Zavier Ellis AKA Charlie Smith

OBJECTIFIED | Curated by Roy Exley | CHARLIE SMITH london

2012-01-05T11:38:00.000Z

Featuring:

Daniela Ambrus, G.Roland Biermann, Roy Exley, Oliver Godow, Christian Hagemann, Joséphine Michel, David Owen, Dylan Thomas, Elliott Wilcox

Private View

Thursday January 12^th 2012 6.30-8.30pm

Exhibition Dates

Friday January 13^th – Saturday February 18^th 2012

Gallery Hours

Wednesday–Saturday 11am–6pm or by appointment

Objectified brings a range of divergent takes on the still image – still, not only because they are photographic images, but also because they convey a sense of stillness in the scenes that they portray (Stilleven – ‘quiet life’ in Dutch was the origin of the still-life genre). Evading the hook of time, they are adrift in a timeless envelope all of their own, purveying their uniquely quiet visual statements. Long gone are the days of the 19th century photographers who tried to excel at the painter’s game in attempting to emulate those classical 17^th century still-life scenes of bowls of fruit, vases of flowers or the limp bodies of dead game, with their sumptuous surface reflections and diffusions of light. While the images in this exhibition do have an important feature in common with those paintings - that is, their expression of our mortality through a portrayal of the transience of the everyday objects and scenes which surround us, or in which we are immersed - their subjects are, however, very much of their time.

There is a vastly different momentum and a different cadence of course to the transient events of our contemporary world. These differences are starkly portrayed by the photographs in this exhibition. All are harbingers of hidden narratives, but narratives with distinctly 21st century significance. That the flow of time has been halted not only hints at our finite mortality but also introduces the phenomenon of artifice. This artifice invites the play of our imaginations to tweak and transform it into something that we would like it to be or to represent. We seize upon our own versions of those narratives and possess them for ourselves, engaging with them on our own terms. If, as viewers, we enter into these narratives in order to create dialogues with the artists then they are dialogues at a distance.

The mystification or reification of the object or scene through its intensified objectification in an image can engage the viewer in two contrasting ways: in one way it appeals, no matter how minimally, to our innate desire to experience genuine awe and wonder (something of which the ubiquity of ‘spectacle’ in contemporary culture has deprived us), where its mystique taunts us. The second way touches on our urge to analyse and recognise things with which we are not familiar and, for an instant, we can be caught in a limbo, subconsciously suspended between the need to fix or categorise and the desire to be mystified. The duration of that limbo moment can vary according to the nature of the image; the relationship between the covert and the overt in its composition will be the deciding factor here. The still-life can either nurture our imaginations with its subtle, half-concealed narratives, or it can goad us towards entering into a thorough-going rational analysis. Like the gestalt effect, however, we cannot hedge our bets here – it is either one or the other. Roy Exley

Editor’s Notes:

Roy Exley is a freelance art critic, curator and photographer who has written for prestigious publications including Art Monthly, Art Review, Contemporary, Flash Art, Art Press (Paris), Blueprint, Camera Austria, Portfolio, Creative Camera and Art World. Since 2000 he has curated eleven exhibitions in London and Paris and has been a judge for the Photosynkyria Biennale in Thessaloniki, Greece, and twice for the BOC Young Artists award. As a visiting lecturer specialising in contemporary photography, he has worked at a number of British Universities.

THE FUTURE CAN WAIT presents: Polemically Small

2011-11-26T13:07:00.013Z

Henny Acloque Almudena Mixed Media 38.1x27.9cm 2011 £850 (+ VAT)

Alexander Adams Four Figures at a Table Gouache on paper 13x18cm 2008 £150 (+ VAT)

Dale Adcock Discussing Fate, Holding Kerosene & One Stop Brotherly Vigil Watercolour and ink on paper (2x) 29.5x20.5cm 2010 £800 (+ VAT)

Angela Bartram Dog Girl: ‘Cindy’ Pen on paper 21x14.8cm 2011 £200 (+ VAT)

Emma Bennett Last Night Pencil and enamel on paper 28x21cm 2011 £500 (+ VAT)

Kiera Bennett Still Life Oil on paper 42x29.7cm 2011 £650 (+ VAT)

Gabriella Boyd Sockets Oil on paper 42x25.5cm 2011 £375 (+ VAT)

Jemima Brown Untitled Profile Picture Watercolour on paper 30x30cm 2010 £450 (+ VAT)

Gordon Cheung Sleepwalker Study on paper 19.5x28.5cm 2004 £1000 (+ VAT)

Hugo Dalton Gaia Ink on paper 22x34cm 2011 £999 (+ VAT)

Claire de Jong Fly Catcher Oil paint on magazine on board 28x21cm 2004 £700 (+ VAT)

Tom Doran The Murder Mile Oil on paper 11x9cm 2011 £400 (+ VAT)

Heather Eastes Egg Head and Face Acrylic and pencil on paper 22x17cm 2009 £165 (+ VAT)

Nadine Feinson Untitled 1 Oil on paper 20x27cm (28x33cm inc. border) 2011 £600 (+ VAT)

Hester Finch Mother and Child Oil on paper 27.9x35.6cm 2011 £525 (+ VAT)

Grant Foster Consequences Watercolour on paper 29x34cm 2010 £450 (+ VAT)

Rose Gibbs Body Legs Collage 42x29.7cm 2011 £150 (+ VAT)

Dominic From Luton The Irresistible Lure of Fatty Gingo Laserjet on paper 42x29.7cm 2006-2011 £999 (+ VAT)

Stewart Gough Study for Oak-Sprig Frame Watercolour, pencil, crayon on watercolour paper 42x 30cm

2011 £400 (+ VAT)

Andrea Gregson Toyshop Pen on paper 24x24cm 2007 £800 (+ VAT)

David Hancock Stef as Cheshire Pencil crayon on paper 41.5x28cm 2011 £450 (+ VAT)

Sarah Hardacre Instituto Collage: magazine cutting, book pages, paper 21x41cm 2011 £400 (+ VAT)

Andy Harper A Song to Dance to Oil on paper 28x20cm 2010 £1400 (+ VAT)

Justin Hibbs Counter Lever (Secondary Modern IV) Acrylic on archival print 41.4x31.7cm 2010 £800 (+ VAT)

Christian Hidaka Untitled (Balancing Rocks) Black ink on paper 20.5x29.5cm 2002 NFS

Sigrid Holmwood Sleeping with Stockings on Woodcut on paper handmade from old bed sheets 17x36cm

2011 £850 (+ VAT)

Paul Hosking Untitled (Blue) Watercolour on paper 42x29.5cm 2011 £500 (+ VAT)

Luke Jackson Journey to the End of the Night Oil on paper 30x23cm 2011 £500 (+ VAT)

Sam Jackson Arum Dracunculus Graphite on handmade cotton rag 21.5x15cm 2011 £250 (+ VAT)

Monica Ursina Jäger Child of Saturn #2 Ink on paper 30x40cm 2009 £970 (+ VAT)

James Jessop Red Dracula is Dead Marker on paper 42x29cm 2011 £100 (+ VAT)

Jasper Joffe My Hand Pen on paper 25x14cm 2011 £100 (+ VAT)

Chris Jones & Vicky Wright Witch’s Tit Oil and collage on book cover 34x26cm 2011 £1500 (+ VAT)

Reece Jones Screen 3 Charcoal on paper with polymer varnish 19x25cm 2011 £750 (+ VAT)

Annie Kevans George W. Bush Oil on paper 40.5x30.5cm 2011 £3800 (+ VAT)

Peter Lamb Warm Time Machine Drawing Paper collage on found drawing 21x29.7cm 2009 £250 (+ VAT)

Juliana Cerquira Leite Climb Ink on paper 42x29.7cm 2011 £350 (+ VAT)

Cathy Lomax White 10 Oil and acrylic on paper 40.5x29.5cm 2010 £375 (+ VAT)

Francesca Lowe Flutter Oil on paper 29x42cm 2011 £2000 (+ VAT)

Robert Luzar Network 10.07d Ink on found paper and acrylic 20.5x13cm 2008 £200 (+ VAT)

Joe Machine Sailors Blowjob Acrylic on paper 40.5x28cm 2011 £100 (+ VAT)

Alastair Mackie Mimetes Anon (moc up 6827.psd), 2009 Photographic print 30x 40cm 2009 £600 (+ VAT)

Jasmine Maddock Lady Bird Man Acrylic and pen 20x28cm 2003 £150 (+ VAT)

Robin Mason Lorelei Souvenir 6 Waterbased medium on paper 30x42cm 2011 £600 (+ VAT)

Rui Matsunaga Rise of Time 1 Pencil on paper 29.5x43cm 2011 £500 (+ VAT)

Alan McQuillan Hollow Graphite on paper 30x21cm 2010 £250 (+ VAT)

Hugh Mendes Obituary: Capt. Beefheart Pencil on paper 41.5x29.5cm 2011 £1100 (+ VAT)

Alexis Milne Future Riot (Battle of Fruit Towers Panel 1) Graphite pencil on paper 29.5x41.5cm 2011 £600 (+ VAT)

Jock Mooney Fuck my Dead Mouth You Cunt Pen on paper 25x25cm 2010 £450 (+ VAT)

Kieran Moore Today, of all Days Pencil and Gouache on paper 36x47cm 2009 £350 (+ VAT)

Alex Gene Morrison Totem Mixed on paper 42x29.7cm 2011 £650 (+ VAT)

Jost Muenster Untitled (Bands) Acrylic paint on paper 42x29.7cm 2011 £1200 (+ VAT)

Gavin Nolan Elvis Graphite and ink 12x10cm 2011 £950 (+ VAT)

Margaret O’Brien Flies I, Series I Pencil on paper 30x35cm 2011 £250 (+ VAT)

Tom Ormond Limitless Energy Proposal II Gouache, pencil and collage on inkjet print 29.6x21cm 2011 £450 (+ VAT)

Tim Parr Untitled Pen on paper 29.7x42cm 2011 £1950 (+ VAT)

Claire Pestaille Bella Donna Series (Peep hole) Magazine paper collage 28.5x19.7cm 2011 £600 (+ VAT)

Danny Rolph Lower Sydenham 6 Mixed media on paper 38x28cm 2011 £500 (+ VAT)

Miho Sato Boy with Hat Acrylic on mailite 42x31cm 2008 £2400 (+ VAT)

Stuart Semple Dove Watercolour monoprint and acrylic on paper 42x29.7cm 2011 £750 (+ VAT)

Benjamin Senior Stretches I Watercolour on paper 31x41cm 2010 £600 (+ VAT)

Dominic Shepherd The Hireophant Watercolour on paper 37x28cm 2011 £1200 (+ VAT)

Jamie Shovlin Index (The Mask of Satan AA) Watercolour and blackboard paint on card 28x40cm 2011 £1500 (+ VAT)

John Stark 'The Islander' Pencil on paper study 33x41.8cm 2011 £2500 (+ VAT)

Nessie Stonebridge A Piece in Fund 300 Lines Pencil and charcoal on paper 42x29cm 2011 £500 (+ VAT)

Kate Street Flowering – Still 7 Gouache on paper 13x17.5cm 2010 £350 (+ VAT)

Charles Thomson Two People in the Rain Acrylic on paper 20.5x29.5cm 2011 £100 (+ VAT)

Erik Tidemann Giant Skull Boss no. 74 Ink on paper 42x29.7cm 2011 £300 (+ VAT)

James Unsworth 'Licking of Feces and Violation of Cadavers' Pen and ink 23.8x16.8cm 2010 £600 (+ VAT)

Covadonga Valdes The Chase 1 Charcoal and acrylic on paper 10.5x14cm 2011 £400 (+ VAT)

Alex Virji Venerate 1 Inkjet print on paper 19x27cm 2011 £200 (+ VAT)

Zoe Walker & Neil Bromwich Dancing Borders (Carpal) Watercolour on paper 41x31cm 2011 £1200 (+ VAT)

Stephen Walter Coppice Graphite on paper 41.8x29.5cm 2011 £1100 (+ VAT)

Miranda Whall Untitled Printed drawing 29x42cm 2011 £500 edition on 4/£1000 edition of 1 (+ VAT)

Hannah Wooll The Watcher Acrylic, pen and wash, collage 29x21cm 2010 £350 (+ VAT)

