'I have always been interested in debasement as purification': Sam Lipp dissects the body in London

Sam Lipp’s paintings are intensely physical. The US artist places the viewer in intimate proximity with the body, through a mix of portraits, cropped torsos and close-up views across bare shoulders. He ruptures his works’ surfaces using destructive methods, encouraging their steel bases to rust, dragging them across concrete pavements with chains, and fixing them to the wall with crude screws. For ‘Base’, his new show at east London’s Soft Opening, Lipp presents a series of works in three main colourways, moving from bloody reds through to grey and hyper-exposed white, playing with old film and digital image aesthetics.

'It’s the first time I’ve been this methodical,' he tells Wallpaper*, speaking ahead of the show opening. This series of work began with two small, exhibited test pieces, ‘Crying in Paris’ and ‘Vagabond’. While carefully thought through, the apparent immediacy and experimental marks of these paintings have fed into larger works in the exhibition. A central piece, ‘Tyrannicides’, shows two faces with open mouths moving together passionately as their shoulders disappear into a mass of scratches and white exposure. The painting is drenched in fiery tones. Its oil elements, which sit over airbrushed spray enamel, were applied in a single day.

Whether showing himself, live models, or figures from found images, Lipp’s paintings all reflect his inner world to some degree. 'When I decided to drag a piece for the first time, it was based on my emotional state,' he tells me. 'I continue to have a desire to destroy what I create, projecting my emotions and personality onto the image. Shame, guilt, joy, passion... The dragging and rusting have a wildness and uncontrollability to them, but I’m learning how to manipulate them.'

When painting other people, Lipp has used everything from found mugshot imagery, to pornography, and encounters with mutual friends. 'There is always a relationship to film and theatre,' he says. 'It’s like working with actors. There are tangible limits and implicit limits and responsibility; when I’m portraying someone else’s face there are so many complexities.'

He looks for some kind of attraction towards the figures he paints from life, focusing on faces that express a subtlety of feeling or individuals who hold a compelling presence. By the time their image reaches its final state, it has often been cropped or slashed to remove some recognisable elements. While his works are rooted within the self-image curation and bodily marketing of our contemporary image world, they reject the clean flatness that often defines it.

'I’ve always hated smooth things,' he tells me. 'The first paintings I made after college were inkjet prints that were painted on top, so they started as a photo. The direction I forged for myself at college was how much aesthetic territory could I explore away from my own hand. I want to explore both the photographic and painterly nature of the image. Where can it break and where can we find ourselves?'

Lipp graduated from Goldsmiths in 2010 and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago the following year. His early work was driven by the digital landscape of its time, drawing upon the user-driven visual material of gay hookup apps and social media. 'It definitely felt more liberatory in 2015 than it does now!' he laughs. 'These technologies have a very direct relationship with our bodies. I’m thinking of this hive mind consciousness that has now evolved into AI.'

His raw paintings penetrate the image, sometimes showing what’s underneath and at other times literally screwing through it. In earlier works, he welded cleats to the back of his steel bases in order to hang them, but this felt as though he was hiding something, so he introduced the visible screws. 'It’s like a natural inherent gesture which feels violent, troubling and intriguing. The screws came from a truly utilitarian honesty about my material constraints.'

Such interventions call to mind violent yet godly imagery that permeates much older visual culture, particularly the gruesome, erotic and cathartic depictions of Jesus’ crucifixion. Lipp tells me he ultimately delves into shame in order to find something honest within it. 'I have always been interested in debasement as purification, as a religious pursuit or saintliness.'

Sam Lipp is at Soft Opening, London, 17 January - 4 March