of decadence. You show the chandelier next to your metal work, which has a strong idea of physical labour - using force to create in contrast to the Chandelier, which maybe represents an idea of elegance and distinction. What are you trying to explain by putting it on the same level and representing these objects and techniques together?
TC: Taking the fragile object and putting this strong material back into it. After modernism everything is made of steel or later designed on CAD and what happens to the craft ecosystem? I’m not trying to make any specific social commentary that could be provoked by the work but not resolved in it. I see the fragile object of the chandelier as an alegory for a queer body, holding power from a position of vulnerability. When I started working with chandeliers I was inspired by the poet Constantine P. Cavafy. He has a poem where he compares a chandelier to a young man that he loves. His experience was a turn of the century fall from wealth, he came from a very wealthy background but his family lost their fortune and this narrative is one that has a universal importance. Things can go up and down. Things that we think of as fixed are not necessarily fixed. Figures like the dandy or the artist are able to transcend social categories. I’m painting the fragility of something beautiful held in a moment of falling.
AS: So you consider frivolity as something important?
TC: The idea of frivolity being important is also a critical position that is not necessarily pro or con, it’s not necessarily celebrating or condoning or condemning it, just looking at it. Frivolity is also camp, or frivolity is a gesture of a certain lifestyle choice. I like it when George Bataille talks about ‘exuberant waste’ and the frivolous being a way for society to let off steam. Frivolity is important because it serves a function to allow people to have some kind of hedonistic fantasy. There‘s a downside to it and a lot of people throughout history involved in frivolity and ornament have been persecuted, which is interesting. I don’t come down on either side. People see curves and swirls and it’s one of those symbols that people don’t really understand. What does a spiral represent and who does a spiral represent?
AS: Reappropriating objects and symbols from the past is something common in queer culture. How are you reclaiming the chandelier and the balcony?
TC: I’m doing a costume version of these objects. It’s a lot about camouflage as well. José Munoz wrote about how ornament functions as camouflage in Cruising Utopia. Like you say it’s a behaviour from the past because there should be no need to camouflage or have words like dandy today. But representing this kind of coding is a way of respecting the struggle that came before. My work with history is about tracing and going back through non biological heritage. Sexual orientation isn’t something that gets passed down from our parents but the codes are passed down through culture. We owe our liberation to the revolutionaries who survived. I see the balcony as a sort of romantic division between lovers in history who were not allowed to be in love publicly. What happens if those boundaries twist apart, jumping off the wall to go out dancing.
