Posts Tagged ‘abstract’
Painter/Painter: Dan Perfect, Fiona Rae, at Nottingham Castle
The Long Gallery at Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery is an excellent setting for sixteen marvelous paintings, seven by Dan Perfect and nine by Fiona Rae. In the adjacent room there are some smaller works on paper by Perfect and collages by Rae along with a video about their respective practices. Curated by Tristram Aver, this must be one of the best shows I have seen in Nottingham for a long time, though we are doing well this year, a Tess Jaray exhibition having just finished at Lakeside and Somewhat Abstract continuing at Nottingham Contemporary until 29 June.
In London, almost a year ago I saw small paintings by Rae and Perfect in a group show at the Lion and Lamb Summer Saloon, and when, around that time, I also heard that the Nottingham show was being planned I thought that the two would make a brilliant combination, not knowing then that the artists are in fact married to each other.
I had been impressed by the Dan Perfect painting Operator, and much of what I admired in that little painting I am seeing again here at Nottingham Castle only on a much larger scale.
Dan Perfect, Operator, 2011, oil and acrylic on linen, 38x46cm. My photo
I wonder if the operator in the title is the artist, acting upon the materials of canvas and paint, or maybe even the painting itself as it operates upon me the viewer, changing my experience, visually and psychologically. Likewise, the huge painting Transporter, here at Nottingham Castle, affects me, taking me somewhere, similar to the way that a dramatic natural landscape might act upon my gaze, as if I were a passive observer, transported even to some ‘spiritual’ place, when in fact I am the one who is actively constructing the world I see. I am the operator, the transporter or the Generator, another of the paintings here. Then again, maybe the motifs, figures or gestures within each of these paintings take on such agency, painted marks or patterns first creating spaces that they then inhabit. In Generator clusters of atom-like, circular forms, seem to hover in spatial crevices, but take the motif away and no space is now perceived. In Transporter a blue disc atop a meandering line could be read as a wheel travelling along a highway, without the disc the line wouldn’t be a highway and without the line the disc would not seem to travel. Once the highway association has been made I am cued to read the rest of the painting as landscape, with trees and mountains perhaps, even whilst knowing full well that no such landscape has actually been described.
Dan Perfect, ‘Transporter’, 2014, Oil and acrylic on linen, 183 x 257 cm. Image: Copyright Dan Perfect
Whilst I may be paying too much attention to the titles and not enough to the objects themselves, I think Perfect chooses his titles carefully, so that when I come across a painting entitled Laocoön or another entitled Cerberus, surely I must be expected to think of, in the first case, the famous statue in the Vatican Museum, and its reference to Greek mythology, or, in the second, of the mythological, gigantic three-headed, creature guarding the gates of Hades. And in viewing the painting Cerberus I start to think that the central white shape might resemble a head of the dreaded creature, and then to wonder what might be guarded, i.e prevented from getting out of the painting into the external world, or vice versa. And even as I am talking to myself about this. I hear Perfect speaking on video about his paintings being abstract in the same sense that mathematics is abstract, i.e. existing in its own tautologous world.
Noting the title Laocoön, I cannot help but bring to mind the article Towards a Newer Laocoön by Clement Greenberg in which he made his (in)famous case for value in abstract painting based on medium specificity. Martin Herbert makes this connection in his essay in the excellent catalogue for this show. He also reminds us, if reminder were needed, that Perfects painting Full Fathom Five, borrows its title from Jackson Pollock‘s 1947 painting of the same name. In Pollock’s famous painting we find bits of the ‘real world’ embedded into the surface, objects such as nails, thumbtacks, cigarette butts, coins, buttons, and a key. The ‘real world’ has changed a lot since 1947, one massive change being the rise of the computer and digital media. Could it be said that embedded in Perfect’s painting are bits of the virtual world, using as he does in his practice, Photoshop to manipulate sketched material, a hard copy of which he then uses as a ‘score’ for the paintings? The digitized image finds its way into the painting. In Full Fathom Five a swirling gesture in the bottom left hand corner changes colour abruptly halfway through its stroke, it looks like a digital edit. Similarly, the very fine circular doodles in Transporter look a lot like digital doodles. I have the sense that I am witnessing a visual conversation between the digital and the analogue.
