Four Tet - Anna Painting

August 29, 2019 - Text Records

There is this unspoken idea that art has to be about darkness or suffering to evoke something of an audience. “Happiness paints with white,” to quote a professor from my undergraduate years who most definitely was quoting it reverently second-hand as a sage motto that’s been passed down for generations. But art the way we know it and experience it today hasn’t been passed down for generations. It’s fresh and new and evolving so quickly the artists can hardly keep up. 

Ever the songbird, our favorite Four Tet aka Kieran Hebden composed three tracks alongside the works of painter Anna Liber Lewis—his close childhood friend. The results of the collaboration were presented at Elephant West gallery in London in a show titled Muscle Memory. An installation of paintings and sound. Originally, these songs were set to remain digitally unreleased, vinyl only, limited to the ears of those who were lucky enough either to snag a vinyl from the edition or experience the work in person. But for me and the rest of us across the pond who hover below the threshold of flying to the UK whenever we feel like it, Four Tet’s public release of the Anna Painting EP was a moment of inclusivity within a bubble of exclusivity that is the art world that I love to hate to love. 

This is mostly speaking from a place of jealousy, of course, because I have long been enamored with Four Tet, and I am now completely enamored with Lewis’ paintings. And I haven’t had the chance yet to see any of them in person. I can only imagine that room full of Lewis’ color and the light of Four Tet’s curated soundtrack. 

Anna Liber Lewis is a painter’s painter, and her work is fearlessly cool. Cool like she knows how the polar ice caps were 200 years ago. Recognizable modern letterforms and symbols undulate and overlap and interact in a way that’s impossible in HTML or any coding language. Visual information becomes material in the physical plane, and (as I can imagine) the color gamut is beyond the realm of the digital world being referenced. Then, like the mystical Hilma af Klimt, her approach to image-making pushes those shapes and colors beyond digital, beyond physical, to the metaphysical world where they will remain forever in our imaginations. 

The internet is now a giant database of humanity’s collective knowledge of itself. To understand the symbols that haunt everyday existence, artists and scientists once had to acquire the means to either read thousands of books or to travel the world. Now, to most, that information is available in less than a millisecond. And when you have free rein to explore it all, what do you do? Where do you begin? How do you use it to communicate? 

The smartness afforded creators in the information age is a striking parallel I see between Lewis’ paintings and Four Tet’s musical oeuvre. Both clearly crave to know more about the world around them, and both clearly are driven by a desire to see what things look or sound like. Both are clearly maximalists, collectors who smash things together and see what happens and hold onto the discovery. They share the same question: How do the unique influences and inspirations cultivated by an individual who seeks knowledge for its own sake interact when thrown together on a plane of a canvas or in the waves of a song?

How satisfying it is when two stars like this crash together and shower glittering light down on the rest of us from the impact of the interaction! There’s something irresistibly triumphant about how these two artists celebrate and uplift each other. 

So, I ask. Who says joy is taboo? That person has probably been dead for a long time. ☔