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HEAD TO HEAD | The artist in conversation

Wed, 16 May 2012 18:30 +0000

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RECENT SMALL WORKS

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 11:53 +0000

Patricia Cain talks on 'Drawing (on) Riverside'

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 18:30 +0000

PRIVATE VIEW | Drawing (on) Riverside | THURSDAY 8TH MARCH 2012 | 6.30-8.30

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 18:30 +0000

HEAD TO HEAD

Fri, 04 May 2012 12:00 +0000

Celia Scott has worked all her life as an architect, and when she designed her studio she made it in a minimalist modern style. That was clearly her preference. So how has it come about that, being instinctively a modernist, she has produced all these portrait busts?

It happened almost by accident, and the story is told in her book: Celia Scott, (Black Dog 2008)

This problem brings us back to representation, and while the world is full of natural beauty, it also contains ugliness and evil. The problem centres on the human being, and that is no doubt why Francis Bacon believed that portraiture is the highest form of art. For the sculptor, this leads directly to the portrait bust.

The portrait bust is based on the idea of a likeness, but the issue is more complicated than that. The head, which stands for the human being, becomes a bust, a thing in itself. It acquires a presence, a life of its own. Alex Potts has said:

When a sculpture displayed in a gallery does somehow seem compelling, our attention is sustained by an intensified visual and kinaesthetic engagement...This is what makes the fixed shape and substance seem to come alive. (Alex Potts: The Sculptural Imagination, 2000)

For the artist, this provides a somewhat elusive goal: you are on the track of a quality that can only be glimpsed, not grasped. In the book, Alan Colquhoun stated:
...Scott’s work recalls that of Lucian Freud in painting, although their sensibilities are utterly different. Both artists sidestep modernism’s multiple developments over the last hundred years. ...Her style is the conscious choice of a highly intelligent and knowledgeable artist whose instinct and talents lead her to a certain kind of available sculptural expression...one that is still in a sense part of the collective memory of society (in Celia Scott, 2008)

Michael Sandle has said:
Her portrait busts are more than simply “portraits” or facsimiles – they have a powerful physical and psychological presence. (In Head to Head catalogue 2012)

There are twenty-four portrait busts in the show, arranged on bases which put them at eye-height, putting them in conversation with each other – and with the viewer.

Eleven Spitalfields Gallery will be hosting ‘The Artist in conversation with Michael Spens & Ellis Woodman’ on Wednesday 16th May at 6.30pm. Admission is free but booking is advised. RSVP to info@elevenspitalfields.com

DRAWING (ON) RIVERSIDE

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 12:00 +0000

“ Patricia Cain’s work on the Riverside Transport Museum brilliantly captures a singular moment of the build: uniquely documenting the geometric complexity and structural integrity of the museums design” Zaha Hadid

Threadneedle Prize winner Patricia Cain’s Drawing (on) Riverside takes its cue from Glasgow’s new Riverside Museum, which took shape over four years on the site of the former Pointhouse shipyard on the River Clyde. Designed by architectural ‘superstar’ Zaha Hadid, the Riverside opened to the public in June, 2011, as Hadid’s first major public building in the UK.

Over four years, former lawyer Patricia Cain immersed herself in the Riverside’s unique and intricate structure. She won 2 major awards, the Aspect Prize and the Threadneedle Prize, for her forensic studies of the building under construction.

Cain now brings around 50 of her works that interrogate the process of constructing Hadid’s building, which were exhibited in last summer’s major solo exhibition at the Kelvingrove Gallery. The exhibition will also feature archive footage from the Scottish Screen Archive.

Cain describes the process of working on the exhibiton as being similar to the collaborations involved in all construction - and deconstruction. “I found myself really drawn to the past,” she explains. “There is so much history surrounding the Clyde.’

“The making of these vast ships and buildings, many of which no longer exist, did not happen without extensive collaboration between all sorts of individuals. It was these processes rather than the building as an artefact that become the focus of the work.”