Dan Perfect, ‘Laocoön‘, 2013, Oil and acrylic on linen, 183 x 257 cm, Image: Copyright Dan Perfect
I think I find a similar dialogue taking place in Fiona Rae’s paintings, only here the digital seems to be referenced more in the synthetic colours and the insertion of manufactured collaged elements from childish popular culture, girly stationery, stickers of cute cartoon pandas, her now familiar mixing of crass pop decor with the tropes of Abstract Expressionism, that continues to have the power to jar, entertain, and provoke.
If Perfect’s paintings resemble landscapes Rae’s are more like full-figure portraits, at least in their orientation, there is something person-like in their physical scale, but optically it is space that seems to be portrayed. Both artists open up spaces that appear cosmic, Rae’s to an even greater degree, her choice often of blue hues, the inclusion of stick-on stationery stars and her tracing direction lines from their points all add to this impression of the stellar.
Fiona Rae, ‘Does now exist?’, 2013, oil on canvas, 213.4 x 175.3 cm. Image: Copyright Fiona Rae, Courtesy Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
Rae’s has an amazing facility with paint, her dramatic swooping gestures look effortless and also delightfully intricate. There’s something Rauschenbergian about them in their faux authenticity, yet with playfulness and a much greater sense of enjoyment than in Rauschenberg. Rae seems to revel in the contradictions of technological culture. The suggestion of personal expression and subjectivity yet also its knowing denial. Her inclusion of geometric motifs, references also the Constructivist strand of abstraction, acknowledging both its promise and its failure. Am I indulging my imagination too much seeing in these paintings a hint at a new vision, an acceptance of where we are now, tentatively hoping for a future that is more than parody, irony and the feeling of being stuck?
Fiona Rae, ‘See your world’, 2013, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 213.4 x 175.3 cm. Image: Copyright Fiona Rae, Courtesy Timothy Taylor Gallery, London
In the painting See Your World, a synthetic sky is populated by squiggles, gestures and apparently decomposing cartoon pandas. It’s high-tech Abstract Expressionism-meets-Manga, that I think does reflect the contemporary east/west, post apocalyptic, almost sci-fi world we now inhabit, without quite representing it. Just as the pandas appear both cute and sinister, the technological future might seem both attractive and menacing. I am reminded of the small painting by Rae that I saw at that Lion and Lamb exhibition, Party Time is Coming, it might even be here already, and it’s not necessarily a good thing, even though I do think Rae’s paintings are a very good thing!
Fiona Rae, Party Time Is Coming, my photo
Dan Perfect and Fiona Rae’s joint exhibition, ‘Painter, Painter: Dan Perfect, Fiona Rae’, is on show at Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery from 3rd May to 6th July. The exhibition, will travel to Southampton City Art Gallery 18th July to 18th October.
Mapping the Abstract at Beers.Lambert
Seeing the current exhibition at Beers.Lambert, and feeling at first that the paintings in this show are too ‘figurative’ to be Mapping the Abstract, puts me in mind of the difficulty of talking about abstraction, and particularly the ambiguity of the word “abstract” in relation to painting. In one sense, the further removed our experience is from empirical reality the more “abstract” it is. Thinking in terms of “levels of abstraction”, seeing something in the “real world” is a representation “in our heads”, an image that is one removed from “reality”, already an abstraction even at the point of perception, to use Korzybski’s distinction: a map rather than the territory. When an artist then seeks to represent in paint what s/he sees, that representation is a further abstraction, a higher level abstraction if you will. To then “abstract from” that representation is a higher level of abstraction still. In this sense of the word “abstract”, a representation is a lower level abstraction.
