Simon Callery — The Primacy of Perception

Simon Callery’s work is rooted in the Northern European landscape painting tradition. However, the term landscape alone falls short of capturing the essence of Callery’s practice. As he states, his work is not about landscape in the broad sense but more about specific places and precisely about the experience of place as a subject for painting.

Callery’s painting process begins in the studio, where he prepares canvas by removing the starch to restore the softness of the cotton. He works with traditional materials such as dry pigment mixed with rabbit skin glue to produce a medium known as distemper, which is soaked into the canvas. This process binds the pigment to the canvas, turning it into a singular, integrated entity, physicalizing the colour itself. Once dry, the canvasses are rolled up and taken to the location of work, sometimes in the London area, where the artist lives, and at other times, away from the urban environment in the landscape. He lays out metres of the prepared canvas on the ground; puncturing, cutting and marking the fabric in response to what he can feel beneath it. However, Callery does not set out to make an image or visual record of the places where he works. He is concerned with finding ways to register physical contact. Back in the studio, the cut and marked canvasses undergo further transformations; large sheets are cut down and the elements reconfigured. Parts are stitched together to structure the overall shape of the painting and to give physical depth to its body. 

Simon Callery’s practice rejects the conventions of image and narrative in favour of a new set of signs that engage the viewer in a broader sensory experience. The creative process, while evident in a finished work, is not an end in itself but functions to heighten the viewers awareness of how they perceive the painting and to connect them with how the painting was made. Each working action leaves a tangible trace. In this new group of works called ‘Puncture Paintings’, the cut-out patches and scraps of canvas were collected and then reinstated on the front face of the paintings, resulting in a textured surface layer, secured there by loops of stainless steel and copper wires.

His approach encourages us to slow our gaze, pausing the instinctive moment when the eye and brain automatically process images. To assign this a spiritual motivation, however, would miss the point as the experience is played out between the viewer and the artwork on a material level. His works not only invites observation but also encourages physical interaction through movement around the paintings to peer inside. This dynamic leads to a shift in the relationship between the viewer and the artwork, fostering a deeper, more immersive engagement and blocking an immediate, straightforward interpretation. 

At the heart of Callery’s approach is the idea that painting should be more than a screen of projection. His thinking has been shaped by his involvement with archaeology. Of note is the Segsbury Project (1996-2003), where he integrated the materiality of excavation sites directly into his work. A collaboration with the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford, where the artist worked alongside the field archaeologists as they excavated two Iron Age hillforts in Oxfordshire. Instead of documenting the process, Callery made a monumental plaster and chalk work called Trench 10, capturing the raw material of the excavated bedrock. 

Archaeologists generally rely on a clear spatial schema to distinguish the synchronic from the diachronic; find two things in the same layer and they can usually be assumed to be contemporary with one another, dig down below them and you are going back in time. For the artist, the principle of stratigraphy is not simply a scientific procedure, but a representation of the hidden subject of painting; the relationship of time and material. 

The phenomenological approaches in archaeology that highlight the significance of human experience and sensory engagement with material culture parallel Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodied perception, which emphasizes the inseparability of mind and body¹. Informed by his long-term interdisciplinary work, Callery redefines painting as a tactile, tangible object of mediation. These perspectives challenge traditional subject-object dichotomies, asserting that our understandings are deeply intertwined with our physical interactions with objects and landscapes. This embodied framework invites a rethinking of what interpretation can be; positioning material engagement as both a means of knowing and a mode of being.

— Baptiste Renoux

¹ Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophique [1946]. Lagrasse : Verdier, 2014.