Arts writer Jan Patience comments; “The area around the Clyde has gone through massive changes in the last 50 years and Cain has explored this using the new transport museum as a starting point in a sensitive and thought-provoking way.”

SNAP | PRIVATE VIEW | THURSDAY 12TH JANUARY 2012 | 6.30-8.30

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:30 +0000

an exhibition of photography by Miyako Narita

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:56 +0000

Late in his career, the renowned photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz created a series of photographs of clouds that he called 'Equivalents'. This series presented his photographs as visual metaphors for his emotional state at the time he made the photographs – "I have a vision of life and I try to find equivalents for it." His concept was later developed by the famous photographer and teacher Minor White and remains at the core of a particular strand of contemporary (mainly american large-format landscape) photography.

The work of Miyako Narita takes the concept of equivalents in an entirely new direction. Just as in the card game 'Snap' similar cards are paired together, Miyako Narita makes photographs that pair experiences from her past with events in contemporary her life that remind her, either emotionally or intellectually, of these previous experiences. Sometimes this linking to a memory is clear and easily traced through the image. Other times, however, the connection is felt but eludes explanation. We are not talking here of the classical 'decisive moment' of Henri Cartier-Bresson but more from the concept developed by Geoff Dyer in his International Centre of Photography Infinity Award's winning book "The Ongoing Moment" where the author addressed the idea of recurring elements in contemporary photography.

This constant pairing of experiences divided by time is the result of her ceaseless (some might say compulsive) recording of the various mundane things or actions that she encounters in her daily life. It is almost as if Miyako Narita has taken the Shinto religion's requirement that people establish a connection between present day Japan and its ancient past and internalised it within herself. Through her practice her past constantly informs her experience of the present.

As an artist, Miyako Narita establishes no rules in her practice. Her photography starts each morning at home and continues relentlessly throughout the day wherever she is and whenever something stimulates this recognition of something of an experience or feeling from the past. A single day can result in more than two hundred photographs and, to date, she has accumulated many thousands of images. Each photograph 'seizes' these events and creates a fragmentary record of her everyday life.

For this exhibition, Miyako Narita has taken the pairing of earlier experiences with contemporary events in a different direction. She has created sets of images (normally pairs) made at different times and in different locations with the aim of establishing a chance relationship, be it formal, emotional or intellectual. Although each photograph maintains an individual and independent identity, the combination of these images creates a dialogue between the images that suggest new interpretations. Viewing the images, I find myself questioning whether the interplay between the images reveals, perhaps, a common past experience that stimulated Miyako Narita to pair the photographs together or whether the pairing actually reveals an artist constantly restructuring the burgeoning and fragmentary record of her life and related memories in a particular photographic form.
D.S. Allen, Berlin, 2011.

Sarah Eyton, Michelle Mason, Olha Pryymak & Rachel Scott

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 18:30 +0000

an exhibition of photography by Miyako Narita

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:22 +0000

by Peter Ashton Jones,painter & co-editor of Turps Banana

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 09:38 +0000

They said, “You have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are”

The man replied, “Things as they are

Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

I’ve always considered Wallace Stevens’ poem The Man with the Blue Guitar, to be one of the great literary masterpieces of the Twentieth Century. Based on a painting by Pablo Picasso from his blue period, the picture shows a figure, “a shearsman of sorts”, bent over a guitar.

Throughout the thirty-three stanzas of the poem, Stevens refers to the guitar - an object that resolves the difference between the ‘world of the poem’ with the physical and metaphysical world - as something to be ‘tried on’, handled (like a tool), adjusted (moving between abstraction and figuration), and manoeuvred (an apparatus constructed out of place and space). Everything comes from and returns back to “This buzzing of the blue guitar.”

Painting is its equivalent, the things or properties employed - the surface, the treatment and methodology, and pictorial concept - assert themselves to find an exactness, to find a consciousness: a buzzing of a kind.

