Make Colour Sing, Nottingham Pop Up Exhibition

Pop ups, by their nature last only a short time and this one finishes Sunday night, having been open almost all of this week, at Nottingham Society of Artists Gallery,  Friar Lane, Nottingham. It’s a survey of contemporary abstraction curated by printmaker and painter Laine Tomkinson, who includes some wonderful prints of her own in the show, where colour-resonance is a major preoccupation.

Her screenprints sometimes resemble collages in their multi-layered-ness, some may even be collage, which could be a sub plot for her curation of this exhibition.

Collage artist EC has three works in this show. They are small and in one sense quite delicate, I get the impression that they could easily be damaged, yet the paint handling (these collages appear to be made of cut-up paintings) is so sturdy and confident, that the works also look robust.

John Stockton’s prints are photographed collages that lose their materiality in the transition from thing to image, whereas Martin Heron’s beautiful drawings appear to dematerialize as repeated lines of colour tail off in concert, creating gaps where the paper is left bare, perceived as positive shapes that glow. His ink on scrim pieces also dematerialize into shifting shades and hues of reflected light.

David Manley’s large vertical paintings on paper, play with both the physicality of paint, (we get drips and scribbles and mixed-on-paper areas of colour), and its image-making potential, (we find ‘primitive’ evocations of signs and symbols here and there). Paint is at one and the same time, physical stuff that can be pushed around canvas or paper and an immaterial vehicle for colour, and sometimes for associative content. (In my photo a bit of Nottingham architecture is also reflected in the glass.)

Neil Clements small paintings on card are direct presentations of colour-shapes, often two colours only, creating figure-ground shifts, my perception of them continuously alternating between positive and negative, impossible to fix on one view and have perceived the whole.

Richard Perry uses colour to describe the various planes of geometric shape in the small scale sculptures on view here, but colour behaving as it does, description gives way to dissolution, not of shape but of weight.

In works on view here it is the materiality of the support and the demateriality of the colour, as something that exists only in perception to which I keep on returning, as if colour could switch to auditory channel and sing.