Can a painting be as much of a performance as a play? Its composition carefully crafted as the blocking in a Brecht production or its imagery riddled with as many figurative inferences as Shakespearean verse? Stuart Pearson Wright, winner of the prestigious BP Portrait Award in 2000, whose latest exhibition, Love: & Death, opens at the Riflemaker gallery on Monday, seems to think so.

‘When you’re painting a portrait, you’re making an image which is about the identity of a person - creating a kind of narrative in the way a theatre or film director might’, explains Wright. ‘I’m using that person to tell a story’, he continues, ‘people in my paintings are actors essentially’. 

The artist himself is adept at taking to the stage, so to speak, painting himself in various guises, notably as a cowboy and sea-faring fisherman for his last exhibition, I remember you, and in this most recent collection of works, as Hamlet. ‘I’ve cast myself as all sorts of heroic male archetypes because it’s fun to try them on for size’, he explains.

Born through artificial insemination, Wright has never known who his father is, and having not had a clearly defined male role-model is something he confesses to having agonised over when he was younger, unable to easily establish his masculine identity through example. ‘I think all boys piece themselves together from various sources but largely base themselves on their fathers’ he notes. ‘They’ll stand in the pub and watch how their dads hold their pints and you can see the fathers and sons doing the same things’.

Without a father to follow, it was painting through which Wright was able to explore his own masculinity, mimicking various male archetypes, from the Wild West to ancient Rome. ‘I didn’t know how to be myself but I started to realise I could have fun with that and that I could play these roles in a slightly ironic way’. Through his painting, he was able to consider ‘do I want to be a military hero, or some character from Eastenders?’.  

After directing Keira Knightley in his film work, MAZE, and having what he describes as the ‘amazing privilege’ of working with a group of professionals with whom he could set up and capture a scene exactly how he wanted it, Stuart Pearson Wright found it natural to translate the film-making process into his painting, which for him ‘is like directing – I’m directing myself’. He describes this parallel and a real breakthrough, realising that ‘essentially I’d like at some point for my studio to be like a theatre where I just set people up and paint them from life’. For a triptych of paintings, entitled Conception, Birth, and Death, in which each of those key ingredients of human existence is portrayed, he worked more theatrically than he ever had. ‘I built a set, I lit it, I dressed the set, I talked the actors through it as a director would’, before photographing the final scene and painting from these images - enhancing the shadows and elongating bodies – to create an exaggerated set of tableaux.

Wright also explores ideas of theatre as Hamlet in the semi-self-portrait included in Love: & Death. Here, he portrays a performer taking on Shakespeare’s famous Danish Prince, or ‘an actor, acting as an actor, who is acting out a part’ and in doing so is playing with the idea of ‘several layers of reality’, as a play might, as well as indulging the frustrated actor in him who ‘knew no one was ever going to ask me to play Hamlet’. 

One of the reasons Wright is drawn to this theatrical approach is that while in his work there is ‘a suggestion of real, contemporary scenes’, at the same time, ‘I don’t ever want to present something as real’. Unsurprisingly, Wright notes the modernist German playwright Bertolt Brecht, whose USP is a distancing of his audience to allow them to connect with his work exactly as it’s presented, rather than requiring them to suspend disbelief and connect emotionally with his characters as though they were real. Of his paintings, Wright points out that ‘I always want the audience to know that they’re looking at something that isn’t pretending to be real. It’s like a play’. Like Brecht, Wright wants his audience to ‘experience something on your own terms’. Rather than offer a prescribed interpretation of his work, ‘I like people to come up with their own responses and narratives for things that I make, even if I have my own reasons for needing to create it’. 

Furthering this idea is Wright’s use of the Gothic Novel in Love: & Death. A sculpted skull, which will be dressed in armour that Wright has commissioned especially for the piece as based on the ghost of ‘Brave Alonso’ from Matthew Lewis’ 1796 genre-defining novel, The Monk, and he also notes Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula as influences.

With similar sentiment to Roland Barthes famous essay, The Death of the Author, Wright offers us his take on these famous works, for our own interpretation, giving life his audiences ideas while his own are laid to rest. In doing this he offers intellectual parallel to the life-cycle we see in the Conception/Birth/Death triptych, or the various visual allusions to the same idea that is explored in Hamlet - ‘a man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm’. 

For Stuart Pearson Wright then, performance and painting are one and the same, but ultimately, all he wants to know is, what do you think of it?