Painting though, and discussion about it, has to be seen within a current cultural pluralism, in which different disciplines, values, practices and even identities are striving for acceptance. Painting is very different from all the other visual art disciplines though - it is full of history, a history that can be liberating or crushing for the artist, and for an audience for that matter, and the current contemporary art world has shown a degree of reluctance to engage in a full and erudite critical discourse about painting (although it still has a bit of a love affair with it), largely because many consider the medium to be out of date, decorative or self-indulgent. Such ignorance undermines the unique capabilities of the medium in the right hands - a unique playing if you like - even more so given the chaotic, crass and rather superficial quality of the stream of images that invade our daily lives.

Things and the way they are played in the paintings of Nancy Cogswell and Laurence Noga at first appear to be quite different - Cogswell’s paintings employ a figurative construction of space, Noga’s a high Modernist abstraction, but although they are pushing from almost opposing positions, their paintings reach a similar ‘place’ but with independent and unique resolve. 

All of Cogswell’s paintings refer to one object: a table with a drawerthat isnever shown in its entirety. It is an object with many layers of ideas - a bit like Stevens’ blue guitar. Cogswell’s architectural background is evident, given the design and spatial dynamics of her pictures, but these are not architectural paintings, to say that would be to underplay their atmospheric strength and the essential content that the paintings/pictures hold.

In False Flagging, two drawers have been removed from their ‘domestic sleeves’ and placed on top of the surface of the table. The striking sharpness of line and a recession of angular space is bold but subtle, and the unusual but extremely effective use of colour is hostile but inviting, and gives the picture an eerie or ghost like quality which is further imbued by light from the left and the shadows that lip the edges of the drawers, a sort of tapering reminding one of a sense of ‘joining’. On one level, the dark colour of the background plane feels at odds with the foreground, which drives into the ‘picture’, but on another level it is entirely in keeping with the picture because of the way it works with the luminosity of the coloured ‘slabs’. The surface too, is extremely successful. The picture has a strange kind of realism, slightly close to a photographic sharpness, but counter-pointed by the artifice of the ‘painting’ which allows the surface to catch an odd but compelling atmosphere. False Flagging reminds me of a tomb you might see in a Fifteenth Century Italian painting or a Victorian graveyard, where the monumental is a substitute for the deceased, or a section of a classical Roman building, depopulated of the sentimental sightseer who believes hesees history but sees nothing. In many ways False Flagging opens up an emptiness that can never be filled.

Laurence Noga’s Floating White Sap Green also has a strong sense of formal design, but very different from Cogswell’s - I think the formal and the design are found in the making of the painting. Noga’s ‘pictures’ are developed from the collages he makes, from exhibition invitation cards, such as Collage Number 4 - overlaid vertical strips in a panoramic format. They are reminiscent of stage or window curtains and are regarded as preparatory drawings for the paintings. When I first saw Floating White Sap Green I was immediately disturbed by the lack of pure symmetry of the white half circle at the far left of the painting, but realised quite quickly that the not so pure ‘drawing’ of this shape was essential to the success of the painting. In fact, it is a key element to a reading of the work, and despite the apparent abstract quality of the work I see Floating White Sap Green as a minimal figurative painting. The white ‘eye’ at the far left of the painting is the beginning and the end - everything comes from and returns to it, or rather tries to return to it. It seems to sit on the painting but is in the painting, and this curious arrangement creates a figurative, albeit shallow space. There is a sense of a game at play that has been suspended, as if freeze-framed like a scene from the Pressburger/Powell film A Matter Of Life and Death.

Floating White Sap Green is a diptych, but unusually the shadow of the join between the two canvases is a part of the work - the ‘line’ in the painting that makes oneaware of the edges of both canvases and which further gives onea sense that everything has been put or placed within the ‘picture’ in brilliant counterpoint to the quirky drawing of the white eye. In contrast to the simple warm white-sap green relationship of the left canvas, the right canvas is hot and cold, clean but intense. Light or heat radiate outwardly to the right and then suddenly stop, or rather sit on top of a cool flat cerulean blue. It is as if the whole painting is an oddly objectified depiction of a white sun, or the pulsating of an eye which only half stares back. The colour is also reminiscent of 1950s design, and this helps to slow everything down, or hold back the pace of such an imaginative image, a picture that is like a cartoon without the slapstick.