However, the expression “non-representational” has also become synonymous with “abstract” because abstract art seeks to do something different than to represent. Consequently, some have preferred the word “constructive”, or “constructionist” (as did Charles Biederman, for whom Korzybski was an important influence) or “concrete”, which in that other sense is the exact opposite of “abstract”. Rather than being removed from observable reality the abstract painting is itself a sub-set of that reality, an autonomous self-organizing system. Things become further complicated when that autonomy is itself called into question as it has, for example by abstract painters such Jonathan Lasker, Francis Baudevin, Ingrid Calame or Fiona Rae, to name only a few.
It is against this complex background that the three painters in this show: Blake Daniels, Robert Fry and Benjamin Brett could be said to map the abstract.
Installation shot: far wall – Robert Fry, Related Study E, 2011,oil,acrylic and mixed media on canvas, left – Benjamin Brett, Untitled, 2013, oil on linen, and Dancer, 2013, oil on linen. Image by courtesy of Beers.Lambert
Benjamin Brett‘s Dancer is very clearly a figure, as the title suggests, what the dancer is actually doing is difficult to work out, though s/he seems to be making a gesture not unlike the gestures the painter has made on the canvas. I have no way of knowing whether an observed event was the occasion for an abstraction or whether something resembling a figure was the result of ‘free’ gestural mark making. I recall that Kandinsky, in relation to his own paintings, distinguished between an impression (an abstracted representation) and an improvisation (an image that presents itself from within the mark-making process). I wonder whether Brett’s Dancer might borrow from both these approaches.
His painting Untitled, grabs my attention because of its similarity to a pattern I have been exploring in my own work, a diagonally oriented grid resulting in a rhomboid chequerboard, resembling floor tiles. My interest has been in how when the scale is small this formation becomes a network of scintilla. Brett’s formation is large scale which seems to reduce the optical ‘buzz’ of the image, retaining whilst slowing down, the figure ground oscillation. The contrast between the hard edge, flatly rendered ’tiles’ and the loose gestural graffiti drawn over the top tends to create a ‘background’ of the geometrical pattern, except that the gestures then interact with the shifting of figure/ground so that at times I attempt to situate them spatially somewhere in between the dark and light tiles, in an impossible space, or one that is available only to the sense of sight. I am unsure what to make of the drawings of hands, a cup, a rib cage (?) and I relate to them as if their purpose was to deface the geometry. Then I become aware of a blue mark, roughly central toward the lower left hand quadrant of the painting. When the white rhombus shapes are ‘figures’ it positions itself behind a ‘hole’ in the surface, but when they are ‘ground’ it pushes forwards so that it sits on the surface of the brown tile. It also leads my eye to the lower left hand corner where one of the dark tiles is painted light blue as opposed to the brown of the others and the tile above it is divided more or less in half along the diagonal, with the lower half in blue and the higher half in green, reading at times like these two tile shapes have been cut into the surface and I am peering into quite a deep space through the cut-outs. There is no attempt to create a believable representational space here, yet this two dimensional space is anything but flat, and anything but still.
And in the end, I think it is space that is being explored by all three painters in this mapping of the abstract. Robert Fry‘s paintings are clearly representations of male figures, and they are drawn with a certain degree of illusionistic depth within the figure, for example when the figure is side on, the half of the body that is nearest to the viewer looks nearer than the other half, and the space between the feet is readable as a three dimensional space. However the space behind or in front of the figure is not so readable, the space that the figures inhabit then is shallow, and the negative spaces between the figures also read sometimes as positive figures themselves. To me, they are tableaus with figures, bearing some similarity to ancient Egyptian tomb decorations except that whereas there the figures are flat here they are almost naturalistic. But if there is a naturalism it is only a naturalism of sorts, in that body parts, for example, sometimes occupy spaces of their own, or seem to have detached themselves from a body in a way that could never be an observable “real world” event.