Anthology Long List

2011-07-21T17:59:00.005+01:00

Chris Allan

Rachelle Allen-Sherwood

Mehraneh Atashi

EA Byrne

Sidsel Christensen

Jake Clark

Patrick Colhoun

Emma Critchley

Harold de Bree

Inez de Coo

Andy Harper

Stuart Hartley

Het Het

Andrew Hladky

Rinaldo Hopf

Alex Hudson

Hanna Hur

Lee Johnson

Judith Jones

Susanna Majuri

Dieter Mammel

Eric Manigaud

Enzo Marra

Casey McKee

Jock Mooney

Steven Morgana

Suzanne Moxhay

Christina Niederberger

Tom Ormond

Dimitri Papatheodorou

Giusto Pilan

Philipp Preuss

Clare Price

Eva Raeder

Andrew Salgado

Michelle Sank

Cassander Schattenkerk

Albin Schutting

Arun Sharma

Yukako Shibata

Rebecca Stevenson

Florin Ungureanu

Wouter Hendrik van de Koot

NEW ZAVIER ELLIS | Black Magic

2011-06-22T07:18:00.000+01:00

Zavier Ellis 'Black Magic' Gloss paint, pencil drawings, found wood & poster 2011

JAMES JESSOP @ CHARLIE SMITH london until July 2nd

2011-06-22T07:15:00.000+01:00

Jessop 'Subway Train 1983 passing over St Ann St, South Bronx' Oil, acrylic & Uni Posca marker on canvas 250x342cm 2011

THE FUTURE CAN WAIT presents: Polemically Small | Torrance Art Museum, California, USA

2011-05-27T10:37:00.001+01:00

THE FUTURE CAN WAIT presents: Polemically Small

Curated by Zavier Ellis, Edward Lucie-Smith, Max Presneill & Simon Rumley

Curatorial Assistants: Jolanda Chandler & Chelsea Garner

Private View
Saturday May 28th

Exhibition Dates
May 29th – June 25th 2011

Address
Torrance Art Museum, 3320 Civic Centre Drive, Torrance, CA 90503, USA
www.torranceartmuseum.com

Museum Hours
Tuesday – Saturday 11am-5pm

Admission
Free

The Torrance Art Museum is proud to announce a monumental exhibition of new British art for Los Angeles BritWeek 2011, organised in association with The Future Can Wait and Edward Lucie-Smith.

Based on the idea that small, today, is often much better than big, this exhibition will be a groundbreaking show of almost 100 British or British based artists. All working on paper and none bigger than A3 in size, it invites viewers to engage with art intimately, and at the same time offers the American public a sweeping overview of the exciting new artistic developments now taking place in Britain.

It will almost certainly be the largest display, in terms both of the number of artists, and also in terms of stylistic variety, of new British and British-based art ever seen in California. This exhibition reflects the do it yourself attitude of the curators, standing against bureaucracy and top down institutionalism, and demonstrates how young artists and committed curators can mount major events in straightened times.

ARTISTS:

Henny Acloque
Alexander Adams
Dale Adcock
Dominic Allan
Jonathan Baldock
Angela Bartram
Paul Becker
Emma Bennett
Kiera Bennett
Jemima Brown
Juliana Cerqueira Leite
Gordon Cheung
Billy Childish
Oliver Clegg
Sam Dargan
Tom Doran
Heather Eastes
Zavier Ellis
Nadine Feinson
Hester Finch
Grant Foster
Nick Fox
Rose Gibbs
Stuart Gough
Steve Green
Andrea Gregson
David Hancock
Christopher Hanlon
Sarah Hardacre
Andy Harper
Justin Hibbs
Christian Hidaka
Sigrid Holmwood
Paul Hosking
James Howard
Luke Jackson
Sam Jackson
Monica Ursina Jäger
James Jessop
Jasper Joffe
Chris Jones & Vicky Wright
Reece Jones
Claire de Jong
Annie Kevans
Rebecca Kressley
Peter Lamb
Cathy Lomax
Francesca Lowe
Robert Luzar
Joe Machine
Alastair Mackie
Jasmine Maddock
Robin Mason
Rui Matsunaga
Alan McQuillan
Hugh Mendes
Alexis Milne
Jock Mooney
Kieran Moore
Alex Gene Morrison
Jost Münster
Nika Neelova
Gavin Nolan
Margaret O'Brien
Tim Parr
Claire Pestaille
Harry Pye
Danny Rolph
Kim Rugg
Miho Sato
Stuart Semple
Benjamin Senior
Dominic Shepherd
Jamie Shovlin
John Stark
Nessie Stonebridge
Kate Street
Charles Thomson
Erik Tidemann
Gavin Tremlett
James Unsworth
Covadonga Valdes
Alex Virji
Zoë Walker & Neil Bromwich
Stephen Walter
Miranda Whall
Hannah Wooll

EDITOR’S NOTES:

The Future Can Wait was launched in 2007 by Zavier Ellis and Simon Rumley. Conceived to provide a platform for emerging artists of the highest standard, The Future Can Wait has taken place each year during London’s Frieze week in industrial or historical locations of note. To date the project has focused on London based or educated artists working in all mediums including Gordon Cheung, Alexander Hoda, Sam Jackson, Monica Ursina Jäger, Jasper Joffe, Gavin Nolan, John Stark and Stella Vine and has led to gallery shows in Berlin, Los Angeles, Naples and Rome. The exhibition is privately funded and as a museum scale curated exhibition provides an important and independent alternative to the art fair routine.
www.thefuturecanwait.com

Zavier Ellis is the Director of the Shoreditch gallery CHARLIE SMITH london. He is also co-founder of the museum scale show for emerging artists The Future Can Wait and has curated exhibitions internationally including in Berlin, Helsinki, Klaipeda, LA, Naples, Rome and London. Known as an acute talent spotter he has identified and exhibited a number of important young artists from Art College including David Blandy, Oliver Clegg, Tessa Farmer, Sam Jackson, Monica Ursina Jäger, Annie Kevans, Nika Neelova and Douglas White. Zavier is also a practicing artist and has most recently exhibited at Paul Stolper Gallery in London and Museum der Moderne in Salzburg.
www.zavierellis.com
www.charliesmithlondon.com

Edward Lucie-Smith is an internationally known art critic and historian who is also a curator, a published poet, an anthologist and a practicing photographer. He has published more than one hundred books in all, chiefly but not exclusively about contemporary art. Edward is generally regarded as the most prolific and the most widely published writer on art in the UK. A number of his art books, among them Movements in Art since 1945; Visual Arts of the 20th Century; A Dictionary of Art Terms and Art Today are used as standard texts throughout the world.

Max Presneill is a Los Angeles based artist and curator, originally from London, UK. He was the Founder and former Director of the artists initiative space Raid Projects and Director of the Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica from 2005-2008. Currently he is Head Curator for Torrance Art Museum as well as Director of ARTRA Curatorial, an independent curatorial projects management team. He has extensive experience internationally as a curator having organized exhibitions for museums, institutions and galleries in the US and UK, Australia, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Turkey and more. Max is known as an international talent spotter and an authority on emerging art in Los Angeles. He is also part of the international movement of curators concerned with overseeing museums becoming more artist-centric. As an artist Max has shown throughout the world including Amsterdam, Istanbul, London, New York, Sydney and Tokyo and is represented by Durden & Ray, Los Angeles, and the Garboushian Gallery, Beverly Hills.
www.artrala.org
www.raidprojects.wordpress.com

Simon Rumley founded the auspicious New London Kicks in 2005. An annual exhibition sponsored by The Armory Show, New London Kicks promoted British contemporary and emerging artists in New York in collaboration with Soho House NY and Wooster Projects. As well as showing breaking talent such as Tessa Farmer, Gordon Cheung and Stella Vine, Rumley was first to exhibit Katy Moran's work in New York before she was signed by Stuart Shave/Modern Art and Andrea Rosen. More recently Simon has co-founded The Future Can Wait and co-curated shows globally. Simon has also produced, written and directed six feature films including Strong Language, The Truth Game and Club Le Monde & The Living and The Dead. His most recent film, Red White & Blue, is released in the USA by IFC films and will be coming out theatrically in the UK via Trinity X in September.
www.simonrumley.com

£1,000 Cash Prize Exhibition: Anthology | Call for Applications

2011-05-27T10:08:00.001+01:00

The Exhibition

CHARLIE SMITH london is pleased to announce its inaugural juried exhibition Anthology, in association with The Mark Clannachan Collection and re-title.com - the international directory service for contemporary artists and galleries. Selected and curated by internationally respected art world professionals, Anthology will be a multi disciplinary exhibition that will reach out democratically to artists worldwide. Presented at the CHARLIE SMITH london gallery in Old St, London, the exhibition will be a key barometer of emerging and established talent. Consisting of ten finalists selected from all applicants, a cash prize of £1,000 will be awarded by The Mark Clannachan Collection to one winner for outstanding merit.

Artists at all stages in their careers and working in any medium are invited to apply. To receive the Application Form and Terms & Conditions please email anthology@charliesmithlondon.com. The application deadline is June 15th 2011 and our only requirements are a £10 + VAT application fee; completed application form; 6 jpegs; a short artist's statement; an artist's CV / biography. All works presented must be for sale.

The Jury

Paul Carey-Kent is a freelance art critic whose writings can be found at paulsartworld.blogspot.com. Paul was Editor at Large for Art World magazine 2007-09, and now reviews for ARTnews, ArtUS, ArtLyst and The Art Newspaper. He also frequently writes for contemporary galleries. Paul aims to visit every significant show in London, and writes a column for the Saatchi Online Magazine recommending his top ten exhibitions to see each month. Paul has a BA (Hons) in Philosophy from Oxford University and an M Phil in Poetry from the University of Glamorgan.

Zavier Ellis is the Director of the Hoxton gallery CHARLIE SMITH london. He is also co-founder of the museum scale show for emerging artists The Future Can Wait and has curated exhibitions internationally including in LA, Naples, Rome, Berlin, Klaipeda and of course London. Known as an acute talent spotter he has identified and exhibited a number of important young artists from art college including David Blandy, Oliver Clegg, Tessa Farmer, Sam Jackson, Monica Ursina Jäger, Annie Kevans, Nika Neelova and Douglas White. Zavier is also a practicing artist and has most recently exhibited at Paul Stolper Gallery in London and Museum der Moderne in Salzburg.

Roy Exley is a freelance art critic and curator who has written for prestigious publications including Art Monthly, Art Review, Contemporary, Flash Art, Art Press (Paris), Blueprint, Camera Austria, Portfolio, Creative Camera and Art World. Since 2000 he has curated eleven exhibitions in London and Paris and has been a judge for the Photosynkyria Biennale in Thessaloniki, Greece, and twice for the BOC Young Artists award. As a visiting lecturer specialising in contemporary photography, he has worked at a number of British Universities.

Werner Grub is a London based German collector who has been collecting art in all mediums for more than 20 years. Werner’s substantial collection has been gathered from galleries and artists across the globe. Taking a proactive approach to his interest, he enjoys providing connectivity within his international network where appropriate. Werner is a founding partner at the independent merchant bank Richmond Park Partners LLP.

Edward Lucie-Smith is an internationally known art critic and historian who is also a curator, a published poet, an anthologist and a practicing photographer. He has published more than one hundred books in all, chiefly but not exclusively about contemporary art. Edward is generally regarded as the most prolific and the most widely published writer on art in the country. A number of his art books, among them Movements in Art since 1945; Visual Arts of the 20th Century; A Dictionary of Art Terms and Art Today are used as standard texts throughout the world.

The Prize

Ten finalists will be curated into the exhibition Anthology which will be held at CHARLIE SMITH london during August of 2011 with a private view arranged to coincide with First Thursdays on August 4th. A £1,000 cash prize will be awarded by The Mark Clannachan Collection to the winner for outstanding merit.

JAMES JESSOP | Bomb Chaser | Private View Thursday June 2nd 6.30-8.30pm

2011-05-20T12:14:00.000+01:00

Exhibition Dates
Friday June 3rd 2011 - Saturday July 2nd 2011

Gallery Hours
Wednesday–Saturday 11am–6pm or by appointment

CHARLIE SMITH london is pleased to announce James Jessop’s first one person show with the gallery. The exhibition will feature three large paintings, a salon wall of smaller works and Bomb Chaser, a new documentary that follows Jessop touring the Bronx to visit the locations that he paints with one of his 1970’s graffiti heroes Blade, and Martha Cooper, photographer for the seminal urban art book Subway Art (Thames & Hudson Ltd, London, 1984).

The title Bomb Chaser refers to Jessop’s life long love affair with graffiti. Like many others of his generation, Jessop was first turned onto graffiti by Henry Chalfant and Cooper’s afore mentioned Subway Art. Presented with the book for his birthday in 1986 Jessop never looked back. Initially making drawings from Subway Art he slowly learned the language of the street before taking in formal training at the Royal College of Art; solo shows in Copenhagen, Sao Paulo and London including at the now legendary Rockwell Project; group shows globally including The Saatchi Gallery’s New Blood; and adding the occasional bit of colour to city streets globally.

