Check (Yellow Blue, 1 & 2)

Andy Parkinson, Check (Yellow Blue, 1 & 2), 2015, acrylic on two canvases, 12″ x 24″

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Geometry, Wonky and Otherwise at DEDA

Geometry, Wonky and Otherwise at DEDA brings together nine abstract painters who approach something like the geometric in a variety of ways. Andrew Bracey, for example, geometricizes the human figures that feature in reproductions of relatively well known paintings. The triangular structures superimposed on the figures have a unifying effect, the individual particularities being evened out, as if draped by geometric fabric. A symbolic, or metaphoric reading, might find in these attractive works a criticism of the hegemonic geometry of the social order.

Reconfigure Paintings by Andrew Bracey

There may be a nudge towards the symbolic in the disquiet of Sarah R Key’s geometries. There’s something unsettling about the clusters of shapes hovering in an indeterminate space. Someone suggested to me that they have a science-fiction look about them, and the title of the one photographed below “Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space” appears to confirm that. It would perhaps be too far-fetched to cite Freud’s concept of the uncanny because whilst Key’s paintings provoke a certain sense of foreboding and loneliness, feelings of unpleasantness and repulsion also associated with that notion are not at all my experience. In fact quite the reverse.

Sarah R Key, Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, 2014, oil on canvas, 90 x 100cm

Richard Perry’s paintings share some similarities with Key’s, but without the unnerving feelings. One of the differences is that whilst in Key’s paintings the clusters of shapes that form a strange, shadowless central object, exist in a deep space receding away from the viewer, usually larger than the viewer but at some distance away, Perry’s objects on the other hand, seem to project outwards from the canvas, inhabiting the viewer’s space yet they are smaller than human scale, like something you could examine in your hands, such as an uncut precious stone or a mineral. Key’s geometries are austere, sublime even, whereas Perry’s are friendly, at times approaching the domestic. Jewellery comes to mind because of its potential for framing the extraordinary.

Untitled paintings by Richard Perry, 2015, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 25 x 30 cm.

Louisa Chambers’ geometry may be closer to Andrew Bracey’s in having the appearance of fabric or, more accurately, of wrapping-paper that is folded or screwed up and discarded, and then used as a model. Her Fold/Unfold series are like abstract still-lives, paintings of provisional ‘sculptures’, often including a horizon line. The scale shifts, the objects can appear small or large, the negative spaces in Raise 1, for example, becoming, on second reading, the underside of a structure such as a bridge or a tunnel.

Louisa Chambers, Raise I, 2015, oil on linen, 30 x 40 cm

Other paintings here by Chambers feature less of an illusionistic space. My favourite is Interlocking Pattern, in which two very different looking patterns, each founded on a grid which is also divided along the diagonals, meet along a more-or-less central point.

My own paintings generally explore patterns and patterning. The ones in this show include my series of ten small canvases, based on the geometric paving tiles along Nottingham’s Long Row East and a new larger work entitled Ninety- Two Divisions Square Duo 2 (close-up below).

Andy Parkinson, Ninety-Two Division Square x Two 2, 2015, acrylic on two canvases
76 x 152 cm.

Lucy Cox’s unmoored, sometimes patterned, rectangles delight in the ambiguous spaces they themselves create, whilst her coloured circles can be read equally as autonomous shapes situated in front of a rectangle or as being cut-out, revealing a further coloured plane behind it. My friend wondered, tongue in cheek, whether we might make three dimensional versions of these paintings, knowing that such a project would quickly fail. To borrow a Greenbergian idea, the spatial relationships are available only to eyesight.

Lucy Cox, Zippy Five, 2015, Acrylic on canvas
90 x 120 cm.

The show is curated by David Manley, who also shows some magnificent paintings, including those on circular aluminium supports that merge layers of polygons, as in Old Sixfiveseven Again, where planes of serial hexagons pentagons and heptagons combine to form a visual, cacophony. And then there are the smaller, more mysterious paintings, like Bright Eyes, almost surrealist in feel. The colours being reminiscent of de Chirico, without the figuration, and the geometry resembling esoteric signs or ancient pictograms. I hear that there is another version of this painting currently on show in Manley’s solo exhibition Winter Cycle at New Court Gallery, Repton. I am hoping to get there before it closes on 30 October.

David Manley, More Bright Eyes, 2015, acrylic & vinyl on panel, 30 x 30 cm.

In Marion Piper’s Skipdance installation numerous canvases are positioned in relation to each other along a sizeable wall. The wall becomes the painting, each individual canvas the geometry, within which differences of line and colour are explored. I am fascinated by the subtle variations of line quality in the gridded sections.

Marion Piper, Skip Dance
Pencil & Acrylic on canvas on oil, 2015, dimensions variable

Terry Greene’s slightly off geometry, (in this show often triangular forms, arrived at by dividing a rectangle diagonally), provides for him an opportunity to explore colour. I want to say colour relationships but that’s probably not quite right. What is “right” is the way each piece looks to have reached a “correct” conclusion, as if always the result of a tough negotiation that is eventually resolved in a win/win settlement.

Terry Greene, Tricot, acrylic on canvas, 14 x 10”, Marylebone, acrylic on canvas, 14 x 10”

There are over 70 paintings on view in this exhibition that finishes on 7 November.

Saturation Point Projects present Clear Sight at Sluice_ 2015

Saturation Point Projects present Clear Sight at Sluice_ 2015

Judith Duquemin / Hanz Hancock / Patrick Morrissey / Laurence Noga / Andy Parkinson / Charley Peters

“The more stuff in it, the busier the work of art, the worse it is. More is less. Less is more. The eye is a menace to clear sight.” – Ad Reinhardt

This exhibition will show a selection of work by contemporary artists who all adopt a reductive position in the context of current art practice. ‘Reduction’ as a term is not limited to defining a single artistic movement, but the threads or references contained within the semiotics of their work demonstrate a consistency – in the use of geometric metaphor, iconographic presence, systems-related elements, and other characteristics associated with the methodology of constructivism and its stylistic/intellectual descendants. The exhibition seeks to demonstrate that this genre has a strong, ongoing presence and that its traditions continue to be developed and explored.

16 – 18 October 2015, 11 – 6pm. Bargehouse, OXO Tower Wharf, South Bank.

Reception: 15 October, 5 – 8.30pm