Eleven Spitalfields CMS

Over the Rainbow

Fri, 03 May 2013 09:22 +0000

Suicide is known in all human societies. For Freud, it was one possible outcome of severe manic depression, of being caught between feelings of intense love and hate or in an unresolved oedipal conflict. The sociologist, Durkheim, claimed it was the result of anomie - the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and their community - which causes feelings of powerlessness, lack of meaning and isolation.

For women, a sense of self-worth is still largely based on appearance, youth and relationships. Yet the lives of many are dominated by the fear of rape, unwanted pregnancy, male violence, poverty and ageing. While some women experience a fundamental lack of autonomy and self-determination, others are lambasted as ‘over achievers’, who are assumed to be ‘unfeminine’ ‘difficult’ or ‘feisty’. For the creative woman – even in this post-feminist age - there is still a constant pull between the demands of motherhood and creativity, along with the sneaky, guilty belief that she does not have the right to pursue her own vision. The reasons for suicide are, nevertheless, varied: depression, the loss of a relationship, shame, a sense of failure and despair, all play their parts.

Celebrities live under a particular set of pressure-cooker circumstances. Often an innate low self-esteem has been bolstered by a life-style full of unrealistic expectation and false notions of perfection. Those whose careers are failing or who have become enmeshed in scandal are often forced to play out their battles with loneliness, depression, alcohol and drugs in the public domain.

Rachel Howard’s ‘’Suicide Paintings’’ were first shown at the Bohen Foundation in New York, in 2007, and exhibited at Haunch of Venison, London in 2008. The series evolved after an acquaintance of Howard’s committed suicide. He was discovered, not in the imagined drama, ‘swinging from the rafters’, but kneeling in a pose almost of prayer. It was this particular detail that Howard found most disturbing, and which led her to create the series, coupled with the fact that for her, suicide is one of the last taboos. The source material came from trawling through forensic magazines and internet sites. These images were then abstracted from their contexts within Howard’s rapidly executed line drawings.

In response to these the award-winning poet, novelist and art critic, Sue Hubbard, who has written about Howard’s art work, has created a series of poems that sit alongside the images in an emotional and visual dialogue, and illuminate the deaths of women as various as Diane Arbus, Judy Garland, Dora Carrington and a female suicide bomber. Taken from her newly published third collection, The Forgetting and Remembering of Air, these disarmingly, direct and evocative poems explore in a language that is muscular and lyrical, painterly yet spare, the psychology of these very different women in extremis.

This brave, bold, collaboration between two women artists, each highly regarded in her own field, demonstrates that there is still something important to say about the poignancy and tragedy of the human condition.

Rachel Howard is represented by Blain Southern and Sue Hubbard’s new novel, Girl in White is published by Cinnamon Press and her new poetry collection, The Forgetting and Remembering of Air, by Salt Publishing.

PRIVATE VIEW | SOERDITCH: Diary of a Neighbourhood

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 18:30 +0000

Soerditch: A Diary of a Neighbourhood

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:00 +0000

An intimate portrait of London’s most talked about post code is revealed in 125 new drawings by Adam Dant titled ‘ Soerditch ; Diary of a Neighbourhood ‘.

Dant has created a drawing a day, each of which encapsulates a particular aspect of the life and stories that surround his Shoreditch studio. Taking their form and attitude from the traditional editorial cartoons of Giles et al each of Dant’s drawings combines a familiar location with a random scrap of overheard gossip, profanity, inanity, information or opinion to present a compendium of views that forge a vivid picture of contemporary life.

Choosing to use the areas original soubriquet ‘Soerditch’ after the local ‘sour ditch that issued into the Thames’ the subjects of these pictures are intended to echo the centuries old history of Shoreditch as an extra-mural site of all manner of theatrical and bawdy events and to serve as an echo of the prattle and twitterings of those former ages. In this historical sense they might also be reminiscent of the scenes of daily life encountered in Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo’ .

A 128 page paperback volume ‘Soeditch ; Diary of a neighbourhood’ has been produced in the fashion of a traditional newspaper cartoon annual and will be available at the exhibition.

Elizabeth Cope

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 12:00 +0000

A Collection of Works by Elizabeth Cope

11^th January 2013 – 22^nd February 2013

Reviewed by Sandra Gibson

Located near the junction of Brick Lane and Princelet Street, Eleven Spitalfields is the airy and gracious setting for painter Elizabeth Cope's latest exhibition. Recently featured in 'Living Irish Artists', by Robert O'Byrne, this prolific artist offers us a glimpse of the impressive range of her work. I have known her paintings to be displayed in hay barns, pig stys and stables; I have found them rolled up like carpets, then rolled out to flourish like a magician's trick; I have seen them displayed on the high walls of her sitting room at Shankill Castle or peeping out among the treasures in an antique shop. These exhibited at Eleven Spitalfields are her paintings on their best behaviour, the protective environment of this lovely space conferring a sense of formal and respectful occasion.