In this exhibition, 25 years later, Jessop has turned full circle and returned to the same source. Two monumental paintings derive from his visit to New York City. Jessop and Cooper found the location at St Ann St where she originally shot Midg 1983 passing over St. Ann Street, South Bronx and created a new set up for the 21st century. Using the original image from 1983 for one painting and then the new 2010 image for the other, we are treated to Midg’s whole car blaze in one and then the shiny clean surface of a modern New York subway train in the other. The war between the writers and New York’s authorities had been won and the result is a sanitised version of a once visually vibrant urban environment.

Technically Jessop combines the language of graffiti with those of fine art painting and spoof horror comics and B-movie posters. As well as drawing on painters such as Van Gogh and Peter Doig, the latter by whom he was taught at the RCA, Jessop under-paints using customised marker pens that have been adapted to make unique marks before filling in with acrylic and oil. These pens have been used, kept, repaired and refuelled in cities across the world including Barcelona, New York City, Rome, Turin, Sao Paulo and Montpellier. Painterly techniques and elements from historical painting are then transcribed into areas of his compositions along with appropriations of 1950’s pulp fiction. The result is an distinctive collision of rich visual idioms drawn from high, popular and underground cultures.

Please contact gallery for images and further information

NIKA NEELOVA | Installation Images | Monuments

2011-05-20T11:59:00.001+01:00

THE POSSESSED | Curated by John Stark

2011-05-20T11:51:00.000+01:00

Featuring: Yason Banal, Luke Brennan, Hugh Mendes, Seamus Moran, Manuel Ocampo, Toby de Silva, John Stark, Roman Vasseur, Muir Vidler

Exhibition Dates
Friday May 6th – Saturday May 28th 2011

Gallery Hours
Wednesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm or by appointment

Address
CHARLIE SMITH london, 2nd Floor, 336 Old St, London, EC1V 9DR

"Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrived at unlimited despotism"
Shigalyov in Dostoyevsky’s "The Devils"

The resistance unites amidst a fiery reality ripe with revolution; saviors and avengers possessed by the justified hope of liberty, agents of change unwittingly play host to the infernal and flag bearers carry the burden of past catastrophes into the flames of rebellion once again. Hunting for new prospects beyond the vanishing point, their thousand yard stares reach into the sky coalescing with the last rays of light from the horizon. Advancing along the narrow path of progress through a complex network of delusion and guilt, the miserable footsteps of war carry the mad passengers further into the newly administered world; a harvest of sorrow with foul heaps that tell of devotion and violence, until they reach what remains of the city’s gates. They rest a while in the shadows of the deranged architecture, huddled on the altar steps in the burnt out cathedral, at last liberated from tyranny yet tyrannical through their liberation. Their collective gaze takes form; a vaporous slipstream projecting from the depths of their haunted furrows, fragmenting through shards of stained glass creating a glorious spectrum over the clouded ruins of the city. John Stark

NIKA NEELOVA | Monuments | Private View April 7th 6.30-8.30pm

2011-03-14T17:59:00.000Z

Private View | First Thursday
Thursday April 7th 6.30pm–8.30pm

Exhibition Dates
Friday April 8th 2011 - Saturday April 30th 2011

Gallery Hours
Wednesday–Saturday 11am–6pm or by appointment

CHARLIE SMITH london is delighted to present the Russian born and 2010 winner of the Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4’s New Sensations Nika Neelova with her debut London one person exhibition.

Neelova’s sculptural installation engages with personal, collective and adopted histories. Narrated through the evocation of remembered architectural spaces, houses and features that she has occupied or seen, Neelova’s installations and sculptural interventions depict decaying architectural structures inspired by spaces that once existed. Fragments of these spaces are rebuilt from materials salvaged from elsewhere, thereby negotiating a new space between actual and unknown histories. In doing so Neelova’s work is emblematic of both and becomes a cultural and historical displacement, also acknowledging the transience and persistence of time.

The notion of time is central to Neelova’s work. In emphasising the concept of the ruin, newly made objects that have undergone intensive work at the hands of the artist come to signify decay, destruction and loss. The reliance on memory also explores its failure, where distortion and fragmentation replace the actual and complete. Neelova therefore constructs a complex set of correlations between the remembered, the forgotten, the actual and the ephemeral where these fractured indices take form in monumental, haunting, melancholy objects.

In this exhibition Neelova will present three new works. Using wax cast from salvaged antique Dutch banisters with ash and dark patina pigments, a spiral staircase will occupy the back room. In doing so the skeletal object is rendered fragile and dysfunctional, climbing only to the ceiling which now impedes rather than protects. Referring to funerary rituals in post-Reformation England, Neelova will also present a series of flags. Embedded with illusive charcoal dust patterns, they allude rather than dictate to notions of identity and of the commemorative. And in the main gallery Neelova’s third piece, made from salvaged timber and cast wax elements, will directly reference the architectural. Distantly suggesting rail tracks it is a de-contextualised, structural work that intimates a path or route, but which is again impeded by its own constitution. Hanging cast ropes bring forth notions of the hangman’s gallows, which originally built as a replacement for the crucifix, symbolise judicial power as articulated throughout the centuries.

Please contact gallery for images and further information

Biographical:

Born: 1987

Education: 2008-2010: MA in Fine Art Sculpture, Slade School of Fine Art; 2004-2008: BA (Hons) in Fine Art Sculpture, Royal Academy of Fine Art (The Hague)

Selected Exhibitions: 2011: Monuments (Solo), CHARLIE SMITH london, London; 2010: Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4’s New Sensations, Boswall House, London; The Future Can Wait (curated by Zavier Ellis & Simon Rumley), Shoreditch Town Hall, London; Young Gods (curated by Zavier Ellis), CHARLIE SMITH london, London; The Grove, Public Art Commission, Keukenhof; Arena, Woburn Research Center, London; 2009: Carpet IV (Solo), Scheltema Center, Leiden; Attitudes to a Miss (Solo), Christus Triumphatorkerk, The Hague; Memento, Galerie 37, Haarlem; 2008: Paraat #4 (Best of Graduates 2008), RonMandos Gallery, Amsterdam; KunstVlaai, Stichting Artes, Amsterdam; Carpet III, Royal Conservatoire, The Hague; Untitled: Artist in Building, Former KPN Building, The Hague

Selected Awards & Residencies: 2010: The Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4 New Sensations Prize 2010; The Fifth Annual Armitage Young Sculptor Prize, Kenneth Armitage Foundation; 2009: Merzbarn Foundation, Lake District

Collections: The Saatchi Gallery, London; private collections in the United Kingdom

'A daydream of everyday life.' by Tony Benn

2011-03-02T11:39:00.001Z

Written to accompany Sam Jackson’s exhibition ‘The Fearful Joy’

When Gautier exhorted artists of Paris to paint from life to make paintings of people in their ordinary clothes in the 19th century little did he know what he had done and undone. Manet attempted to enter his Tuilieries painting to the Academy salon; it was roundly rejected by Delacroix amongst others for its slap dash approach and the painting of people most of whom were unrecognisable or unremarkable.

The recognition factor of Jackson’s paintings, a quality that is important to the portrait genre, is always held at some reserve. The figures of men are memorable or at least access those parts of our cultural memory we feel familiar with, but perhaps do not know why; the style and dress of the people painted seems to come from a long time ago without appearing completely historic. They pose and face towards us but rarely look at us. Their eyes always seem lost in some internal reverie, making them never quite available to us for scrutiny and enquiry.

Jackson paints with a limpid oily quality to his work. The brush strokes are there and apparent, but don’t impose themselves against the depiction of likeness, nor do they emphasise forming and shaping in any demonstrative way. The use of paint is tactful without always being polite. I refer to Sam Jackson’s perhaps more earlier, perhaps more notorious work of pornographic scenes such as ‘Heel’ or ‘The Journey’ where the characters are performing some deep personal ritual that is not all about simple pleasures given and received.

In the new works exhibited at CHARLIE SMITH london the characters that perform for Jackson’s painting are no less lost to some deep personal wonderment and dream state. They might be the same ones as the ones in sexual dramas; before they removed their clothes or after, and entered into their personal rituals of pain and pleasure. These people might be about to embark on their journeys of self-discovery, where the body will discover its own limits outside of the constrictions and reifications of bourgeois productivity.

Tactfulness is often exhibited between those whose demands upon the world are extraordinary; in a more noble soul it is the quality of one who acts with a certain sense of propriety of doing the right thing at the right time. It can also mean a sense of touch - it has a quality of decisiveness to it. Tact requires a certain touch that is in the end the tacit, the precise manner of touching upon people and difficult subjects. The paintings demonstrate in front of us this certain touch. Just here and here but not so much there. There is no overload of gesture with paint, no over emphasising or stressing where the figure will be touched and described in paint. One is reminded of the tact that occurs frequently in Cezanne, especially in the card players, where the peasants are stated clearly seated at the table but where proximity is the issue: this near, but only this close, no closer.

Closeness to surfaces is of high importance here in these new paintings; in fact the surfaces of flesh are animated, but not all over; only in certain places. The brush is used to activate the skin in much the same way a sadist might animate the skin of the willing submissive with a feather or a riding crop: your flesh will be touched there and there, but not everywhere. It could be said that painting is the art of tacit knowledge; that painting ‘is its own argument’, as T.J. Clark has said in ‘In Sight of Death’.

Perhaps it is also true that painting keeps its distance from us, that it imposes or describes a distance which is not just a literal distance of the painting in this space from my body. The act of painting whether representational or otherwise is an abstraction upon a primary experience of distance. Merleau-Ponty would describe this as a spontaneous experience that precedes language and yet emerges through and within language. ‘The world is flesh’ (M-P) or when looking at painting is about the world becoming flesh. Painting implies depth whether described or denied, it is proffered forth to the viewer, and implies the viewers will accept the painting in their own space.

The figures in Jackson’s paintings seem lost to their own world and lost to our world too. They are at a distance, a certain distance, a distance from themselves and most definitely at a distance from us. They exist silently within their brown rooms and dusty interiors. At once appearing as if from another age, but not one that is locatable. They are dislocated from themselves and from us at the same time. To return to the example of Cezanne again, he was painting at a time of crisis, when the world was no longer an utterly certain rationalist universe, if ever it were, where the certitude of the bourgeois revolutions and the Bonapartist regime no longer held the centre.

Often in times of crisis the daydream becomes the escape route. For many of us who can barely summon the energy to face a cheerless reality of a world utterly hollowed out, the daydream allows more subversive thoughts to arise. A world without any meaningful use for a material history (not that it isn’t thought about and discussed academically). This world where meanings and all the problems that spring from it are eviscerated of all their potencies that could hold community and spirit together.

Jackson’s paintings remind us gently, tacitly of a world that could be dwelt upon, thought about, remembered actively and touched upon in thought and gesture. The daydreamer might be the last person left alone in the library or the bar but still that person has thoughts that need sifting through and evaluating for their quality. A painting, a good painting is just that, a dwelling upon a thought or concept that has to be taken through the medium of paint to remind us of the important restorative qualities of just that act.

SAM JACKSON | The Fearful Joy | Mar 4th - Apr 2nd 2011

2011-02-26T09:40:00.000Z

Private View

Thursday March 3^rd 6.30pm–8.30pm

Exhibition Dates

Friday March 4^th2011 - Saturday April 2^nd 2011

Gallery Hours

Wednesday–Saturday 11am–6pm or by appointment

CHARLIE SMITH london is delighted to present Sam Jackson with his second solo show at the gallery following his 2009 sell out debut.

In this exhibition Jackson has restricted his studio practice in order to concentrate only on portraiture. Returning to a smaller format than his recent larger works there is an economy in scale as well as paint application that demands quiet consideration. Calling to mind the economical approach of Luc Tuymans or Wilhelm Sasnal, these new paintings are subtle, contemplative and calmly beguiling. Beginning with source material derived from the canon of art history; historical figures of consequence or obscurity; political figures; and others that might be found variously in books, periodicals or newspapers, Jackson chooses and then engenders in his subjects a distinct melancholy and authenticity. It is important that these subjects, almost wholly male, have been chosen as a starting point and not as specific references, but nonetheless they are imbued with a gravitas that alludes to the presence of the weight of history.

Technically we find in these paintings a fluidity of paint. Just as the subjects are rendered atmospheric rather than specific, so the paint work provides expression and feeling. The idea of a life lived and spent is felt and liquid application and mark making represent an understanding of the conveyance of character via the entropic. As well as this, poise and palette also point to the worn and weary; to experience and the effects of time. Combined with characteristic use of unsteady line we are presented with psychological, charged paintings that at times turn us back on ourselves. Seen together as a body of work one occasionally has the sense of being observed by a group of forefathers in a similar way to that induced by Gerhard Richter’s ’48 Portraits’. A sense of character, culture and history bring weight to the subjects who invite and then question the observer.

