Landon Metz: ‘If someone can feel infiniteness while standing in front of a painting, then I’ve done something right’

For the 38-year-old artist Landon Metz, painting is a form of mindfulness. Armed with bolts of raw canvas and bottles of acrylic dye, he quietly pushes and pulls colours into rhythmic, biomorphic forms, which gently ebb across one, two, three or more stretchers — and sometimes entire gallery interiors. It’s a technique born of Metz’s interest in music — or rather, the way in which tempo, sound and silence are employed in the work of avant-garde composers such as John Cage, and in the meditative practices of Zen Buddhists.

Applying those ideas to the physical act of painting, he intuitively explores the limits of his materials to create results that the Financial Times has described as ‘immensely calming’.

‘It creates a space where raw data is feeding into your system, and you’re not casting judgements, values or assumptions,’ he says of his process. ‘You’re just having the experience.’

In the wake of a recent string of solo gallery shows in London, New York, Seoul, Stockholm and Milan, as well as an exhibition at the Pietro Canonica Museum in the Villa Borghese, Rome, Christie’s has partnered with Custot Gallery Dubai to present the private selling exhibition Being Infinite: Landon Metz.

Ahead of the opening of the show, which contains 19 new works, Metz spoke to us about his work.

You’re self-taught. When did you know you wanted to be an artist, and how did your early career evolve?

Landon Metz: I would say I’m an autodidact. I was born in Phoenix, Arizona, but I grew up in northern Scottsdale, a pretty sleepy desert town. I played music from the age of six, starting with the violin, then brass instruments and piano.

After high school, I drove from Arizona to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Eugene, Portland, Seattle, then Vancouver, where I lived in a big punk house with 13 other kids. There I started working on visuals for events and albums, and something clicked. The work was coming out of me very easily. There’s a technicality to music, and it’s a much longer process than putting an idea to canvas, which felt very intuitive and resonated with me.

I arrived in New York aged 24 and dedicated myself to my practice. At first I worked out of my apartment. Then I got a small studio in Brooklyn. I became part of a scene in New York, and it’s the place I found my voice. If there is anything that remotely resembles a meritocracy, it’s New York City.

How did you come to settle on working with acrylic dye and raw canvas?

LM: Having a musical background, I became interested in the avant-garde work of John Cage and Philip Glass. I also started to read about its relationship to philosophy — Eastern philosophy in particular. I read a lot about Taoism and Zen Buddhism and became interested in meditation.

In New York I met a Zen Buddhist monk from Vietnam who opened a monastery here. I would go and do a week-long silent retreat. These philosophies became principles in my studio as well. They guided a lot of my decision-making. I started to think, ‘How can my materials embody this way of being?’ The studio became a space to explore material constraints and see how they would fit into my blossoming philosophical practice.

I also found raw canvas has an honesty to it: I wanted everything to be visible. I used dye rather than oil paint because it has a such a low viscosity. It’s like it has its own voice, by being exposed to naturally occurring phenomena like gravity — you get pools of pigment, areas of crystallisation, and gradients form where the dye evaporates or soaks into the canvas. Even the humidity at different times of the year affects it.

Do you have any rituals associated with your work?

LM: I do my best when I meditate regularly. I sit and follow my breath. It’s really just a means of recalibrating. In the studio, that creates grace and ease, a nice way to start a painting: the two practices seem to be mutually dependent.

My studio is a quiet and introspective space. But it can also be lonely. I’m on the sixth floor, overlooking Canal Street, and I work alone. It’s eerily quiet for Downtown Manhattan.

What’s involved in planning a painting? Is there an element of randomness?

LM: I’d say there is an intuitive element to it. The materials are allowed free rein, but, within that, there is a window of opportunity inside the composition I lay down.

Before I paint, I’ll undergo a period of play in the studio: drawing, or using a blade, or scissors, or ripping paper. That becomes the birthplace of the form, then the colours just reveal themselves to me. I don’t try to intellectualise this part of it. I just trust whatever comes to me.

Laying the paint down becomes a little unruly. There is a lot of propensity for failure and entropy and chaos. Even though the works may look calm, they’re pools of water with their own nature.

Were you inspired by Colour Field painters, and in particular, Helen Frankenthaler?

LM: Frankenthaler used raw canvas and a stain technique, so not to acknowledge the relationship would be unfair. The Colour Field painters thought about materials in terms of how they could embody a thought process, or a way of looking at the world. I wouldn’t put it past them to have arrived at these themes through the American avant-garde’s relationship with Buddhism as well. Basically, I haven’t tried to position myself as a Neo-Colour Field painter, but I think subsequently what happened is maybe just that.

You’ve said your works are site-responsive. Do they speak to the interiors in which they hang, or the wider cultural spaces they inhabit?

LM: All my works have a peripheral nature — there’s a slippery effect when you start trying to hold on to what the image is and where it sits and lives.

I think the work is always slipping off itself and into the surrounding environment. I do use painting as an opportunity to explore this idea further sometimes: when my works are shaped to fit around architecture, it’s emphasising or reinforcing their peripheral nature.

I am also interested in not just the space, but the place, and the cultural prerequisite we have for moving through a particular environment. Narratives get built into places.

Are there any Middle Eastern influences in the 19 new works you’ve made for the show at Christie’s in Dubai?

LM: There is an inherent sense of desert in all the decisions I make aesthetically. As I said, I grew up in Arizona, exposed to this raw landscape where life and water are scarce.

There is a sort of faded atmosphere to a lot of my work. I remember, as a kid, the effect the sun and the dryness had on surfaces. All the cars from the Sixties had a particular type of paint job, and the sun would just eat away at it in this really specific way, desaturating the colours and creating a marbled effect.

This sense of the oppressive nature of the desert is baked into my artistic vernacular. Some of the larger works in the show, especially the orange and the blue pieces, have a particularly rugged appearance. They’ve got a bit more of a windswept, sun-bleached energy.

You released your debut album, Six Days at the Orange House, last year. Does the sense of rhythm, space and flow in your painting complement your ambient music?

LM: It all comes from the same place. Sitting in a silent room or staring at an empty canvas are holistic experiences, and to me it’s like I want to embody a sense of infiniteness. With music, you create a soundscape with sounds that rise and fall between pieces of silence and space. It’s the same with creating visual gestures that arise and subside out of the empty visual plane.

I do my best to maintain emptiness in my work. It’s an infinite potential source for creativity. If someone can feel infiniteness when listening to my music or standing in front of a painting, then I’ve done something right.

Being Infinite: Landon Metz, presented in collaboration with Custot Gallery Dubai, is open daily, 5-15 February 2024, at Christie’s in Dubai