Whitehot Magazine: Painting Energy: The Alex Katz Foundation Collection at the Portland Museum of Art: Marcus Leslie Singleton in Conversation with Federico De Francesco

Via Whitehot Magazine August 6, 2025

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Marcus Leslie Singleton: So, you and I have been friends for a while- like five years.

Federico De Francesco: Since 2020.

M: We always go to each other's shows and I love seeing you grow as an artist. And how do you and Alex Katz know each other? I met him through the Journal Gallery.  

F: I met Alex through Nicole Wittenberg. Nicole was teaching a critique class at the Bruce High Quality Foundation University and Alex was a guest. His critique gave you a sense for his character. He’s someone who has thought about painting for a long time. He has strong views on it. It was an inspirational moment, not only because he is such a celebrated painter, but because I got a sense of how he structures his work around what he’s learned from history. Why do you think Alex Katz has such an influence?

M: One of his super powers is what he sees in other painters like you and me. You mainly paint abstraction and landscape and I’m more figurative, but there is a throughline with all the artists he appreciates. I think about Alex as somebody who is incredibly articulate but doesn’t talk a lot. There's a difference between a novel and a book of poetry and I think Alex is more on the poetic side. He doesn’t overexplain- there’s not a lot of information in these paintings- but they are painted so poignantly that there is no mistaking what the artist is trying to infer.

He’s a genius at that. Federico, with your work, being that it’s so textural and colorful, there are a lot of opportunities there to world-make or story-tell. You use color in a way that’s not necessarily representative of the actual occurrence.

The reason you chose blue is not because the sky is blue- but because maybe that’s how the soil felt that day because it was damp and cold and it had just rained. There are all these different inferences to your color choice. When I look at your work and I look at Alex’s work, a lot of times his paintings don’t necessarily pull from reality all that much. Like, the skin tones in his work aren’t really real skin tones.

F: I do feel the same about your work. Especially in your landscapes, they are very abstract ones.

M: Have you talked to Alex about both of your practices?

F: I think Alex approaches painting with an image in mind. Even for the most abstract works, he has a very strong hold on an image. That’s what I find appealing. In the process of making the image, there is a directness to his relationship with the medium itself and then there’s a response to the medium. Whereas for me, I’ve always had this resistance of having that image. And with an image, there are memories. I probably do have memories of images that have accumulated over time, and they do enter the work. But there's a resistance to hold onto just one of them. I would love to work the way Alex does. It's a matter of nature. Marcus, you, also have a clear idea of what the image will be.

M: Alex thought about the curation very carefully for Painting Energy. Who else is in our grouping in the show?

F: Some of my favorite painters. Chantal Joffe, Marlene Dumas, and Katherine Bernhardt. Your painting in that show is really fascinating.

M: It's actually one of the smallest paintings I've ever made. It’s maybe six by eight inches.

F: Is it? It has a lot of presence.

M: I think anytime you're talking about incarceration, that's such a charged subject matter that you don't really need a lot of space.

F: Yeah. Where's the image from?

M: It’s one of those paintings I referenced from memory. I have a cousin that has been in and out of prison since I was an early teenager. So, that painting is from one of the visits. It's from before I moved to New York, I was on the west coast. Those situations are really interesting- it makes me think about the merchandise at Walmart and Pay Less and how you think, ‘okay, well these are just cheap.’ And a lot of the people in prisons make those clothes and shoes.

F: Free labor.

M: Yeah. Economy. There's so much I can talk about with that painting. It's a very small painting  but there's a lot of potential for conversations. I think the imagery of an imprisoned person writing…

F: It's like a form of expression. It feels like that's probably the only way to feel freedom, and find space. It's all about freedom, isn't it? We're all incarcerated in some way.

M: In some way, I think right? A little bit. For example, if you broke your ankle and you are on bed rest, even though you're home, there are many forms of what that is. But America has this really specific job to produce free labor using immigrants, and as a Black American, there's a large percentage of black people that are in prison, so when you put that in a painting, I think people already understand that's a serious subject matter.

F: Do you think of your audience when you make your paintings?

M: It differs. Usually when I'm making a painting, I very rarely consider anybody else. I often think about where I’m at in my life at that point. I appreciate Alex's work in that way because some of the work feels almost like journal entries. Like when he’s painting his wife, or his sons. They are not these expansive moments, they're these moments that lots of families have daily.

And for me, when I consider what I want to paint - they are oftentimes small decisions that could turn into big signifiers. So these small choices I'm making for a painting-  somebody cutting vegetables in the kitchen, or somebody taking out the trash- are all small decisions but they have cultural implications. As painters, we're always participating in culture, oftentimes we're creating it.

The importance is that we are remaining true to our values as people that use sound, color, and form as a vehicle for saying: hey, I think this is an important thing we should talk about. That's theoretically how I approach work. So it’s not necessarily like I'm thinking about an audience, but more, do I feel like this is important for me to express?

M: How do you feel about having the work in the show?

F: I feel great that it's hanging on the wall. It provides an immediate audience, conversation, and community.

M: Yeah. I think, anytime you have an artist like Alex supporting your work it's incredibly meaningful and there's a sense of comradery there. If you ever have doubts about what you're doing, having somebody like that in your corner gives you some type of engine to keep going.

F: It's true. I’ve had strong doubts about some paintings that I’ve shown him in the past, and getting his approval makes it feel like I'm moving in the right direction. WM

Painting Energy: The Alex Katz Foundation Collection at the Portland Museum of Art - May 23 - Sept 14, 2025

Marcus Leslie Singleton (United States) The Writer, 2022, oil  and enamel on panel, 12 x 9 1/16 x 1 5/8 inches, Portland Museum of Art, Maine. Gift of the Alex Katz Foundation, 2022.27.8 ©Marcus Leslie Singleton  Image courtesy Luc Demers