Perhaps, though, these paintings are more about the artist than his audience. In attempting to ‘punctuate a boredom of society’ Jackson is resorting to history and to his own interior world. There is a yearning for the past that is perhaps less about the romantic notion of a more idyllic age and more about the dissatisfaction of today. We cannot locate the time and place which these characters inhabit but we do know that it is not here and now. Due to a discontentment with our nihilistic age Jackson aligns himself to heroic but unidentified figures of the past and of his own imagination, revealing as well as this disavowal a want of perceived acquaintance over actual isolation.

Please contact gallery for images and further information

Biographical:

Born: 1977

Education: MA in Fine Art, Royal Academy Schools, 2004 – 2007; BA (Hons) in Fine Art (First Class), Middlesex University, 2000 - 2003

Selected Exhibitions: 2011: Everyday (curated by Tony Benn), Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge; 2010: Pokerface, Koraalberg Contemporary Art Gallery, Antwerp; Ray Lowry London Calling, Idea Generation, London (touring to New York & Tokyo); New British Painting (curated by Zavier Ellis & Pilvi Kalhama), Gallery Kalhama & Piippo, Helsinki; 2009: Vas Deferens, CHARLIE SMITH london (Solo); British Art Now (curated by Edward Lucie-Smith), Werkstatt Galerie, Berlin; The Future Can Wait (curated by Zavier Ellis & Simon Rumley), Old Truman Brewery, London; 2008: The Cabinet Braubach Five, Frankfurt (Solo); A Stain upon the Silence (curated by Chris Shilling, Chris Page & Gaboy Gaynor), St. Martins College of Art, London; Anticipation (curated by Kay Saatchi & Catriona Warren), Selfridges, London; UK Best Graduates, White Box Gallery, New York; The Past is History (curated by Zavier Ellis & Simon Rumley), Changing Role Gallery, Naples & Rome; New London School (curated by Zavier Ellis & Simon Rumley), Mark Moore Gallery, LA ; The R.A.5, Lennon Weinberg, New York

Selected Awards & Residencies: 2007: Chelsea Arts Club Travel Award; 2005: Sturdley Award; 2004: British Institute Award; 2003-2004: Florence Trust Studio Award

Collections: Carlos Fragoso, New York; David Roberts, London; Sir Norman Rosenthal, London; Kay Saatchi, London

Private collections in Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States

THE BEARD | Installation Images

2011-02-26T09:14:00.000Z

The Beard curated by Kiera Bennett & Alex Gene Morrison

2011-02-26T09:06:00.000Z

Including:
Paul Becker
Kiera Bennett
Dan Coombs
Alex Gene Morrison

Exhibition Dates
Friday February 4th – Saturday February 26th 2011

Gallery Hours
Wednesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm or by appointment

Address
CHARLIE SMITH london, 2nd Floor, 336 Old St, London, EC1V 9DR

This show brings together four painters who make work that is highly individual yet is anchored to the familiar through the conscious referencing of similar archetypes. Each of these artists creates psychologically charged imagery that collectively reference personal experience, heightened states of consciousness, dreams and fiction. All four artists embrace the power of painting; its history; its materiality and its unflinching ability to effectively transform complex thought into form.

These artists’ paths have crossed at various points over the last twenty years or so, from Coombs and Bennett studying at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in the early nineties, to Bennett and Morrison studying together at the Royal College of Art. Bennett and Morrison then went on to meet Becker whilst being involved in running the Rockwell project space where all four artists showed work but never as a group.

The show takes its title from the accompanying short story written by Paul Becker. The content of the story is analogous to aspects of how all four artists approach making work. Alex Gene Morrison

THE BEARD

By Paul Becker

When the Reverend Patrick Brontë, wishing to know more about the minds of his six motherless children than he had hitherto discovered, placed each one behind a mask to make them speak with less timidity than before, he gave to the three sisters who survived the blessed thrill of anonymity. To speak aloud and yet remain, as it would seem, unknown, to hide identity behind a hollow face; criticism, mockery, reproof – these things could not touch the wearer of the mask.
The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë by Daphne du Maurier

It was blind luck that I saw him at all. He was half buried in the sand of a dry riverbed and only just alive. I strapped him on to the back of the second pony and we headed out East. He neither woke nor moved a finger for six days. On the seventh there was another sandstorm and so I had us holed up in the back of a cave for as long as it took to wait it out. I lit a fire and made some coffee. It was difficult to breathe; the sand filled the air like thick sea fog, even back there in the cave, and as the storm screamed around us it felt for all the world as if we lay in the lower deck of a ship, all hope abandoned, at the mercy of a great typhoon.

It was then he finally stirred. He looked wildly around for a moment, breaking the dry crust of sand and sleep around his eyes, then clutched at the small canvas bag he had attached to his belt. He paid me no mind until the idea of water occurred to him. I passed him the canteen. Then he asked for some of the coffee. His voice was queer indeed, it seemed like an echo from another part of the room and…those eyes! They were of a hue dark and black enough to give a man the impression of staring down into a borehole. His face: that sickly, yellow parchment skin gave him the look of a revenant, a reluctant Lazarus. Pretty soon he started to ramble. My presence was not the cause, rather he was explicating some great principle to himself. I admit that he was making me jittery and after upwards of an hour of his meandering I asked him to either hold his tongue and let me sleep or at least to try and speak plainly to one who had only recently saved his life. He turned that black hole stare upon me.

“I will tell you then since you ask it, of the journey I began that finally set me in your path. What we did, some of our people said, was little more than plain travesty. They said that the God, the idea of whom we had besmirched, would soon be back to play his wrath about our heads. It was we who had moved this Colossus into place, watched it grow into the great behemoth that it became. But when all that is left of a God is the space where once it slept, what better way to understand it, to judge its systems for oneself, other than by the yardstick of its nothingness - its remains, the crumbs from its table, its dry scrapings of dead skin, the plucked tufts of its hair. Detritus”.

I asked him to stop a moment. Steadily his dried-up visage had taken on an ever more sickening look as he told his rambling tale and I would have him rest and drink a little water. He said he could not bear to eat though I offered him a bite. When I caught his eye, somehow I felt the tale was all that was keeping him. I let him talk on.

“Some of us felt that something must be done despite the fear of the rest. We knew that the powder which had fallen from under the toenails of the Colossus contained all the clues we needed, the very blueprints of its destruction. We knew an effigy had to be fashioned from these remains that would be an embodiment of all our doubts, a mouse to bring down a mountain, small enough to hold and feel between our hands. It would be fashioned into a disguise, a mask of wisdom, a symbol of lost knowledge. We would make ourselves beards from the scattered dust of Colossus. They alone would hold all the answers. Emblematic of the last of the elders, those with cognisance of the lost arts: the makers of images who had at first been ignored and then trampled upon by the crowd when usurped by the great God. And so we fashioned our beards. Look here! See!” Still holding my gaze, he leant over and with his palsied fingers, drew a hairy mass of fluff from his pouch. “Born from the dust of failure, our beards stared back sightless, accused with no tongue and were undaunted by thoughts of Colossus, even with no head to hang upon!”

“But what were they for?” I asked. “And what is this Colossus you speak of?” The man could talk no more, had used up the last of himself in the telling. I saw myself reflected for a moment in his eyes as they stared out black into the storm. He only paused to drink down a last gulp of cold, sandy coffee before he fell into sleep. In the morning, when I had brushed the sand from my eyes, I saw that he had died.

I buried him there, just outside the cave. The storm had blown itself out but there was still enough wind to keep puffing the sand from his face and carcass as quickly as I tried to cover it. I took the canvas pouch that held the beard from out of his last grasp. I tried it on over my ears but the wind took it and it rolled off amongst the dunes.

Gavin Tremlett installation images: 'Amusements' at CHARLIE SMITH london

2010-12-13T14:30:00.000Z

Gavin Tremlett's 'Amusement' series on show at CHARLIE SMITH london until January 29th 2011

2010-12-13T14:16:00.000Z

Gavin Tremlett text by Jane Neal: 'Gavin Tremlett: Caught up in the Carnival'

2010-12-13T13:52:00.000Z

"Correggio is the only artist ever to have depicted the anus and scrotum of an airborne angel"
Germaine Greer: 'The Beautiful Boy' 2003

Germaine Greer surely intended to cause a stir when she brought out her book The Beautiful Boy (2003), that featured boys on the cusp of manhood and was intended to allow older women to 'reclaim their appreciation of the adolescent male body'(indeed the book's cover claimed it was 'demolishing one of the last great western taboos'). Yet while comments from Greer such as 'If nature didn't intend boys to be seduced by older men and women, why did it make them so damnably fetching, so downy-cheeked, rangy-limbed and pert-buttocked?' seem deliberately provocative and dangerously close to suggesting that the 'subject' might be (to coin the much abused colloquialism and excuse for unwelcome sexual advances), 'asking for it', the general reaction of most people who encountered the book was not to be scandalised, but wowed by the overwhelming beauty of the selected images. In an age where the naked or almost naked female body has undoubtedly been subject to over exposure on camera and used as one of advertising's most powerful selling tools, the naked male body - though increasingly a feature on our television and film screens, has been noticeably and literally less exposed than the female counterpart.

It has not escaped the theorists' notice that there is a considerable imbalance between the amount of naked female and male flesh found exposed on the big and small screen, on billboards, on the internet and in art. The general consensus for the root of this phenomenon in Western society is Descartes' pronouncements (1596-1650) on body and spirit. The dualisms of Cartesian thought divide the mind and spirit from the world and the flesh. Traditionally men have been identified with the mind, control and culture, whereas women have been situated as the epitome of carnality (that is, of the body or flesh), creatures of the world. Theorists such as Susan Bordo (b 1947) argue that as womanhood became synonymous with the corporeal, as opposed to the spiritual, so the feminine came to: 'define nature, emotionality, irrationality and sensuality'. Unlike men whose minds had precedence over their bodies, women were subject to their sensual appetites, to the frail and unpredictable nature of the flesh and thus needed to be 'over seen' or 'tamed' by men who were, by nature, 'calm and rational'.

An exception to this 'rule' of behaviour is the notion of 'carnival'. The word 'carnival' refers to a variety of folk celebrations in which, as cultural anthropologist, Victor Turner (1920-1983) argues: 'Sensuality, playfulness, and parody are paramount. The carnivalesque occupies a time and space of liminality, a moment "betwixt and between" the structures and hierarchies of the everyday. Rather than sanctioning the social and religious order, as official ceremonies often do, carnival suspends hierarchical rank, norms, and privileges, and creates an alternative world of equality, ambiguity, and transformation.' During the time of carnival (historically held across Europe the day before Lent begins), anarchy reigns and a space is created within which societal norms can be subverted, desires expressed and inhibitions abandoned. Carnival has often been celebrated with masquerades (the most famous example being the annual February masquerade in Venice), the masks allowing the wearer an even greater amount of freedom without the recriminations he or she might face for indulging in wild or permissive acts if they were visible and recognised.

For those concerned with observing societal rules and 'fitting in' but with latent pleasure-seeking leanings, carnival provides a way out, an opportunity to explore outlawed or problematic territory for a brief period of time. Permission to 'play' or 'perform' can help the protagonist to explore an otherwise forbidden side of their nature, so long as they adhere to the rules - this indulgence must be restricted to carnival only, life with all its structures and formalities has to continue outside of this 'zone', with all its rules observed.

Though the festival of carnival has its roots in the Middle Ages, the spirit of carnival and notion of the carnivalesque finds greatest expression in Baroque art. The joyful abandon that is synonymous with Baroque painting - the delight in naked flesh, wild, bacchanalian feasts, even the riotous depiction of heavenly courts complete with boisterous cherubs, is a world away from the classical purity, even the severity of early Renaissance painting. The Baroque is about theatre: death is there, drama is there, colour is heightened, shadows intensified - everything is apparently on the verge of carnival, if not already in full swing.

The attraction of the idea of carnival to gay men is well documented; 'mardi gras' has come to be associated with gay pride marches and fun-filled celebrations. It could be argued that the physical expression of homosexual love and demonstration of desire is the antithesis of Cartesian thinking concerning manhood, and that therefore, mardi gras and carnival is all the more important as a focal point for countering this societal 'rule': that it is women who indulge the fleshly desires and who exist to have desires put upon them, not men.