False Flagging and Floating White Sap Green do not play things as they are. The object in False Flagging has become something other than what is, and the objectification in Floating White Sap Green has made Noga’s apparent purer painting a figurative objectification of itself. Both paintings have a sense of completeness that shows their own history and emotional impact. 

Cogswell also uses the diptych format, or ‘doubling’ as sheand Noga describe it. With Double 2011, the paintings are almost identical but sit about twelve centimetres apart from one another. One side of the open drawer sits on the picture plane, and the table top occupies most of the mid space of the picture. As with False Flagging, there is a dark background that allows the surface of the canvas to be visible, and when you look over the top of the side of the drawer, into the drawer itself, there is a strange looking object that is a boat - two red steam funnels are visible, as is the side of the boat, bringing sexual connotations to the picture. The colour of the drawer is predominantly pink with white lines or drawing adding emphasis to the balance of spatial planes. Everything about this painting suggests that it is about sex - the pink form of the table(containing and revealing), the red and white of the phallic steam funnels and masts (which also suggests lipstick). But it seems to me that the painting is more about the contemplation of sex, what the significance of sex is to one’s emotional intelligence, the whole business of opening oneself and giving oneself. And the serene, fine quality of the treatment enforces this interpretation. Given that both paintings are so similar in colour, design and rendering, I think that there is an intellectual reason for this piece being a diptych, perhaps to do with the moving image - an emphasis on the still - or perhaps to suggest an association with Fifteenth Century alter paintings. Either way, the difference between and similarity of the two paintings is subtle, intriguing and fundamentally intense, an embodiment of emotional loss and gain, of intellectual openness and closure, and of memory recall.

Things or objects visible in an open drawer are also in other paintings such as Sleeper Drawer I and Sleeper Drawer II. Although the drawer is more obviously a drawer in both of these paintings, the use of the open ‘contained’ space filled with a thing, is really mysterious and is an intelligent extended use of the central motif. It’s not entirely clear what is in the drawer when one looksdown, but I don’t think that is particularly important (although it is clear the ‘painting’ of this thing is of something). These are not pictorial narrative paintings - the content is more about the aesthetic charge of what the thing in the drawer is, articulated by the making - the contrast between the shift of emphasis of the design of the container (drawer) and the ‘painting’ which pushes to be ‘of’ some thing. 

Containing the ‘painting’ is also a crucial formal element in Noga’s Curved Magenta Filtered Orange. The format is similar to Floating White Sap Green - I read the painting from the left to the right, starting with a flat area of purple that sits on a flat blue and which looks a bit like a torso in profile. The painting then changes gear, the eye travelling across vertical bands of colour, from various modulated blue/greys to a striking vibrant hot yellow (between which is the line marking the join of two canvases), through to orange, warm reds and magenta until the language completely changes at the end, something which feels less like a vertical band and more a like section or compartment - a white open field of disbursed paint, two paints reacting, wet into wet, giving this section an ‘accidental’ quality, counter-pointing the more consciously ‘painted’ sections. It is as if the last section or compartment defines the formal control and management of the whole painting that takes into full account the exactness of the surfaces and quality of the paint.

Aside from the aesthetic arguments about formal Modernist application and process, more recent commentators on abstract painting often define abstraction in terms of figurative associations. Curved Magenta Filtered Orange looks a bit like a television test card, and although I think this, along with the means of production, gives the painting a post-Modern argument, I find myself seeing Curved Magenta Filtered Orange as a picture with an odd depth of field, and this is also evident in Deep Pink Filtered Silver and Sap Green Filtered Silver. The free-hand of the drawing, the layering of the painting, the contain release of the vertical bands of paint in contrast to the open field of disbursed paint, and most of all the exactness of the colour relationships, creates a depth of field that is seen through the surface of the ‘painting’. There is a sense that a shadow or ghost of some thing or object is in the painting, not lying behind, not pushing to find a figurative form, but more as a signifier for the act of the hand.

