Archive for July 2012
Four Yellows
Perhaps four semi-transparent yellows crossing each other on the white of the canvas, resulting in 16 different colours, gives colours that are so close to each other that it is too difficult to distinguish them. (?)
Signal VS Noise in Yellows and White, July 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 10″x10″
Kierkegaard’s Repetition
After several repeat readings of Kierkegaard’s book Repetition…
…a major theme of which is the impossibility of repetition, I have become convinced once again that repetition is indeed impossible. At the risk of repeating myself, I will say again that repetition is indeed impossible.
I repeat, repetition is impossible
One of the key operations I am using here is of course repetition. I aim to repeat a line, a move, a colour, a quadrant.
Process and Performance 4, July 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 10″x10″
Yet I discover that I am doing it anew, even when what I thought I was doing was repetition. I’ll say that last bit again: even when what I thought I was doing was repetition.
The end of the future
The End of the Future exhibition opening at Transition Gallery tomorrow (preview this evening) and showing until 12 August features Clive A Brandon, Matthew Houlding, Sam Knowles and Alex Pearl. I hope to get along before it closes ( If I can make my Olympics-avoiding visits to London coincide with the gallery opening times). Here’s the blurb about it:
Under the bricks and rubble of the grand Olympic project lie the broken dreams of past utopias. From Ballard to Boris, the grand advance of modernism has been abandoned beneath the dystopian shards.
Our collective current state of affairs is highlighted by past optimistic proposals such as The Festival of Britain (1951) and post-war building programmes with essentially socialist drives to improve society which are in stark contrast to the regeneration schemes and public finance initiatives, which now embody the failures of both late capitalist Conservatism and New Labour.
The End of the Future coincides with the London Olympics, for some a positive affirmation of the highest ideals, for others a cynical corporate scheme with the veneer of regeneration. The four participating artists look back at lost ideals and eras of optimism and present these though a haze of nostalgia for a future that never materialised and a knowing acceptance of failure.
Sam Knowles
Funny how once a theme comes to awareness, you keep coming across it in slightly different incarnations. Maybe it is synchronicity or seriality, or just the filtering process: I am looking for it unconsciously. I think I found the same or similar theme in Luke Turner’s article on the New Aesthetic:
…we harbour nostalgia for a past-future, one that failed to materialise, for the promise of flying cars, jetpacks and hoverboards that never came to pass (but that we secretly hope still might). We are thus cynics, and yet eternal optimists, our technologies driving our melancholia and invention in equal measure. The emergent metamodern condition allows us to face all directions in time at once, oscillating between the promises and pitfalls of the past, present and future.
And again here, at Henri Art Magazine on Retro Painting
We are at a zero point – Postmodern thought has had it’s day and we’ve been left with an unwieldy Mannerist culture that no longer makes sense. We can begin, right now, by thinking about and questioning the paths of our past in a different way, and in so doing, make a new way into the future, understand a new way of seeing. I keep thinking that the contemporary philosopher Graham Harman’s idea about the primacy of things is very important – object-oriented philosophy. It gives us an opportunity to see, not through words or contextual arrangements, but in direct confrontation with something that isn’t contingent on our “perspective,” as something primary and other, as a rising subject. “The sensual object is a unity over against the swirling accidents that accompany it”. We are not concentrated on the vastness of the shifting ground per se, but on the thing itself, the reality of the thing. This switch of one’s perspective is very interesting to me as a painter at this very moment. And I think it offers us many exciting theoretical visual possibilities!
I think I also found similar themes over at Jewish Philosophy Place. It is too early for me to say much more about them now, only that I am finding them interesting…
Pop up at the old lock up
The artists exhibiting at the pop-up exhibition Salon 1, the Summer Exhibition of Contemporary Art at the Old Lock Up Studio in Cromford on the 18th August 2012 are: Diane Atherton, Jackie Berridge, Clay Smith, Nick Hersey, Ivan Smith, Anthony Hall, Rachael Pinks, Jen Aitken, Filomena Rodriguez, Amanda Collis, Kim Sharratt, Vitor Azevedo, Nicola Eleanor Waite, Gareth Buxton, David Manley, Andy Parkinson, Justine Nettleton, Deb Allit and Dermot Punnett.
