Laurence Noga interviews Simon Callery whose show Flat Paintings was recently on view at FOLD Gallery, London.

Callery comments: "The questioning of flatness, which I believe is very important, is that I recognized that flatness is the product of image-based painting. It had to be flat to communicate as clearly as possible. I am not working with images so there is no reason why it has to be flat, although in this case – through a sense of contradiction – they are flat by choice… One of the things which is very important to me is to continue to ask: what is a painting, what is its function, its role? When I was growing as an artist, there was a backlash; a wave of anti-painting from all directions, everybody was climbing on the bandwagon waving their hands and saying that painting was dead. It made me want to question and define what makes a painting and what makes painting unique. I began taking it apart, questioning those roles from a contemporary viewpoint, redefining, reassembling, and re-casting its function."