RESIST - Exhibition Review
It’s a funny thing to write about Painting. We do often see the review or statement in galleries and shows and art schools. And so I think we forget that actually these mediums, one visual and one linguistic, are different and will always struggle to find an overlap. A painting, as you stand in front of it, will always have something that cannot be put into words. Art writing can often hide behind heavy language, imposing a narrative on the work because there is no way to really, truly describe the art in front of it. I am chatting to Karl Bielik who runs Terrace Gallery and we are agreeing on this point, even though I am here because he has asked me to write about the show.
The show is titled Resist, a look at process-led painting. The struggle of making a painting is, for many artists, as important as it is painful. Rather than being an object that we can easily impose our wills upon, the painting seems to talk back. In that push and pull between artist and painting, Rachel Wilson, the curator, describes a tension. The painting harnesses a liveliness that is linked to the artists engagement and struggle with it. This is an example of the indescribable in painting. This is something that has to be seen and felt.
I was thinking about this space that Karl has created. It’s a space dedicated specifically to showing paintings, with mostly painters gathering together at its events. And so the conversations that happen here are if not about painting, then certainly around it. It occurred to me that the main function of the space is to create a scenario to talk about painting. Language again, blustering clumsily in, but this time less formal. This is easy chatting, drink in hand, and standing in front of a painting. The conversations have an ease dealing with the ambiguous, awkward fuzziness of art, the I-don’t-know-why side of making. They’re also aided by hand gestures to fill in the gaps when words fail us. It’s low pressure stuff. As I wander the show, trying to get to speak to as many of the artists as I can manage, a fantastic image comes into my head of the room like the gut of some majestic beast. We are the microbiome digesting ideas. We carry them back to our own studios to digest a little more, bringing them back next time with a few others to supplement them. I myself am carrying the thoughts of one conversation around the room and into another. The room is full of valuable ideas about making. I decided that the best thing I can do is record a little spark of them, try to make sense of them, and try not to ruin them.
One of the main things that I ended up talking to people about was the idea of the collection, how most artists have somewhere in their studio a pile of some description. This might be a pile of materials, offcuts, paper, clippings of images, old discarded works. Rachel Wilson collects diagrams of buildings. That collecting of shapes allows random encounters that trigger moments of inspiration. The cuttings become assemblages and a crucial method in her compositions. Bruce Ingram has a similar methodology of collected objects and materials. He’s interested in the cutouts, the bits left behind and discarded. There’s a recycling mentality, a desire to find value in the seemingly valueless. His relief works pile together, finding ways for forms to curve around eachother like they were made to be together. This side of process seems to me less about struggle and more about play. Between the problem-solving and the joy of the eureka moment, struggle and play might be two sides of the same coin.
Rachel has introduced me to Diana Taylor, who later introduces me to Bruce (I’m playing with the order of things here for the sake of narrative). Diana’s work plays with what she calls ‘temporalities’, juxtaposing images from different times: William Morris wallpaper with Disney cartoons, crochet patterns with woodcuts. But my introduction to her work begins with the struggle. For her, the painting process is always a battle and she feels it has to be that way. There are endless layers before a work is finished. I can see this in the painting and I ask about the process of redaction. Large areas are washed over, semi-obscuring the cartoons. No element of this cluttered painted collage is left whole or intact. This process of removal and obscuring seems to be important, perhaps harking back to childhood battles with the hated Laura Ashley wallpaper in her bedroom that she plastered over with posters.
In the case of some artists the collection is in repetition, painting the same thing over and over again, collecting of memories and experiences of production. For Chloe Le Tissier, her observational paintings begin to layer upon one another in her mind, so that in the action of the repetition she finds opportunities to shift reality: a children’s toy house is scaled up to loom over the fence, a plant grows to towering height. The paint itself becomes playful, dripping and losing interest in precisely rendering reality. Our conversation drifts to the dribbles of paint that come from the garden bush and remind us of the material and the hand making those marks instead of the scene that she is observing. Within the process of the painting, through freedom found in repeating the same image over and over, she discovers details that overtake and become a dialogue between her and the work.
Among the crowd I manage to get an introduction to Frank Minoprio. His paintings have been eyeing me from the wall, demanding my attention, but I left them for last. He has two small paintings and one large in the show, and there is a stark difference between them. The smaller two, filled with concentric rectangles that follow the form of the frame, have a constrained energy that comes from composition rather than gesture. In the larger painting, the rectangles drift calmly off the edge. He tells me that he struggles more with the smaller ones, the larger giving him more freedom to immerse in the canvas. The smaller paintings intrigue me most. They wind around the edge of the canvas, aware of it, self-referential. Frank doesn’t seem enthusiastic about this thought. He’s got a no-nonsense approach to the conversation. Isn’t that a bit of bollocks, he responds in stubborn resistance to one of my attempts at analysis. Fair enough, really. I had been trying to shoe-horn his practice into a narrative thread that I had created, of collage and collection and struggle. He put me right, stoically representing the theme of the exhibition: Resist. I was trying to describe a reasoning behind painting, and it fell apart. It was indescribable. I’ve had a struggle. This was process-painting doing what it does best: putting up a fight and resisting the narrative that we try to impose upon it.
Resist opened at Terrace Gallery, London on 16.10.22