But what of men who are straight but refuse to be bound by Cartesian thinking? What if the straight man wants to explore the delights of the 'beautiful boy'? This way of thinking was not of course alien to societies past - ancient Greece being perhaps the most obvious example, where sexuality was arguably more fluid and less confined and codified than it is today; with beauty being prized by all. It is interesting to note that although Botticelli (1445-1510) introduced the female nude to Renaissance painting and Giorgione followed with his 'Sleeping Venus', 24 years later, the female nude only really became the 'preferred' subject of choice over the male counterpart from the 17th Century onwards (perhaps, one could argue as a result of Cartesian thinking). The Baroque movement that went hand in hand with Catholicism's attempt at counter reformation, allowed - even in the church - the depiction of sumptuous, naked flesh; celebrating the delights of the well fleshed, female body. However after looking at the delicious renderings of the young male body by Caravaggio (1571-1610) and Correggio (1489-1534), it is clear that these artists were not unmoved (and arguably preferred) to depict the more sculpted beauty of the young, male form.

Gavin Tremlett is a decidedly 21st Century artist. He sources his figurative subject matter from contemporary images drawn from a variety of sources including erotic gay literature and pornography. Yet the majority of the artist's oeuvre is concerned with depictions of the kind of 'beautiful boys' that grace the pages of Greer's afore-mentioned book or cavort across the canvases of Baroque and Mannerist paintings. As these boys twist and turn their taught and lightly muscled frames, the viewer is struck by the beauty of their young bodies, recently matured, but also by the uncomfortable nature of their poses and expressions. The work is fraught with anxiety: though the boys' bodies are beautiful, many of them have faces that appear twisted, even maimed or partially obliterated by a lurid, poisonous-coloured fog. In other examples, the boys in question may have challenging, even threatening expressions, causing the viewer to question whether they are indeed objects of exploitation, or knowing, cunning predators, callously using their youth and beauty to entrap the pleasure-seeker.

Tremlett's art is meticulously executed. He works on paper, combining a mixture of linear, graphite drawing with tonal shading and oil washes. His subjects vary between depictions of the whole or part figure and small 'bust' portraits in charcoal, graphite and oil. His obvious dexterity and command of his medium begs comparisons with old master works, yet the boys' poses that look to be derived mostly from gay pornography, and Tremlett's often overly heightened use of acid colours reveal the influence of 20th and 21st photography, film and television.

It is this tension between traditional medium, wrought with considerable skill, fluidity and sensitivity, crossed with the lurid nature of the contemporary sources that Tremlett scours for material that creates conflict. This conflict pulses through the work itself, but it also courses through the viewer. The medium and execution of the work demand to be looked at. The nature of paint and pencil and the finesse of its handling is extremely seductive, yet the poses of the subjects often make for uncomfortable viewing. There is a sense that what is on display is intended for intimate engagement and encounter, yet the nonchalant and provocative poses reveal protagonists who care little for the discomfort of the viewer and appear to be flaunting their sexuality in an open if not blatant manner.

Tremlett is conscious that the work can be problematic for those who view it. Apart from the embarrassment of being 'caught' looking at something 'naughty', there is the shock factor that accompanies pornography. Laying bare everything, the viewer is confronted by raw carnality, whereas eroticism gently titillates, covering up as much as exposing and allowing the imagination to complete the final act, as opposed to dictating the outcome. Tremlett is well versed in his knowledge of art history and the work of his 'heroes' find echoes in his art. Courbet's (1819-1877) 'l'Origine du Monde (1866), is clearly a weighty influence. With the subject's legs akimbo, and its head covered so the viewer's focus is on the trunk and most especially on the pubic mound with its mass of sprouting dark hair, the shock factor that registers the first time this bold work is encountered is apparent even today. Why this work is so shocking is difficult to precisely determine. It's not as if a woman's genitals are difficult to come by via one kind of screen or another, rather it is the absence of personality in the work that is perhaps its most persistently shocking feature. Expressions humanise, but there is no head to be viewed and therefore no way of gauging if the woman is compliant or victim - even worse, the blue tinges of the flesh tones on her legs could point to necrosis; the woman's vagina may indeed bring life into the world, but is this woman still living?

Like Courbet, Tremlett plays with sinister hues in his works, though unlike Courbet he pushes his palette towards the edge of psychedelia. The hazy blurs that encase his figures are suggestive of colour field paintings and indeed this abstract element, so strongly present, introduces a second tension in Tremlett's work, the play between figuration and abstraction.

Tremlett lists Mark Rothko (1903-1970) as a major influence and it is not hard to find him in Tremlett's grounds. Yet if Rothko sits upon the artist's shoulder, he shares that space with the young Duchamp (1887-1968), Picasso (1881-1973), and Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) - whose beautiful subjects are so seductive as to sometimes cause the viewer to overlook the brilliance of the artist's photography, where the prints themselves are marvels in technical mastery. Perhaps Mapplethorpe appeals to Tremlett on both counts: for his love of human beauty, and for his dedication to his craft - twin obsessions both artists share.

Tremlett is clearly in love with painting. His delight in the way light and colour play together, coupled with his feeling for line are a constant in his practice. This can be traced back to his early art school training in Loughborough. He shared this love of 'old school' fine art practice with his Loughborough contemporaries, artists such as: Reese Jones, Gavin Nolan, Chris Davies and Mark Jackson. Tremlett's dedication to his chosen medium persisted through his time at the Royal Academy in London, but the artist remembers his post graduate student days as being clouded by anxiety. Tremlett was anxious about being in London, he was anxious about his paintings and his tutors' and fellow students' responses. He was anxious after art school, about what would happen next, and this anxiety pervaded his art; he and the work became cowed.

Yet though unpleasant to experience, the weight of anxiety the artist experienced led him to where he is today. Tremlett began to use anxiety as a means through which to questions society's imposed 'norms'. He questioned his own thoughts and responses: what is normality, what is acceptable, what is permitted. Eventually Tremlett sought to find the place between the real and fantasy in his art. Helped by overdoses of Hitchcock films, the experience of moving to Berlin - a new city with an historically liberal arts and club scene, Tremlett found carnival. For if Greer can claim (or re-claim) the young male body for the delight of the older woman, surely an artist can celebrate the beauty of the human form, male or female outside the fetters of social conditioning.

Spoonfed Review: Gavin Tremlett - Amusements at Charlie Smith London

2010-12-13T13:49:00.000Z

The fact that I have to ask someone whether Gavin Tremlett's paintings are totally his own (and not some classical reworking) suggests that his style is a pretty near perfect classical rendition. If he'd gone with a kind of Chapman Brothers-style artistic modification I would not have been keen. But Gavin's works – on show this winter at Charlie Smith London – are in fact built from scratch in a lengthy process of layering and disguising, using oil, charcoal and graphite. Gustave Courbet is one obvious influence.

Gavin is clearly a talented painter and draughtsman and will gladly show this off; his style in parts is verging on photo-realistic, but he's painstakingly removed areas, left parts unfinished and created something which essentially is quite creepy. If you look closely they just aren't quite right. In one painting of a girl's face, everything is perfect except her left eye which is slightly misaligned and wrongly angled and left partly unfinished, leaving her with a disturbing finish. This is clearly no technical fault and as you move into a smaller room at the back of the gallery his intentions are more clearly reiterated. Faces look as though their distortion might melt them off the canvas and one girl's eye peeps out at you over swollen cheeks, carefully created through a lack of shading or adding of a facial boundary where it should not be.

Then there's an added twist: these classically styled pieces are in fact inspired by pornographic poses. Move over Courbet and make way for Robert Mapplethorpe. Or just sit quietly together. Tremlett has cleverly worked in a contradiction, a strange kind of entwining of opposites: innocent, yet promiscuous, their glares inviting, yet frightening. And all titled 'Amusement', numbered 1 to 11. Is this the amusement of the artist with his clever little japes? Or the amusement of the sitter inviting you in and then mocking you quietly from behind the screen with your voyeuristic advances? Ha ha ha.

One might associate pornography with exploitation but these youthful subjects seem to possess both power and cunning. Some are wistfully beautiful, others entirely unsettling, and I don't know how I'm meant to feel. But I just can't help but look, examining Tremlett's revealings and concealings and trying to glean some understanding from these bizarre and provocative human visions.

'Amusements' is on at Charlie Smith London from Friday the 10th of December to Saturday the 29th of January 2011.

LIVE POETRY by internationally renowned art critic, reviewer, poet, fiction writer, harmonica player and practicing artist Richard Dyer

2010-11-30T11:55:00.000Z

Thursday December 2nd 7.30-8.00pm

CHARLIE SMITH london
2nd Floor
336 Old St
EC1V 9DR

020 7739 4055
http://www.charliesmithlondon.com/

CHARLIE SMITH london's first live poetry performance: 'Paperless Poetry: poems on Love, Death, Sex and Alcohol'.

Dyer will recite his poems in the gallery space, creating a dialogue with the lyrical paintings of Dominic Shepherd, where "the hallucinatory and hypnogogic imagery of Dyer's visceral and erotic poetry" (AMBIT magazine) echoes the shifting imagistic universes evoked in the paintings of Shepherd.

This will also be a chance to view 'Lucifer Rising' in its final week and to informally discuss the show with the artist.

Richard Dyer: Biographical Notes

Richard Dyer is Assistant Editor at Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture; and Art Editor of Wasafiri, the magazine of international contemporary writing. He was News Editor and London Correspondent for Contemporary magazine for over ten years.

He is a widely published art critic, reviewer, poet, fiction writer and also a practicing artist. His critical writing has appeared in Contemporary, Frieze, Flash Art, Art Review, Art Press, Third Text, Wasafiri, PLUCK, The Independent, The Guardian, Time Out, Citizen K (London Correspondent), Rapid Eye, Performance Magazine (Assistant Editor), The Jewish Chronicle and many other publications and catalogues.

His poetry and fiction have been published in Contemporary, Ambit, Moving Worlds, Le Gun, Victoria, / seconds, Die Ausensites des Elementes, Junger Welt and Cronica Latina. He has read at events associated with the Galway Literary Festival in 2000 and 2005, and the Hackney Literary Festival. In October 2010 he read with John Cooper Clarke in Galway. His first poetry collection, A Western Journey, in collaboration with the painter Jim Kavanagh, was published by Arlen House, in October 2006. In November 2008 He wrote a second collection of poems with the same artist on the theme of the Irish peat bogs: ‘Bog Land Scapes’, which was released as a DVD of readings, interviews, film and photography containing a booklet of the recent poems, it was launched, along with a major exhibition of Kavanagh’s paintings, at the Galway City Museum. He is currently editing his latest collection of poems, The Romance Engine.

Publications include: Electronic Shadows: The Art of Tina Kean, (Black Dog, 2004); Dan Hays: Impressions of Colorado (Southampton City Art Gallery, 2006); Riddled With Light: Corpus Lumen: Susie Hamilton, 1996–2006 (Paul Stolper, 2006), Zineb Sedira: Saphir (Photographer’s Gallery, 2006) and Transitive Transduction: Breaking the Integument in the work of Tony Bevan (Ben Brown Gallery, 2006). His latest publications are Controfacciata: Solid Water, Liquid Stone, on the work of German photographer Matthias Schaller, (Ben Brown Gallery, London, 2008), Keith Coventry: Deconstructing the Modernist Utopia (Haunch of Venison, Zurich, 2008), Making the (In)visible in the Work of Mark Francis, (Lund Humphries, 2008), Painting: The Essential Verb, (Jerwood Foundation, Contemporary Painters Prize, 2008), The Descent of Man: Wolfe von Lenkiewicz (All Visual Arts, 2009); Clement Page: Screen Memories: Picturing Lost Time in the Watercolours of Clement Page (Kuckei + Kuckei, Berlin, 2009); Art on Demand: Custom Colours and Materials: Sébastien de Ganay, Abstract Works Catalogue, 2008–2009 (onestar press, 2009); Demi-Monde: Alexander de Cadenet, (F-ish Gallery, 2009) and Valérie Jolly: Infra-Thin, (Alexia Goethe Gallery, 2010). He is currently editing his selected writings on contemporary art: Squinky Sinks and Soapy Tropes: Twenty-five Years of Selected Writings on Contemporary Art.

Richard Dyer’s artistic practice ranges from photography, text installation and painting to constructions and sculpture employing mixed media. His extensive series of watercolours explore the soft space between the abstract and the figurative, the organic and the manufactured, articulating the beings which inhabit the matrix at the periphery of consciousness. He has developed, or ‘observed’ the flora and fauna of an alternative universe of painterly entities and recorded them in the fluid medium of watercolour.

From 1988–1997 he curated a series of exhibitions under the title of ‘The Arts Registry’ in a variety of venues, from private members clubs (Fred’s, Soho, two year programme) to the Mall galleries (‘Celebration’: 35 artists), The Horns Gallery, (Bermondsey: 8 artists and auction). He helped to organise the major conference held at Tate Britain in 2008: ‘What is British Art?’ which came out of a special issue of Third Text. He is involved in the production of a major publication with the working title of The Whole Story, which aims to tell the complete history of post-war British Art and which will also be a Tate conference and exhibition.