'Anyone for Tennis?' the paintings chosen for the publicity cards, gives an effective idea of the decorative kinetic power and compositional vigour of Elizabeth Cope's paintings - not to mention her capacity to shock through the use of grotesque imagery. Mercifully, not all of her paintings depict endangered scrotums or we would have no respite from the uncomfortable realization that life is an arena of fervent, aggressive competitiveness, overlooked by the spectrum of death. The eye can also hover on a spacious landscape of tranquil greens and reposeful blues ('Lugnaquilla', from Ballitore, 1976) or relax in the orderliness of the Matisse-like 'Reuben with outstretched arm' (2002) or luxuriate in the chromatic intensity of Lobster on red with pink stripes (2007) and 'Beached Boat, Arran Islands' (1997).

Then there are two treatments of the nude to draw comparison.' Jacqueline Bachman (nude)', 1989, inhabits a domestic space and the artist has echoed this in the ambivalent manner she has depicted the lower part of the body. There is the merest suggestion of an apron in the way the belly is painted at the same time that the artist has emphasised the rounded fecundity of her subject. 'Susannah, Michelle and dog Tassie' (1998), on the other hand, is a good example of Elizabeth Cope's treatment of background as decorative opportunity rather than as sociological context. The 'realistically' painted nudes are placed in front of a flattened background; they do not inhabit the space in the same way that Jacqueline does. The artist has used figurative poses to suggest things about their contrasting personalitites rather than contextual details to convey gender roles.

The Vauxhall Street paintings should be seen as a diptych as well as individually because they share a common origin. Elizabeth Cope's recent work has included a series of cut-outs - a technique that evolved from her irritable desire to cut things that didn't work., out of her paintings. So, this literally happened and a negative situation became a positive opportunity as demonstrated in Cut out keys on white, Vauxhall Street (2012) and Saw, Keys, Hammer, Vauxhall Street (20120. The artist has cut out objects from a painting and stuck them on another background. (i don't know whether they had offended the artist or whetehr she has skipped that phase!) The remaining painting from which the items have been excised has then been stuck on to a fresh canvas, which shows up the absence shapes, creating areas of space for the eye to rest and abstracting the shape from the object originally depicted there. The two paintings are visually related but each offers a different tonal experience, like variations on a musical theme.

It's a mistake to regard Elizabeth Cope only as a colourist. Also on display is a collection of etchings which demonstrate her linear prowess - here is an opportunity to appreciate this without being distracted by her use of colour. As is often the case in this artist's work, one is aware of the processional nature of her method: a giraffe can be depicted with three different head positions because she has captured the continuity of the reptilian movement of the neck. She is more interested in the process of working than its product.

One painting which beautifully balances colour with line, serenity with drama, is 'Telegraph Poles, Tegucipalca' (1997). Its serenity comes from the pervasive blue and from the balance between the stability of the intersecting horizontal and vertical lines and the dynamic of the nervy wires of communication. This is a painting where the literal coexists with the interpretive: the telegraph pole forms a wooden cross combined with a phallus and we must make of that what we will, addicted as we are to narratives.

'Tyson's Chimpanzee' (2012) offers a different balance: we encounter three skeletons and an allusion to mining, with its undertone of incarceration. Yet in spite of the sombre ideas this is a painting of great decorative charm in which the bony reality of death has been disarmed through humour and choice of palette. You wouldn't be at all surprised if the skeletons began to perform that bone song and dance amongst the ferns.

All the successful exhibitions I have visited had one thing in common: the exhibition and the exhibition space complimented one another. The combination of the timeless classicism recreated by Chris and Sarah Dyson at Eleven Spitalfields with Elizabeth Cope's spontaneous, in-the-moment expressionist paintings is the overall balancing factor in this show, providing an oasis of warmth this drear winter.

What's coming up next year...

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:23 +0000

JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2013

Elizabeth Cope

MARCH - APRIL 2013

Adam Dant

MAY - JUNE 2013

Sue Hubbard

& Rachel Howard

JULY - AUGUST 2013

Peter Wylie

SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER 2013

Ian Harper

NOVEMBER - DECEMBER 2013

Victoria Kiff

AFTER WALTER

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 12:00 +0000

The paintings in this exhibition are a direct response to Walter Sickert’s Camden Town nudes shown at the Courtauld Institute of Art in late 2007, and in particular to ‘La Hollandaise’ (Tate). Having visited the exhibition many times, McFadyen felt that Sickert would have had to go some way further to shock an audience today. As a consequence this collection of ‘Sickert-ian’ erotic paintings have become somewhat more explicit in some cases, while others retain a softness and romance. With tongue firmly in cheek the work serves as an acknowledgement of the current trend towards nostalgic feeling around antiquity and remains separate and distinct to the urban landscapes for which McFadyen has become well known.