Blake Daniels paintings are high level abstractions from the real world, the kind of abstraction that take place in dreams where there may be a narrative but one that makes little rational sense, bringing previously unrelated events together, and parts of different wholes interact in a space and time that makes perfect sense only in the dream.
Mapping the Abstract is on at Beers.Lambert, 1 Baldwin Street, London, until 21 September 2013.
Cover (new painting)
Andy Parkinson, Cover, 2013, mixed media on wood panel, 14″ x 14″
Rachael Macarthur paintings in the Meditations show at Pluspace
I posted recently about the excellent exhibition Meditations curated by Lisa Denyer and Matthew Macaulay at Pluspace, Coventry, showing paintings by Karl Bielik, Lisa Denyer, Rachael Macarthur, Matthew Macaulay, Sarah McNulty, Phoebe Mitchell, Joe Packer and Melanie Russell, on until 7 July. I said little then about four charming paintings on paper by Rachael Macarthur, and I cannot resist returning now to say more about them.
On entering the gallery space it is Macarthur’s paintings that I come to first, and to begin with I don’t really know what to make of them. Mostly I perceive them as figure on a ground paintings, particularly the first two, Tabula Rasa and Voyages Grand, but also to a lesser degree the others, and whilst I find the overall colour of each piece attractive, there is something about the figures that I find, if not ugly, then certainly awkward. Is it perhaps that they seem inchoate or even malformed? As I get into a conversation with myself about what they are I realise that I am enjoying them a lot, and it occurs to me that the slight awkwardness prevents them from veering into the territory of the “merely decorative”. They could be experiments in form, the drawing looking like it came from the inside out, as if the shapes evolved from within the painting process rather than being imposed from the outside by the artist’s hand.
Tabula Rasa, looks like a red/terracotta ground was laid down first and then an image was allowed to generate itself almost unconsciously by applying brushstrokes, lighter in tone than the ground and in impasto, towards the centre of the paper, resulting in an abstract portrait. It could be a head in ¾ view. I can imagine the artist working, holding the paper in one hand and painting with the other, or perhaps resting the paper on the floor or a table and rotating it as she works. Believing I can see finger prints along the left hand edge reinforces this imagined scenario.
Rachael Macarthur, Tabula Rasa, 2013, acrylic on paper. Image by courtesy of the artist
The painting is audaciously simple, yet any more work on it would be too much, it would become something else, and the purity of the image would be lost. Similarly, to transcribe it into paint on canvas or into a larger scale would be to lose the spontaneity and directness that seems to come so easily in this format.
In Voyages Grand Macarthur appears to have followed a similar method, an image painted atop a layered ground. This time the central image, a rounded triangular figure is darker than the light blue/green ground that it is difficult not to read as sea or sky…
Rachael Macarthur, Voyages Grand, 2013, acrylic on paper. Image by courtesy of the artist
…except that it is so self evidently paint, no effort being made to specifically describe sea or sky. The association is in the colour and perhaps in the way the light shines through it like sunlight from behind storm clouds.
In comparison with Tabula Rasa the central shape, also made up of impasto brush strokes, this time in grey, and concentric, whereas it is eccentric in Tabular Rasa, appears to float. Both of these are pictures, yet it is unclear what specifically they are pictures of, and I think it is the attempt to work them out that both gives pleasure to the viewer and at the same time creates a certain amount of discomfort. It’s a bit like waking from a dream and vainly trying to recall it. Parts of it come back for a moment and then are gone again. Or to stretch the analogy further I could say that attempting to make sense of these pictures is like attempting to interpret a dream. Gregory Bateson describes dreams as “bits and pieces of the stuff of which we are made. The non-objective stuff” pointing out that “the dream contains no label to tell us what it is about” likening it to “an old manuscript or letter that has lost its beginning and end, and the historian has to guess what it’s all about and who wrote it and when – from inside it”. In this sense I think these pictures have a dream like quality and didn’t Freud identify dreams as “the royal road to the unconscious”?