Although generally known as an art critic, poet and artist Richard Dyer is also a professional blues harmonica player playing under the title of The Critical Harp. He has played with The Blockheads at Ronnie Scott’s in Soho, London, in Berlin at the famous punk club Wild At Heart, with Maxi Geil (recently signed to Fred Label records) at Sketch and the Great Eastern Hotel and at The Café Royal with Claire Nicholson. He played with The Ken Ardley Playboys (artist Patrick Brill, aka Bob and Roberta Smith’s band) at the Hackney Empire, The Serpentine Gallery and at the re-opening of Beconsfied Gallery. He has also played with the pianist Kenny Clayton at the Colony Room Club and Gerry’s in Soho, with Louie Hoover at the French House, at The Groucho Club and regularly at Jazz After Dark. He played with the members’ band at the party to celebrate twenty years of the Groucho. Previously he has played at The Hammersmith Odeon, Manchester Apollo, Barrowlands, Glasgow and the Camden Palace. He has also played at many private parties, gallery openings, the Venice Biennale Australia party, live on Bloomberg/PS1 radio on the Bloomberg party boat on the Grand Canal and at the opening party of Documenta 12 in Kassel, 2007. He often combines music and poetry in his performances.

THE FUTURE CAN WAIT 2010 Installation Images - curated by Zavier Ellis & Simon Rumley

2010-11-25T09:11:00.001Z

DOMINIC SHEPHERD | Lucifer Rising | Installation Images

2010-11-25T09:01:00.000Z

GAVIN TREMLETT | Amusements | Private View December 9th 6.30-8.30pm

2010-11-22T14:48:00.000Z

Exhibition Dates

Friday December 10th 2010 - Saturday January 29th 2011

Gallery Hours
Wednesday–Saturday 11am–6pm or by appointment

“Situated between an embrace of vulgarity in contemporary culture, and a yearning for a lost mode of figuration in painting, my work establishes a place of intersection between the sublime possibilities of painting, and the closed, crude nature of pornography.”

CHARLIE SMITH london is delighted to present Berlin based artist Gavin Tremlett with his first one person show in London.

Tremlett’s portraits and full figure nudes provide a point of entry into an investigation of the human self. Playfully encouraging the gaze Tremlett’s classically rendered adolescent subjects invite us to engage voyeuristically whilst simultaneously turning the gaze back upon itself, as if to both absorb and reflect; to watch and be watched; to tempt and to reject. Displaying an emphatic sexuality, Tremlett’s subjects are at once enticing, inquiring and accusatory. Innocent and guilty, they are both victims and perpetrators.

Tremlett’s unparalleled technical ability combined with the seductive come hither pose of his subjects leads us into a confrontation with the uncanny. Beauty vies with deformity as his classically rendered, often mask-like visages both conceal as well as reveal. This rendering of face as mask is often coupled with abstract, painterly marks that serve to obfuscate the subject, thus interfering with the totality of an ideal self. There is a denial of the whole but also a doubling in process here, both physically and symbolically. The idea of the double, which can be read into portraits, reflections, shadows, totems or even the continuation of a blood line, as the psychoanalyst Otto Rank would have it, is a narcissistic extension of the self and a guarantee of immortality.

Tremlett’s paintings then are beautiful and unsettling manifestations of numerous combined and fragmented sources. At once we are attending art history, pornography, popular culture, nostalgic ideals, and the artist’s and our own inner drives and memories, both apparent and repressed.

Dominic Shepherd Exhibition Images

2010-11-12T13:58:00.000Z

DOMINIC SHEPHERD | Lucifer Rising

2010-11-01T16:46:00.000Z

Private View
Thursday November 4th 6.30pm–8.30pm

Exhibition Dates
Friday November 5th – Saturday December 4th 2010

Gallery Hours
Wednesday–Saturday 11am–6pm or by appointment

CHARLIE SMITH london is delighted to present Dominic Shepherd with his first one person show at the Old Street gallery.

In Latin Lucifer means ‘light bearer’, and came to refer to the planet Venus, otherwise known as the ‘Morning Star’, which can be witnessed an hour before sunrise in the skies of the east and an hour after sunset to the west. Lucifer then, signifies first light, the time when the darkness and mystery of night turn towards the clarity of dawn. It is at this point with its shifting nuances where Dominic Shepherd’s most recent paintings operate.

Shepherd invites us into a time and place that is in-between, a place of mystery and the imagined. Calling to mind John Fowles’ ‘The Magus’, Shepherd envisions a place populated by magicians, solitary wanderers, messengers, lost poets, artists and musicians, a place that is between reality and sur-reality where the macabre and the frivolous walk hand in hand. This imagined place is prompted by Shepherd’s own immediate environment, where cottage and studio sit isolated in a clearing within dense Dorset woods. Stepping into these woods at night one feels simultaneously stimulated and threatened, but one is urged to embrace the shadows and the illusion that lie therein, where the fictive obfuscates truth.

At night, perhaps, such experience is appropriate, during the time of revelry and ritual, magic and intoxication. All take place beneath the cover of darkness. But at the hour of daybreak, as the morning star rises, thresholds other than night to day are broken. Reality returns and with it a wistful awareness of a loss of the other. The dreamlike and hallucinatory are overcome by a confrontation of the self where one can emerge enlightened as with St John of the Cross or fallen as with so many romantic heroes from throughout history. Indeed, Shepherd’s canvases might be populated by lost icons and anti-heroes such as Hesse, Redon, Shelley, Blake or Wagner or more contemporaneously Jack Kerouac, Keith Richards or Charles Manson. ‘The sleep of reason brings forth monsters’, cautioned Goya and Shepherd outlines that escapism, individualism and heroism, and the drives of the intuitive and the unconscious can bring egotism, destruction and excess as well as beauty, magic and discovery, thus simultaneously enticing and forewarning.

POLEMICALLY SMALL curated by Edward Lucie-Smith at CHARLIE SMITH london

2010-09-16T18:22:00.000+01:00

Including: Brandon Ballengée, Felipe Cardena, Genia Chef, Billy Childish, Roni Feldman, Luke Jackson, Sam Jackson, Michael Leonard, Robert Luzar, Alex Gene Morrison, Gavin Nolan, Claire Pestaille, Tom Phillips, Benjamin Senior, Dominic Shepherd, John Stark, Oleg Tolstoy, Gavin Tremlett, Covadonga Valdes, Cedric Wentworth, Alexander Zackharov

Private View | First Thursday
Thursday October 7th 6.30pm–8.30pm

Exhibition Dates
Friday October 8th – Saturday October 30th 2010

Gallery Hours
Wednesday–Saturday 11am–6pm or by appointment

What’s the polemic? Why small? This exhibition, of small, sometimes very small, works of contemporary art is essentially a rant about the outmoded rhetoric of size that is still embraced by what likes to call itself the avant-garde. New cutting-edge artists have been painting small now for some time. It’s happening here in London; it’s happening in Germany, still the real centre for avant-garde activity in Europe; it is happening among a certain number of Italian artists. It may be happening elsewhere as well. The interest in small-scale art is inevitably starting to spread to other genres – sculpture, photography and video.

Huge art, in Modernist terms, was essentially an invention of America in the 1940s. Very big Abstract Expressionist paintings were the “barbaric yawp” (to quote Walt Whitman) that proclaimed the new cultural dominance of the United States. Before that the important Modernist painters had only occasionally painted on a very big scale, to suit a special occasion. Picasso’s Guernica is a good example.

Big abstract paintings made themselves at home in the lofts of South-of-Houston-Street New York, then being colonized by artists. These originally industrial spaces seemed to offer plenty of wall. Love it, live with it, if necessary trash it. New art, though big, was still cheap. Later, with the multiplication of new museums in America and elsewhere, big paintings seemed to have a logical purpose. Admiring critics wrote pieces about the way in which these overweening canvases offered a new experience in wraparound vision. Inevitably, however, the space available soon started to run out. How many Pollocks, de Koonings and Rothkos does it take to fill a vast gallery space to the point of bursting? Too many painters were producing big canvases, with the result that a lot of contemporary art, even art safely in the possession of museums, now spends most of its time in store. Where ambitious private collectors are concerned, we have become used to the term ‘warehouse art’. The proud possessors are known to own it. It’s also known that they don’t live with most of it. In a real sense, art that isn’t being looked at doesn’t exist. Warehouse art is non-art. An awful lot of ambitious but misguided artists are still producing it.

If we look at the art of the past, art earlier than Modernism, we find a mixture of big art and small art. The big art was almost invariably produced for absolutely specific purposes – never on spec. It adorned churches and palaces. It offered a focal point to a public square. Small scale art was sometimes produced without a patron in mind, simply for the market, as most art is produced today. Many of the great masterpieces of the past are disconcertingly small. Portraits by Van Eyck and Memling. Religious paintings by Antonello da Messina. Some, though not all, of Rembrandt’s self-portraits. Samuel Palmer’s landscapes of the Shoreham period. Even the Mona Lisa. They need to be looked at in a different way from wraparound art – slower, more contemplative – dare one say it? – more loving.

Today many young artists are forced, through economic necessity, to work in very small spaces. Collectors, even when prosperous, don’t have unlimited wall space. How many wraparound canvases can you house in a two-bedroom flat? There is an obvious disjuncture between what is being made and its supposed destination. An art market that produces solely for museums and warehouses surely isn’t in a healthy condition.

This exhibition is meant to do two rather ambitious things within a physically small space. First, to suggest that contemporary art is changing, and changing rather faster than usual. An important part of this change is the rebellion against huge size. Artists are making small work not because they are forced to (though in some cases that is increasingly true), but because they actually want to – because small art, in current conditions, is actually cutting edge, and delivers a new and dissident message. “Look at me in a different way,” it says. Secondly, linked to this, the show invites visitors to explore, on their own terms, how this different way of looking functions, and what it may possibly deliver.

Edward Lucie-Smith

Alex Gene Morrison Installation Images

2010-09-16T18:18:00.000+01:00

ALEX GENE MORRISON talks to PAUL CAREY-KENT

2010-08-30T14:42:00.000+01:00

What’s with the ‘Gene’?

It’s basically practical. I’ve always been called Alex, though my actual first name is Eugene, but there’s also an American artist called Alex Morrison. That was confusing online, and when I got asked for information about his forthcoming show I decided to do something about it!

Where did you grow up?

In Birmingham in the eighties and nineties. Then I did my degree in London, so I’m very much urban. Birmingham was a brilliant place for what were then the sub-cultures of skateboarding and alternative music. That’s reflected fairly directly in my earlier work, and especially in the videos. My older brother, John, was a bass player in the band Hefner for some years and now collaborates with me by providing the sound tracks to my videos.

How did you come to be an artist rather than a musician?

Music has always been really important to me and I was in a few bands, but was pretty crap. So I don’t think there ever was a point where I was going to be a musician rather than an artist - I left the music to my brother. As a kid I was constantly inventing games and worlds for myself by drawing, and I was always encouraged in that by my parents.

The pastel colours and human-like characters of your videos and previous paintings don’t feature in this new show. Why is that?

In part it was a conscious decision to change my approach and palette, but without question the enormity of losing my Dad in 2009, which was a strange and affecting experience, was bound to have an impact on the work.

So your father’s death reinforced changes which were already occurring?

Yes, I already wanted to make the shift from one kind of alternate reality to another with a different feel to it – more solid, or maybe the same world but with the lights turned off: with dark things in dark spaces rather than light things in light spaces. Perhaps a world in an in-between state, like something evolving. And it feels nice to show something that’s the start of something – I didn’t want a show that felt like the end of something I was exhausting.

And the change in colours?

That was a real decision to do the opposite of paintings which were getting lighter and lighter. I wanted a conscious shift. I wanted a stronger palette with a dated feel but which still felt modern – parallel to the way fashions come around again.

The new paintings look rather like abstractions. Are they?

No. As well as being form, colour and shape buzzing against each other, I want them to be readable as things. That – as well as my love of sci-fi films like ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, may also lie behind the presence of gateways and portals. I wouldn’t want to get rid of all those things I am interested in: I don’t feel I could get up in the morning just to work on pure colour theory or geometry. I want to take that stuff and then try to do something with it. We have the liberty nowadays to appropriate things and then look to do something with them – but you do need to do something to justify it.

Though there is one face in view?