Having a quick look at the web sites has got me in the mood for seeing interesting work of many different types, whether abstract paintings by David Manley, narrative paintings by Jackie Berridge, photomontage of Clay Smith (by the way, am I the only one making a distinction these days between montage and collage, and have I even got it right?) abstract landscape collage paintings by Rachael Pinks, sculpture (?) by Ivan Smith etc.
What I am noticing most is that much of the work is classifiable with a / sign, whether it is sculpture/environmental art, painting/collage, abstract/figurative. I like the “neither this nor that/both this and that” of many of the kinds of work being exhibited. Even my own work which mostly stays put in one specific discipline is increasingly becoming painting/construction.
I think it promises to be a really interesting exhibition, and with music by Corey Mwamba an excellent evening. Come and see it if you can!
Salon 1 at the Old Lock Up Studio, Cromford
Another event I am looking forward to (not least because I am taking part) is Salon 1, the Summer Exhibition of Contemporary Art at the Old Lock Up Studio in Cromford on the 18th August 2012, for one night only!
Corey Mwamba will be providing the music, a real treat. Catch him on you tube here
What better for a summer’s evening? Come along if you are anywhere near.
Turps Banana at Vigo Gallery, London
This upcoming exhibition looks interesting. I am planning a visit or two.
TURPS BANANA 12 JULY – 17 AUGUST 2012
Vigo Gallery 22 OLD BOND STREET LONDON W1S 4PY
An exhibition to raise funds for the TURPS ART SCHOOL opening in September.
In September 2012, Turps Banana, the painting magazine written exclusively by painters, will open the doors of its new art school based in Bermondsey. The one-year course aims to provide an intense mentoring structure for committed painters and, as well as a back to basics approach, Turps will have the support and involvement of some of the most illustrious painters who have worked with the magazine during the publication of 11 issues.
Although all of the artists have donated works to help to support the magazine and the development of the art school, this exhibition has been carefully considered to reflect that which is current, significant and critical in contemporary painting, including abstract works by Thomas Nozkowski, Mali Morris and Phil Allen, and painters who have championed a figurative approach such as Chantal Joffe, Neal Tait and Dinos Chapman. The show will change with new works being added during the course of the exhibition.
PHIL ALLEN
DINOS CHAPMAN
NIGEL COOKE
MARCUS HARVEY
GAVIN LOCKHEART
PETER ASHTON JONES
CHANTAL JOFFE
HARLAND MILLER
MALI MORRIS
RYAN MOSLEY
THOMAS NOZKOWSKI
NEAL TAIT
Abstract Critical on “Double Vision”
I was interested to read Abstract Critical’s write up (click to read) of a show I posted about a few times recently.
Turps Banana Issue 11
I love it when that Turps Banana hits my door mat. I know that I am in for a treat of looking at good reproductions of interesting paintings, reading thought-provoking articles and interviews and then pondering on it all for ages afterwards. Sorry, if I am sounding like an advert. I just can’t help being a big fan.
It says it on the cover, so I won’t tell you that it is Turps Banana, issue 11.
In issue 11 there are two interviews, or conversations, that I am particularly enjoying, with two very different abstract painters: Katharina Grosse and Jeffrey Steele, the interviewers being Peter Dickinson and Katrina Blannin respectively. Dickinson opens with a statement about abstraction, which leads to a discussion about different definitions, Grosse saying ” I am not an abstract painter any more” where abstraction is understood to be “abstracting from or generating a residue of something seen”. Dickinson proposes a contemporary definition, where it is “the process of thinking and action” the resultant product being a record of that process. Clearly, the paintings/installations of Katarina Grosse come into this category, and so do the paintings of Jeffrey Steele, though the products of these two artists seem poles apart. There is something at least apparently subjective and random in the Grosse paintings in contrast to the mathematical and systems orientation of the Steele paintings, and Blannin does a great job of teasing out the origins, rationale and methods of his approach.
Neither interview is “easy” and both provoke as many questions as they answer (in a twitter exchange with painter Dean Melbourne on the morning we opened our copies of the Turps we acknowledged that our initial response was to feel a bit thick) which I think is what a good journal is meant to do.
Red Rhombus
It’s a composite of four “identical” paintings, arranged in mirror opposition, resulting in the central red rhombus figure…
Red Rhombus,July 2012, acrylic on canvas, 24″x24″
…and what else?
patternsthatconnect 