‘After Walter’ consists of over 60 boudoir interiors in a cod Edwardian style with distressed decorative frames. They are meant as a complete installation thus the idea of exhibiting them in 24 Princelet Street, a faked up-real Georgian house, which architect & gallery owner Chris Dyson transformed from a dilapidated former sweat shop, stripped of all its original features, into a wonderful reconstruction of its former glories. The transformation is both dramatic (considering its original state) and subtle, effortlessly sitting alongside all of the other Georgian houses in the street. An important element of the exhibition, and its location in Spitalfields, is that the works are shot through with artifice, further connecting them with the space.

LONDON'S CALLING

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 10:54 +0000

LONDON’S CALLING brings together the work of Jessica Voorsanger and Bob & Roberta Smith. Both artists presenting their independent visions of London following a summer bookended by the Queens Jubilee and the Olympic Games, which have both ensured the worlds gaze has been focused on the capital. Where Voorsanger uses historic images of London as the starting point for her series of collages, ‘This Is London’, Bob & Roberta Smith are looking firmly to London of the future.

Mostly known for their humourous sign paintings, Bob & Roberta explore the relationship between art and politics. They challenge their audience, elevating them from passive observer and instead directly engaging them in the debate at hand. These bold and colourful works are painted onto found materials and call for the return of the Tram system to East London. This utopian vision of the East London of the near future is further reinforced in the painting, ‘Imagine the Mile End Road of the Future’ by the addition of cycle lanes, electric cars and lavender lined streets.

Through her art, Voorsanger explores the concept of celebrity within popular culture through obsession, fans and media representation. She works across a variety of media ranging from painting to performance. The projects themselves often dictate the medium that is most appropriate.

Through her interactive exhibitions, visitors are invited to wear wigs and accessories of famous television and film personalities and perform (often through karaoke) as a reaction to the onslaught of Reality TV and how celebrity has changed as a concept. Celebrity has become interchangeable, allowing us to become them. In the recent series of collages displayed here, ‘This Is London’, she explores the random nature of current celebrity through found images and drawn interventions. The starting point for all of the images is a juxtaposition of London locations, celebrity intervention and a direct drawn reaction to the spaces - ranging from the architecture to the formal shapes and lines created from window ledges, telephone lines etc.

On Sunday 14th October, Eleven Spitalfields will be hosting an interview exchange between our artists, which will be followed by a guided tour of the local area taking in spots of interest and perhaps a bagel or two! For more information or to reserve a place, please contact the gallery on 020 7247 1816.

PRIVATE VIEW | RECENT SMALL WORKS

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 18:30 +0000

HEAD TO HEAD | The artist in conversation

Wed, 16 May 2012 18:30 +0000

Eleven Spitalfields will be hosting two ‘Meet the artist’ events in the coming weeks with Celia Scott.
These are set to take place on Monday 11th June 6-8pm, and Saturday 16th June 10am-1pm.
For more information, contact info@elevenspitalfields.com

RECENT SMALL WORKS

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 11:53 +0000

Small Paintings: Cosmic Glimpses

Frank Bowling’s paintings offer a vision of a universe of his own imagining. They are images of an energetic chaos in which the mineral phenomena of fire and water, air and earth are caught in the very process of generation; out of this elemental and undifferentiated energy emerge the ever-changing morphologies of flame and light-fall, waterfall and cloud, rainbow, rain and the mists of aerial weathers. In this cosmos of atmospheric or aqueous colour-light may be discerned, with the shock of familiarity, the vegetable forms of tree, bush, leaf and flower; the rough surfaces of earth; the evanescent shimmer, shadow and flash of sunlit mudflat, forest clearing, flowing river; the tactility of animal scale and skin.

The powerful object-presence of Bowling’s paintings (whatever their scale) derives from the artful actuality of their facture, and this is true of all his work since the mid-1970s, when the beautiful and utterly distinctive ‘poured paintings’ now on show at Tate Britain were made. From that time on Bowling’s work has consisted in a kind of collaboration with materials and time. The materials are mineral: diverse pigments and unconventional media, acrylic gels and chemical solvents, whose dynamic admixtures and interactions have unpredictable but managed outcomes. Time is necessary to the creative combination of ingenious aleatory procedures and natural processes. With Bowling’s attentive assistance the paintings make themselves; are themselves instances of the phenomena they picture.

But in what does this creative assistance consist? To the daily practice of painting the artist brings twin intensities of memory and desire. Memory of a life lived in diverse places: his birthplace and its landscapes of river, coastal flats, forest and seacoast, with a mother gifted in the skillful artistry of milliner and dressmaker; London with the great Thames a constant presence, and the conversation and critical insight of artist friends; New York, at first in SoHo among disputatious and competitive colleagues, and later in creative solitude looking over the shining East River; Skowhegan, Maine, among green fields, woods and streams, where he was reminded of his great predecessors Constable and Turner. Above all, art and its histories, European and American, have been central to this actively imaginative recollection of things past. These small works have their own small grandeur; they are glimpses of the cosmos.

Mel Gooding, 2012

Frank Bowling is represented by and shows courtesy of Hales Gallery, London. An exhibition of his recent large paintings is currently on show at 7 Bethnal Green Road, E1 7LA.

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.

To make order, please contact;

info@elevenspitalfields.com

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