Yes, ‘Self Portrait as the Skull of an Apeman’ is the oldest painting in this show and something of a link to earlier work. Despite references to the ‘technological sublime’ and an interest in new technology in relation to painting I still want the paintings to be expressive, physical and sort of primitive. So ‘Self Portrait’ relates to that more bluntly in a symbolic way. However by depopulating the spaces and making them less specific I have allowed myself to be freer with the exploration of painting processes.

So the science fiction could stand in for the creative process?

Yes, definitely. You’re never settled with your own paintings – you can’t have that experience of finality which you have with other people’s work. One painting is always a step in moving on towards the future paintings. You’re always looking to move on. But things also tend to be cyclical and old ideas come back up again in new forms.

Are you deliberately referencing abstract artists?

Yes, I like playing games with art history and its genres. Here I’m absorbing a different kind of painting history, which has always interested me but I haven’t directly used before. I wanted to use it to create a new language, recognizing it’s impossible to make a painting that doesn’t refer to other paintings. I like the kind of time travel aspect of referencing Malevich, Rothko and Reinhardt while still keeping the viewer in the present.

How do the paintings come about?

I get there through the process of painting and repainting on a small scale, plus photographing them and then messing around with them on Photoshop to try different things. It’s a matter of letting the thoughts and influences float in and out without crowbarring them too much, and then seeing what comes about.

Although you haven’t made videos for this show, the paintings also have the feel of video games…

That is a massively integral part of my aesthetic. I’m aesthetically interested in the clunky feel of early computer games like Pong, which came about from their limitations – having to use flat planes, restricted colours and vector graphics to show space. But then if I made video which looked like these paintings it would look just like old computer games. I didn’t want that, and I wanted to assert that painting has always been my core concern.

There are also what look like blank screens?

Yes, there may be a connection there. The screens are important for how they look out at you and you look into it them.

What’s the hovering motif about?

When my Dad died I felt like someone had literally lifted me and it was a few days before I felt I had my feet back on the ground. I think that led to the idea of painting things which were being affected by some force or other, or being held in a state of balance from which they might be knocked off. A sense of weightiness and solidity contrasted with lightness, but also with a science fiction or magical feel, together with the sense that painting can do whatever it likes.

Are the paintings set in any particular time?

Well hopefully the past, present and future! The past projected into the future or the other way around. Definitely not just ‘now’.

STORIES OF THE DEATHLY ABSTRACTS by Paul Carey-Kent

2010-08-30T14:18:00.000+01:00

Those who saw Alex Gene Morrison’s last solo show in London, 2006’s ‘Vile Lure’, may be surprised by his new body of work. Four years ago there were paintings and videos of gloopily comical, pastel-coloured characters who seemed to have zoomed in from some unspecified sub-culture: we were in an alternate universe with equal measures of seduction and repulsion. In contrast, Morrison’s new show is of paintings only and is dark, serious, restrained and apparently abstract.

But not so fast. A closer look at the biggest canvases in ‘Dark Matter’ reveals that these may not be so abstract after all. ‘Sentinel’ suggests a door, a tomb or some Cyclopic presence. ‘Mass’ could be a dark planet, a black hole, a ball of flies or an opening into the void: an earlier version even started as an ironically black Smiley face. ‘Static’ could be a another dark opening, but also a huge close-up of a medal with ribbon, a computer screen or even two green faces in profile shouting each other down.

Nor is Morrison all that restrained. Far from disguising the artist’s hand in the flat style of much minimalism, there is a hand-drawn wobble to the shapes and plenty of painterly effect. The black centre of ‘Mass’ has a swarming, crawling texture. The reading of ‘Static’ as a screen is supported by the horizontal static-like striations of paint. ‘Sentinel’ contrasts areas of gloss and matt paint. Several smaller paintings make playful use of dark on dark colouration so that shapes are evident from some angles only.

These apparent abstracts, then, all from the last few months, are openings – literally, in those which depict portals, doors and screens – but also metaphorically. Openings into what?

First, they are openings to other places. The visual language echoes the worlds of science fiction and computer games and the urban landscape – all consistent with Morrison’s background and previous interests. Perhaps his characters may yet be ready to occupy these spaces. The paintings in ‘Dark Matter’ also suggest the more abstract world of artists such as Malevich, Rothko and Reinhardt to which they clearly refer.

Those three are spiritual painters, which may be another clue. Morrison’s father died shortly before he embarked on these paintings. That, not surprisingly, affected him profoundly and explains why tombs and coffins can be seen in the paintings, too. It is also consistent with the dark tonality and serious atmosphere of the work, and suggests that those openings may be into the possibility of an afterlife. The solar and planetary elements and the presence of hovering – or possibly rising – forms fits in with that.

The portals may also lead us into different times. The science fiction reference recurs if we see the paintings as depicting a form of time travel. References from the past – eighties technology, primitive video games, classic abstraction – are thrown forward into an imagined future. A future in which – as is the way – it seems the looks of former times have come around back into fashion. It’s a sort of primitive retro-futurism.

The emotional and scientific implications of ‘Dark Matter’ are, then, present throughout. The stage is set for these apparently abstract paintings to imply a surprising amount of narrative content – historical, personal, spiritual, transformational, and speculative. It’s not so much that Morrison has discarded his previous content, as that he’s testing how far he can move away from its figurative characteristics and still refer to it. I get the sense that this game works both ways: some forms start from the narrative, others emerge for themselves and Morrison then has to puzzle out whether and how they fit in. That keeps the process open and fresh.

Abstraction often arrives through a paring-back of references to the world in favour of concentrating on the work of art as an independent object in itself. In one way Morrison has started from that point by concentrating on geometric forms, but then added back the links to the world. Yet one could at the same time say that the result is rather closely related to Rothko’s intentions, for he saw himself not as an abstractionist but as a painter of human emotions.

Morrison’s latest work, then, gives us subtly lush paintings which pilfer the history of abstraction, but also provide openings into other times and places. They are abstracts activated by the to and fro of their stories.

ALEX GENE MORRISON | Dark Matter | Private View Sept 2nd 6.30-8.30pm

2010-08-30T14:14:00.000+01:00

Exhibition Dates

Friday September 3rd – Saturday October 2nd 2010

Gallery Hours
Wednesday–Saturday 11am–6pm or by appointment

CHARLIE SMITH london is delighted to present Alex Gene Morrison with his first London one person show since 2006.

In this new collection Morrison employs a highly personalised language in order to engage with a universal cosmology. Suspended delicately between representation and abstraction, forms advance and recede to suggest an outer worldliness that is somehow beyond and even pre or post human. Morrison creates an inter-dimensional realm that is at times enticing and other times foreboding. Complimentary and subtle colour combinations might project stillness and harmony whilst abrasive, electric codes suggest the clinical, infirm or incubatory.

But whilst Morrison maintains a stance of implication and illusiveness he still affirms a sapient presence by means of absence or in suggesting transitory movement. A stone slab in an empty room tells us that something was once here, most likely extinguished, and warns of an ultimate finality. Portals, gateways or corridors convey a journey, a point of crossing over from one state to another. Human or sentient beings were or are present in primitive or futuristic form.

Whilst nodding towards now retro futuristic film such as Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ or Franklin J. Schaffner’s ‘Planet of the Apes’, both of 1968, Morrison also references 20th century abstract painting. Glimpses of Kazimir Malevich, Ad Reinhardt or Peter Halley can be traced in Morrison’s layering of form and colour. There is an acute awareness of the materiality of paint where subtle shifts in tone, texture and direction of application combine to create spatial and perspectival shifts; and underpainting and repainting bring our attention to the built surface. An inquiry into the equivocal, therefore, is underpinned by a rigorous investigation into paint itself.

Young Gods Postmortem

2010-08-30T14:09:00.000+01:00

It was a pleasure to reactivate the Young Gods project and I'm delighted with the results. Scouring college shows is always an enjoyable process but scouring with intent is even better. My final selection of nine artists working across mediums included Joshua Bilton, Amy Cade, Leah Capaldi, Alexis Milne, Nika Neelova, Lara Rettondini, Ryan Riddington, Benjamin Senior & James Winter, all garnered from Goldsmiths, the Slade and the Royal College. The show came together well and the private view was busy as ever, and we reported sales for Benjamin Senior on opening night. Charles Saatchi visited on opening weekend and the following week it was announced that Bilton and Neelova had made the 20 strong shortlist of 'Saatchi's New Sensations'. More recently Neelova has made the final four, which involves making new work for the Saatchi show during Frieze week as well as a three minute Channel Four short. Having witnessed filming in the gallery, I'm confident Neelova's interview will be well received as she was so eloquent and revealed a deep understanding of her practice. Leah Capaldi has won another well respected prize by being selected by Parasol Unit for 'Exposure'. Her excellent video installation 'Sculpture' will be on show at Parasol Unit this September and October. Not to be outdone, Alexis Milne been selected for the international 'Start Point Prize'. Finally, it is with pleasure that I can announce Nika Neelova's stunning sculptural installation 'The Night also Falls' has been placed in a London based collection.

YOUNG GODS Images

2010-07-15T13:41:00.000+01:00

Joshua Bilton

Alexis Milne

Ryan Riddington

Benjamin Senior

James Winter

YOUNG GODS | 2010 London Graduates

2010-07-15T13:38:00.000+01:00

YOUNG GODS
London Graduates 2010
Curated by Zavier Ellis

Artists
Joshua Bilton, Amy Cade, Leah Capaldi, Alexis Milne, Nika Neelova, Lara Rettondini, Ryan Riddington, Benjamin Senior, James Winter

Private View
Thursday July 15th 6.30pm – 8.30pm

Exhibition Dates
Friday July 16th – Saturday August 7th 2010

Gallery Hours
Wednesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm or by appointment

Address
CHARLIE SMITH london, 336 Old St, London, EC1V 9DR

CHARLIE SMITH london is pleased to announce its forthcoming survey show of selected recent graduates from the art schools of London.

Gallery Director Zavier Ellis will curate a group show featuring the best of London's 2010 graduate and postgraduate shows, promising to offer a glimpse of the future of contemporary art. Known for identifying rising talent early, Ellis' previous selections from final shows include Jennifer Allen, David Blandy, Oliver Clegg, Simon Cunningham, Tim Ellis, Tessa Farmer, Sam Jackson, Monica Ursina Jäger, Annie Kevans, Peter Jacob Maltz, Sarah McGinity and Douglas White, all of whom have gone onto achieve notable success with galleries and collectors and many have begun to work with international museums.

Consisting of photography, installation, performance, video and painting ‘Young Gods’ promises to be an exciting and essential overview of current emerging practice.

Joshua Bilton
I am interested in an encounter of incoherence. Objects and events passed through the image have many voices that begin to entwine, weave and demarcate the certainty of thresholds, boundaries and hierarchies. Integral to my thought is the point where what is seen becomes uprooted in materiality and nature, colliding the surreal with an objective realism, the banal with the absurd, the empirical with the poetic, the great with the impotent. These structures mark an event that took place, a decision to pause, a reason to build, an invitation to perform but without any direct obligation. They gesture to an alternative habitation, the making of a space perhaps or an action rather than representing something in themselves.

Amy Cade
“I am looking for 2 male adult models to be part of an amateur adult movie to be made with one female adult model. No previous experience necessary…” After placing an advert on craiglist hundreds of applicants were put through a process of elimination. The audition was set up to both emulate the structure of an adult movie audition, but also to subvert the general gender roles. From two days of auditions six finalists have been chosen and short excerpts of their auditions are shown here. Two of these finalists will be chosen to be part of an ongoing project to direct, star in and produce my own adult movie that challenges the general assumptions of gender roles in the adult movie industry.

Leah Capaldi
I respond to the influence our culture has over the way we view ourselves in relation to themes of exploitation, power and desire. I continue to challenge existing beliefs and stereotypes within a gendered, political and cultural context. I explore this in relation to social reference. I am currently exploring the boundaries between performance and sculpture. I work primarily with performance as I believe it gives an immediacy and intimacy with the viewer that sculpture alone cannot possess. In being self aware I understand the object of the gaze and I return it with a punch.

Alexis Milne
The intention within my practice is to explore the role of the artist/activist through performance and video, negotiating the psychological terrain of taking a critical outsider political stance, whilst living within the current dominant culture. ‘Riot’ was produced after experiencing the G20 demonstrations at The Bank of England, which felt like a huge staged spectacle. Police were monitoring and recording activists who were in turn recording police, creating an endless loop of documentation. ‘Safe Riot’ addresses the contemporary state of protest, which can often seem like a futile gesture, and represents the endless cycle of civil unrest that is experienced 2nd hand through the media’s lens.