And they said then, “but play, you must,

A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar

Of things exactly as they are.”

It’s hard to imagine that there will be a radical new style of painting or some avant-garde breakthrough, such as Cubism, in the Twenty-first Century, particularly given the recent focus on a detached means of production alongside an aggressive marketing strategy (almost as if the word art is now spelt: m o n e y). But then the Twentieth Century hare and tortoise like chase was never entirely always going to yield intelligent painting. The blue guitar of painting, the buzzing of consciousness, is something that has existed in great painting from all centuries, even as far back as the Medieval illuminated manuscripts. It is the objectification of the things and the way they are played that is essential to good and intelligent painting, and obviously the understanding of good painting. And it is ‘a difference’ and the intelligence of painting that seems so vital to the now.

When I visited Cogswell and Noga to discuss their work I asked what painters they were interested in or that they looked at on a fairly regular basis. There were some painters they both expressed an interest in, and some that were specific to one or other, and one can see ‘something’ of those interests and recognise some aspects of ‘other’ language in their works. However, they both definitely own their own language (the things and the way of playing), and the consciousness they have both constructed in their works (their buzzing) is very definitely present. Cogswell pushes, without entirely loosing, figurative space toward a more abstract space which, in most cases, creates a brilliant dialectic between what the thing is and what it is not, but through that finds or catches something inherent to that dialectic. And it seems to me that Noga pushes abstraction toward a figurative objectification of a thing, that thing being found in what the ‘painting’ is and what it is not. In that sense, Cogswell and Noga do not play things as they are, but play beyond themselves.

Peter Ashton Jones

2011

* Essay taken from exhibition catalogue.

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FESTIVE COLLECTION

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 12:00 +0000

The Festive Collection at Eleven Spitalfields Gallery brings together a diverse range of fine art & design based practitioners in the wonderful, historic context of Georgian Spitalfields. Thus providing visitors with a unique, festive experience.
In addition to the Private View, on Thursday 8th December, the gallery will be holding two shopping events where visitors will have the chance to meet the people behind the work. They will take place from 3-7pm on;
Wednesday 14th & 21st December 2011

Sarah Eyton is a London based designer, creating jewellery for men and women that make a statement. Sarah’s work is attention seeking and bold yet subtle at the same time. Her ideas are brought to fruition using a range of materials, focusing mainly on Perspex, and precious metals.
Although Sarah initially trained as a furniture designer, she has experienced a natural progression into jewellery design, successfully combining similar materials into what could be described as her “body furniture”.

www. saraheytondesigns.co.uk

Rachel Scott trained as a painter at the Royal College of Art and later began spinning and weaving in 1976. Her handmade rugs are made using yarn spun directly from the fleece and are 100% natural in both colour and texture.
Exhibited extensively in the past 30 years in numerous International exhibitions, Rachel’s work has also been shown at Libertys and Somerset House.

www.rachelswool.co.uk

Michelle Mason designs contemporary interior and giftware products and was short listed for the Homes & Gardens Classic Design Award, 2009.
Michelle’s strong illustrative style has been commissioned for use on several ranges for a variety of clients including the Southbank Centre shops and the London Transport Museum. Michelle’s work frequently appears in both national and international press from the Sunday Times, Grand Designs, Elle Decoration to Homes & Gardens and Living Etc.

www.michellemason.co.uk

Olha Pryymak is a London-based, Ukranian born painter. Part of the international movement of daily painters, Olha produces a painting a day. On display here is a series of interiors produced at nearby Dennis Severs’ House. She describes her work as having a ‘visual language of varied painterly brushstrokes and contrasts of color carry out the narrative’.
Olha’s paintings have been exhibited in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition for the past 3 years and the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery.

www.olechko.org

Private View | APPROACHING THE IN-BETWEEN | Thursday 3rd November

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:30 +0000

IMMERSION - Art & Environmental Change

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:00 +0000

PROGRAMME OF EXHIBITIONS

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:00 +0000

JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2012

Miyako Narita (Photography)