The third painting Keep Your Shadow is arguably more complex than the first two, in that the one central figure is replaced with a cluster of figures and there is overlapping and containing of figures one over another or one within another. The figures seem to be the result of applied colours being allowed to find their own boundaries rather than drawing shapes that are then “coloured in”.
In both Keep Your Shadow and Split Mimic, there is more ambiguity between figure and ground than there is in the first two pictures. In Split Mimic an indeterminate green ground, looking more like thin air than solid mass, supports a solid looking ochre “V” at the lower edge. Above it, or rather behind it, a red figure emerges appearing to stand within the space rendered by the green coloured ground. And then in front of everything else a swarm of outlined shapes, or perhaps a school as they are vaguely reminiscent of fish, hovers, seemingly in motion, progressing from left to right.
Rachael Macarthur, Split Mimic; 2013, acrylic on paper. Image by courtesy of the artist
In relation to this picture, it is easier to describe the relationships between the various elements than it is to describe what those elements are, again recalling Bateson on dreams saying that “The dream elaborates on the relationship but does not identify the things that are related.” Aren’t we back in that distinction between process and content?
In another of my lives I sometimes lead groups in guided fantasy, and I have learned that this works well when I stay out of content, engaging only in process instructions. For example, if I instruct a group to “in your imagination, find a safe place to rest, paying attention to what you see hear and feel in that safe place” each member of the group will supply their own content. Some people will imagine themselves on a beach in the warm sun, and even then all those beaches will have different features, others will be indoors somewhere and others may imagine themselves in the countryside, the supplied content differing with each individual. If I make the mistake of indulging in content the experience will be impaired. Say in a further instruction I suggest they feel the warmth of the sun, the fantasy will be broken for all those whose safe place was indoors and their experience will be diminished.
Of course, in making these parallels I am speaking metaphorically about the experience of looking at these paintings. I am not saying that the same thing is going on, and I am not even sure that my speculation throws any light on the experience, though I do think that, at the risk of lapsing into anti-intellectualism, it has some affinity with the idea expressed in the exhibition notes, of presenting paintings that are supposed to be “meditated on and enjoyed with the senses” rather than understood.
Meditations is showing at Pluspace, The Meter Room, 58 -64 Corporation Street, Coventry, until 7 July 2013. (Open Friday – Saturday, 11am – 5pm or by appointment by emailing matthew@pluspace .com)
(Bateson quotes are from Steps to an Ecology of Mind by Gregory Bateson, University of Chicago Press, 1972, 2000)
Split and inverted
Networked double tetractys…
Distributed Double Tetractys, 2012, permanent marker on paper, 8″x8″
…divided in half vertically, one half inverted and arranged in opposition.
Julie Shapiro
In a previous blog post I mentioned work by USA artist Julie Shapiro. Thanks Julie for emailing me and for bringing my attention to your new show with Nate Ethier at Lenore Gray Gallery until 22 March 2012.
The show looks great (installation shots here), wish I was there!
Long ago: Mali Morris at Angel Row Gallery Nottingham
It was May 2002 and I was walking in Nottingham, when out of the corner of my eye I noticed the name ‘Mali Morris’. She had been one of my external tutors when I studied Fine Art at Nottingham Trent, many years earlier so I stopped in my tracks. An exhibition of her paintings was being advertised at The Angel Row Gallery (now replaced by Nottingham Contemporary). Around this time there had been a number of painting shows at this gallery that I liked (I thought then, and still do now, that painting is so much out of fashion, especially abstract painting, that it is difficult to see any, if you’re not in the capital at any rate).