MARCH - APRIL 2012

Patricia Cain

MAY - JUNE 2012

Celia Scott

JULY - AUGUST 2012

Frank Bowling RA

SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2012

Bob & Roberta Smith

Jessica Voorsanger

NOVEMBER - DECEMBER 2012

Jock McFadyen

APPROACHING THE IN-BETWEEN

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 12:00 +0000

The work of Nancy Cogswell and Laurence Noga shares a preoccupation with the in-between. This is not only reflected in the process, but also through emotive and contained feeling for space. This space is explored using colour as a structuring form, activating sensation and emotional specificity.

That experience for Cogswell is developed by pressing into the paint surface, withdrawing the body of colour and leaving luminous transparency, focusing our attention on the tonal structure of the paintings for emotional content. The phenomenology is activated through the close up, drawing us into the physical space that has an illusion of velvet like depth. This depth has a weightlessness, contained by a domestic architectural sense of form.

Noga’s work offers another interpretation of the in-between, using a dialogue between in control or out of control, keeping faith in materiality. Poured enamel touches matt rolled acrylic. The eye moves across the divisions of colour, exploiting the visual problem of focusing simultaneously on converging tonally dazzling colour, whilst elongating and compressing the composition, allowing intuitive events to collide in a frontal approach.

These artists’ sensitivity for essence is clearly an important alignment. An investigation into ambiguity of presence and absence is a key motivation. Divisions of colour, void spaces made real, all set up a conversation. The physicality of a painted space that can envelop, bend, or push right towards the viewer is a deliberate and conceptual strategy.

2011

IMMERSION - Drawing With Purpose

Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:00 +0000

A place, a debate and a way of life:

In 1980 I arrived on the Suffolk Coast in our barge, Jacoba with my partner Ros Conway. This was a profound change to our way of life and a challenge to me as an artist to which I applied an aesthetic methodology derived from completely different circumstances, the artist ghetto of London’s Docklands.

I already had a well-established practice, working with photography and its dynamic relationship with subject matter in such a way that necessitated the development of my own idiosyncratic apparatus and technical procedures. However, over the intervening years context has become more insistent. Now I am much more preoccupied by the increasing volatility of our coastal and estuarine systems, their wellbeing and management. I find that this throws into question the appropriateness of a straightforward pictorial approach and is an invitation to immerse myself in a more nebulous debate where the cultural implications of environmental change are fundamental.

The challenge is to reposition myself in the face of new imperatives, which may not be answered simplistically by creating artworks to flag up issues; artist as communicator frequently makes indifferent art and fails to communicate. My instinct is to be wary of standard solutions and I have grave doubts over the efficacy of orthodox mechanisms for dissemination, believing it essential to seek ways in which art and myself as an artist can be acknowledged as a vital participant in this discussion. My starting point is to remind myself that insights, strategies and an ability to reflect in a concrete way are hard-won skills that are understood as a part of any artist’s armoury, as is curiosity and an unwillingness to be doctrinaire.

To be realistic, I understand that there are as many strategies as there are individuals seeking them; working in an environment where for every discipline there is another set of priorities, has meant that mine has become a hybrid operation that might be discursive, pictorial, analytical or totally submerged within societal duties.

This is by no means a unique position. Mine happens to be one where, to avoid the generic and obvious, I have embedded myself in a community and its particular concerns, which in turn can threaten to make an irrelevancy of what I can bring to the feast.

I am using this exhibition as an opportunity to indicate where I am coming from and what I am exploring, in the hope that each will to some degree inform the other.

Simon Read

RETURN TO THE CAVE

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 18:30 +0000

Our hero JIMP wanders onto the set of a B-movie horror flick only to have an accidental assignation with George Orwell chatting like Beuys to a coyote with the ears of a hare. His Pinocchio nose and donkeys tail grows, as the anthropomorphic principal shifts into reverse gear. Played out in the dystopian social order of JIMPs ribald imagination, is the existential angst of the common people, living lives they don’t understand.

The thin veneer of civilisation covering the troglodyte rawness of our baser-selves is stripped away by his understated drawings. The cave of the gallery daubed with paper graffiti like the crude confident drawings of the ancients.

The hunter-gatherer in the book-keeping clerk, appearing like Mr Hyde, his drawings reveal some of the oxymoron’s in the life of an average contemporary traveller. The surreal moments in these humble scribings depict some of the true harshness, brutality, sometimes beauty and inexorable randomness of existence. The quiet comedy in the low-fi production, taps directly into our juvenile selves, exposing us to the emotions & curiosity of our adolescence. The jokes are multilayered and droll, as the banker and the vicar revealed in their gauche awkwardness, stumble in emotional confusion, threatened by their imaginary ancestors, humiliated by their descendants. The artist shines a spotlight into the anonymous seething masses: each individual struggling with his own self-consciousness – a kind of exorcism, open, spontaneous, bloody and raw.

Outsider art, disenfranchised from the adolescent bedroom, sci-fi bookcover or record sleeve, and floating in on the artworld like a breeze from an open window, JIMP is free to question our belief in fate, religion and the iprison (sic) of taste and manners. Liberating the viewer to remember the imagination, fears and horrors of adolescence, purging our psyche of suppressed and denied feelings, whilst delivering an unwitting smile. The pleading, engaging characters trapped in their cartoon frieze gaze out at the audience soliciting empathy. We are all there captured in his world view, the wise and the frail, the social bully and the outcast, caught with our pants down in front of the crowd.

JIMP is the penname of Jim Hollingworth. His work can be seen in international collections, live performances and doodled on the back of telephone directories. He is an unstoppable recorder of our times.

By Deborah Curtis

www.jimpwasere.com

Private View | Michael Chanarin | Thursday 7th July

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 18:30 +0000

ILLUSTRATED GUIDE FOR THE CONFUSED

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 12:00 +0000

What do we mean when we say that an artwork is playful, difficult, beautiful or demanding? According to the philosopher Immanuel Kant, there are essentially two approaches: the first, he writes, has no standard other than feeling whilst the second is all logic.

In these paintings we are presented with a third possibility: the pleasure to be found in the incongruous. Instead of continuity and regularity, we find humour and displacement: small pockets of resistance, not large enough to bring us to a halt, but large enough to give pause for thought, an opportunity to enjoy the playfulness between pleasure and comprehension, between manner and method, between image and text. We find at stake not only our preconceived notions of meaning but also our preconceived notions of taste. And in this disparity there is beauty, warmth, charm and amusement.

The images, drawn from publications created for purposes of education, explanation or instruction, have their original intention governed by needs both utilitarian and functional. They all share the common process of being removed or displaced from their original context: orphaned, errant and reassembled. The ‘disjunctive of narratives’ sourced from daily horoscope readings then adds a vague personal tone and stand in relation to the paintings as ‘displacements’ offering a sharp counterpoint to the images under which they are pinned.

Whereas the images give focus to the movement of the body in space, practical instructions for practical ends, the readings give rise instead to abstract and less definable applications of thought: around notions of self, identity, character, insecurity and even free will. Weighty themes, but treated here with a light touch that knows the weight of the narrative under focus. The artist doesn’t charge us to dwell too long on any one individual aspect: the relation itself between the disparate parts, and the painterly process underpinning them, being the real subject of the work.

In the final analysis, what are we to make of these works? We cannot happily fall back on Kant’s formula, of seeing them in terms of an aesthetics of pleasure or an aesthetics of comprehension. Our standard values of taste are displaced or at least challenged. But this is only half the story: the story of isolated and displaced narratives. The other half, that of the process, actively encourages a visceral engagement with the material: in this they are playful, detailed, subtle, serious and precise. And if we wish them to be so, they are also distant and challenging.

For the meaning between image, text and process is based on a relation that is always, only partly fulfilled: they flirt with us, and in this they ask us to consider our own position as viewers, our own position as makers of narrative and our own position as makers of meaning.

by Stephen McNeilly

Link to: Design week