What a show it was! Here are pictures of two of the painting that were on view
Mali Morris, Pale Yellow Curly Clearing 2001, Acrylic on Canvas, 61 x 77 cm, Image by courtesy of the artist
Mali Morris, Ripple 2000, Acrylic on Canvas, 21 x 41 cm. Image by courtesy of the artist
I was expecting large paintings. For me, at that time, ‘abstract’ and ‘large’ tended to go together; it took me a while to realise that these two terms could be disconnected. These paintings gave me some good reasons why. Pale Yellow Curly Clearing, 2001 was the largest one in the show (there was one other with the same dimensions) and still a modest size at 61 x 77cm. They didn’t need to be any bigger, in fact part of their power (my perception of them was that they were powerful images, though on prolonged viewing they became something much too subtle for that word) was their smallness. They had an immediate appeal and they seemed to draw me in for closer inspection. It really felt like the paintings were exerting this power over me.
Every Autumn, near where I live I see kids jumping up or throwing sticks into horse chestnut trees. We think of the agency as being with the kids: they jump or throw. But year on year it’s different kids, same tress. Maybe in the system of tree-kids, it’s the tree that acts, putting out conkers each year always draws the kids up into the trees.
anyway I was drawn in, and when I got up close I found that simple though the images were they rewarded prolonged attention. The colours were doing something, but not in the sense of direct excitation, somehow it seemed indirect. They slowly unfolded, yet each one in a different way.
I chose the two above for contrast. Of course there are distinct similarities, you could say that the image is the same: monochromatic, with a circular shape against a ground, framed inside an almost square rectangle. And this would be loosely true for all the paintings that were in the exhibition. But look at the differences! Yellow and blue are very different in hue and tone. They do very different things. Yellow seems to expand, whereas blue seems to contract. The painting behave differently. In Pale Yellow Curly Clearing, and I think the title refers to the act of clearing away the paint to allow what’s underneath to show through, note how that particular way of placing, painting, clearing away, leads to a picture that behaves in that specific manner. Whereas, Ripple, 2001 ripples, and it was made by rippling, with a ripple or some such a comb-like instrument. And it’s just enough, any more and we would be looking at another painting, with another way of operating, and in each case this particular painting would have been lost.
Character, Letter, and the Misbehave – Mel Prest (via )
I keep coming across blogs and photos of the paintings of Mel Prest. I am impressed by her work
via
This blog was the one that sparked my interest.
There’s also this You Tube video that is a good introduction, referring to a show in 2008
and I found this blog interesting, about the paintings and about Mel Prest as teacher, from a student’s point of view.
Best of all is Mel Prest’s website. I highly recommend the animation page; check it out!
Here’s hoping for a show of her work in the UK sometime soon.
the monochrome as system
I am enjoying the book Monochromes, from malevich to the present, by barbara rose
created and edited by Valeria Varas and Raul Rispa, first published on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name organised by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid 2004.
I tend to feel dubious about a book that starts out with the words “this book takes an innovative organizational approach”. If it’s that innovative surely they don’t need to tell me. Although they make the mistake of bringing my attention to it, it is innovative; it is organised so that it interconnects, like a system.
One organising principle is the use of colours as theme, black, red, blue, gold and white. I like that the cover is reminiscent of Yves Klein’s famous International Klein Blue.
Barbara Rose credits Klein with the discovery of the power of the monochrome to displace attention from the art object to the exhibition space, emphasising the interdependence of artwork and context. This is one of the ways in which the monochrome could be thought of as systemic. Also, artists who make or have made them often employ a systems approach to producing the work.
Many years ago, for possibly a whole year (and painting every day) I painted little else but monochromes. I was young, and some people would criticise me for ‘painting like an old man’ (“this is the kind of painting I would expect someone to do at the end of their artistic career “).
Way back then, I thought I was making ‘content free’ paintings. What became interesting in the long series of monochromes were the subtle differences between each one. The paintings were best seen together (as a system) and those subtle differences started to look less and less subtle after all. The patterns that connected them were as much to do with the differences as they were the similarities. I got into the habit of always showing them in pairs, I can’t believe now that I had overlooked the autobiographical content: being an identical twin myself, I experienced first hand that what becomes more interesting than the similarities between twins are the differences, much more easily noticed when they are together than when they are apart.
patternsthatconnect 