Nika Neelova
Taking its origins in the concept of the ruin, my work focuses on the effort to unearth the past to reveal the fragments of a larger history. Yet any restoration of the past in a way equals its destruction and when uncovered these fragments are irreversibly changed. They enter the light of the wrong day being distorted by the failure of history and the loss of memory to which we are everlastingly committed. My personal history is embedded into a collective and reclaimed history narrated through the evocation of remembered architectural elements and spaces, houses and rooms that I used to live in. Fragments of these places are then rebuilt from materials salvaged and rescued from other places or histories, therefore becoming structures that are emblematic of both transience and persistence over time. These decaying skeletal installations are pointing to a lost and invisible whole being somewhere on the threshold between the impossibility of remembering and the necessity of forgetting. They become the embodiment of a sense of loss and the defeat of commemoration.

Lara Rettondini
My work explores the tension in the individual between self and social interface along with the mechanisms of control that mediate between the two. I combine both conceptual and aesthetic rigour across a range of media to investigate the systems that structure and determine social behaviour, and through the re-contextualization of familiar objects and situations, I invite subtle shifts in meaning. These realignments suggest hidden possibilities and undermine some of the deep-rooted preconceptions that frame our relation to reality, while also questioning the viability of those frameworks.

Ryan Riddington
My work investigates the relationship between sculpture and photography, creating works that examine texture, the psychology of space and identity, both collective and individual. In ‘Control’ a stool is a plinth and a half-dressed figure, that is the artist, becomes a sculpture. With the subject's eyes to the floor, this 'performance' of a figure in isolation was photographed and archived for future reference. Paired with a lyric from the Janet Jackson song 'If' the image becomes a meditation on sexuality and unrequited love (named after a song by Janet Jackson).

Benjamin Senior
This work is part of my ongoing exploration of the thresholds of beauty and perversity. Taking a particular interest in the contemporary body cult, I work with the binaries of the natural and the artificial, the healthy and the unhealthy, the desirable and the abject. I use the body as a formal motif - geometric forces displace the social. This opens up a rich field of formal play in the paintings as I choreograph rhythms, false symmetries and distortions. This particular distortion is the stretch, through which we strive for purity of body, mind and spirit and a closer connection to nature.

James Winter
This work is an exploration of rhythm, movement, dance and sound, which has been born out of an obsession with global underground music culture and the cities that give birth to these new forms of musical expression. In creating an abstract installation that deals with the more formal traditional qualities of space, light, form and structure, I begin to question how we inhabit our cities and the space around us, and how architecture forms and shapes the city, for the better or for the worse.

Artforum's Citic's Pick: New British Painting

2010-06-09T13:17:00.000+01:00

NEW BRITISH PAINTING
Curated by Zavier Ellis & Pilvi Kalhama

GALLERY KALHAMA & PIIPPO CONTEMPORARY
Mannerheimintie 5 B, 5th floor
Helsinki, Finland
May 21–August 8

There are different kinds of newness. Among them is the paradigmatic newness of something taking place for the first time, or of something that rewrites history. But there is also the newness that appears new only because it goes against whatever immediately preceded it.

“New British Painting,” an exhibition curated by Zavier Ellis and Pilvi Kalhama, belongs to the latter category. The six artists participating here share a denial of many of the values characteristic of the works of the YBAs and their contemporaries: a theoretical or conceptual foundation, large scale, and the cult of the artist as celebrity. But instead of giving us a new idea of painting, these recent pieces look back and draw their inspiration from the styles and works of artists who are older or half-forgotten. What contemporary audience thinks about the fetishistic work of Allen Jones, or eighteenth-century French Rococo? These are what first spring to mind on looking at the works of Gavin Tremlett. Perhaps the main difference is the androgynous nature of Tremlett’s nude models.

Most of the works are figurative, modest, and even miniature in scale, and many have the feel of traditional easel paintings. While there are obvious visual pleasures and even humor in Dominic Shepherd’s psychedelic fantasies, the most compelling examples in this exhibition are undoubtedly Sam Jackson’s earth-toned panels, melancholy working-class portraits with their roots in the grand traditions of Bacon and Freud.

EMMA BENNETT Exhibition Images

2010-06-04T17:35:00.000+01:00

EMMA BENNETT: 'Death & Co.' at CHARLIE SMITH london

2010-05-29T10:56:00.001+01:00

Private View
Thursday June 3rd 6.30pm–8.30pm

Exhibition Dates
Friday June 4th – Saturday July 3rd 2010

Gallery Hours
Wednesday–Saturday 11am–6pm or by appointment

CHARLIE SMITH london is delighted to present Emma Bennett’s first one person show at the gallery.

Drawing on her previous paintings of still life elements set against expansive void-like grounds, Bennett proposes a contemplation on time, space and the fragility of the human condition. Underlined by a wistful acknowledgement of the sublime and the tragic, Bennett embraces the notion of the memento mori in her delicate application of appropriated imagery combined with expressive techniques derived from 20th century abstract painting.

In ‘Death & Co.’ Bennett continues to excavate 17th and 18th century Dutch painting for figurative motifs. She now turns her attention from images of hunted game that populated her previous work towards the maritime painting of Willem van de Velde, Jan Porcellis or Hendrik Jacobsz Dubbels. In doing so, Bennett’s monochromatic grounds become representational spatial fields, at once figurative and abstract, with sailing ships appearing from or receding into night time nothingness. As the artist states:

“The vessels appear to be travelling into the void-like space of the canvas. These ships represent individual journeys through life and reflect on the isolated state of people as they make their journeys, whether through passages of calm waters or treacherous high seas.”

Solitude, the passage of time, and a sense of becoming are alluded to, as are notions of value systems and materiality. Referring to the Dutch Golden Age, in which international trade and enterprise established the Netherlands as a world power, Bennett subverts conventional notions of wealth and emasculates historical power systems by freighting imperial ships with beautifully rendered still life fruits and flowers. Thus, in this fascinating new series of paintings, Bennett questions the ascendency of commerce in relation to historical methods of colonial exploitation and undermines its use of authority and dominance.

PAPYROPHILIA included in Paul Carey-Kent's London Highlights

2010-05-28T14:32:00.000+01:00

Papyrophilia @ CHARLIE SMITH London, 336 Old St - Hoxton

To 29 May: http://www.charliesmithlondon.com/

Zavier Ellis, who calls his gallery over the Reliance Pub after a family name rather than his own, has collaborated with Chris Westbrook (whose gallery in Fitzrovia is eponymous) to present a fascinating mix of new and old in 40 odd works on paper by 30 artists. Consistent with the obsessive tenor of 'Papyrophilia', there is a high proportion of perversity in the works shown: look out for Caro Suerkemper's beautifully modulated watercolour of a woman bound and trussed; Tim Parr's 'Construction' of chained limbs; James Unsworth's riotously adolescent nasal fuckers; young Irish artist Keiran Moore's inter-sexual characters, one of them using anemones as if they were leaches; Claire de Jong's cheekily joggled magazine page; and Miranda Whall's sensitive 'lactogenetic' portrait of one of her recently-productive breasts, which follow on logically enough from her rabbit and bird drawings in which the rabbit is a vibrator. There's also performance artist Mark McGowan's first sculpture - a tableau of performance left-overs and documentation, including a chips-up-the-nose photo, which fits right in. Even one of the obituaries drawn by Hugh Mendes is of porn star Marilyn Chambers. True, there's plenty of other stuff from still lives to landscapes, but I'd just come from White Cube...

NEW BRITISH PAINTING at Gallery Kalhama & Piippo Contemporary, Helsinki

2010-05-19T07:00:00.000+01:00

Featuring: Emma Bennett, Nadine Feinson, Sam Jackson, Alex Gene Morrison, Dominic Shepherd, Gavin Tremlett

Co-curated by Zavier Ellis & Pilvi Kalhama

Supported by The British Council

Private View
Thursday May 20th 2010 5-7pm

Panel Discussion
Thursday May 20th 2010 3-4pm

Exhibition Dates
Friday May 21st 2010 - Sunday June 20th 2010

Location
Gallery Kalhama & Piippo Contemporary Ltd, Mannerheimintie 3 B, 5th Floor, HELSINKI 00100, Finland

Contact
+358-9-2785301

Gallery Kalhama & Piippo has the great pleasure to open the group exhibition "New British Painting" showcasing six painters for the first time to the Finnish public. The exhibition is curated by Zavier Ellis, director of CHARLIE SMITH london, and Pilvi Kalhama. The exhibition is a continuation of the gallery's thematic group shows and is arranged with the support of the British Council.

A panel discussion with the curators and artists Sam Jackson and Dominic Shepherd will be arranged on Thursday the 20th of May at 3pm, before the opening reception.

The YBA (Young British Artists) school of the 1990s and the London art scene became an area of high intensity that was of interest to the entire art world, along with artists like Damien Hirst and Tracy Emin. At the same time art itself became deeply wrapped up in theoretical and conceptual explanations. Today, the art world is still following the London art scene but is the situation the same as before? In the past years both the art talk and the large scale spectrum of installations have been questioned by artists. What are the questions preoccupying the minds of today's artists living in this metropolis of great ethnical diversity?

"Today's British art is more an art of differences and divergence than of sameness. Many artists wish to separate themselves from their famous predecessors both stylistically and in their subject matter. They'd rather focus on individuality and personality. Even the viewers of today call for art to unfold on a personal level.

In the body of work of many British artists one can see a radical difference to large-scale painting. However, the contemporary artists working with miniature scale paintings still pose large-scale questions - of sexuality, personality, the self, affinity and strangeness. One thing in common with their predecessors is the glimpse of provocation. An essential concern is still a certain elegance, or a breeze of traditionality. The grand - but often personal and somehow queer - statement raised from the current time is concealed in aesthetical attire. This is typical London today and those tendencies are the ones we want to show in Finland."
- Pilvi Kalhama, director of Gallery Kalhama&Piippo Contemporary

"In the post-YBA era there is an open acknowledgement of the historical canon of art, typified most directly in this exhibition by Emma Bennett (b.1974) and Gavin Tremlett (b.1977) and to some extent Sam Jackson (b.1977), where that history is embraced to a degree whereby the historical is assimilated into the contemporary without irony or cynicism. The historical is mined to the point where it can be appropriated or transcribed, and reconfigured into the personal. A subjective idiom is established that equates to the artist's internal critical model to reveal constant preoccupations of the human psyche: beauty, loss, transience, alter-ego and alternative realities being some such examples.

Indeed, it has to be accepted that art must perform some kind of function other than visual indulgence and a fundamental purpose has to be an engagement with the other, both for the artist and audience, through which one can take flight from the everyday. Nadine Feinson's (b.1959) fascination with the monstrous; Dominic Shepherd's (b.1966) eerily populated landscapes; and Alex Gene Morrison's (b.1975) acidic figure, landscape and interior paintings become windows to other worlds. The magical and mythical entice and warn us to proceed but proceed with caution. Deathly dark powers are at work in these hinterlands as beauty and terror simultaneously seduce and threaten, as we are invited to engage with and decipher interior worlds by means of representations of the exterior.

My hope is that a certain sensibility will render manifest in order to reveal current preoccupations of today's British painters, who in this case were all schooled in and mostly still work from London. There are recurring interests that underpin a segment of rising British painters, some of which are expressed in this exhibition."
- Zavier Ellis, curator and director of CHARLIE SMITH london

PANEL DISCUSSION

DOES NATIONALITY MATTER?

You are invited to follow the discussion about the internationalization of artists, the expectations of the art world and national character of art on Thursday 20th of May at 3-4 pm at Gallery Kalhama & Piippo Contemporary. The opening reception of New British Painting will take place after the panel at 5-7pm.

Participating in the discussion:

Zavier Ellis, curator, gallerist, UK
Sam Jackson, artist, UK
Dominic Shepherd, artist, UK
Marko Mäetamm, artist, head of fine arts department, EE
Erki Kasemets, artist, EE
Silja Rantanen, artist, professor in painting, FI
Pilvi Kalhama, moderator of the panel, FI

Arranged in cooperation with The Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and the British Council.

'EMMA BENNETT: HOW TO PAINT IN FOUR DIMENSIONS' by Paul Carey-Kent

2010-05-17T14:38:00.001+01:00

It’s not easy being a painter these days. Not only do we expect some visual seduction, we also demand an original and recognizable style and want some ideas to be tackled. The state of painting itself is always worth a reference. And if a little technical flair could be thrown in, heavy-handedness avoided and continuing development demonstrated over the years, that would be all for the good. Not easy at all, but Emma Bennett navigates those challenging expectations with some assurance in ‘Death and Co’, her new series of large paintings. They show ships in dark waters, apparently sailing into the void-like space of the canvas, their cargoes of fruit and flowers spilling overboard.

The visual seduction comes in a quadruple dose. Each large canvas combines a glowering lamp black void, a series of realistic images sourced from seventeenth century Dutch painting, and an abstract expressionist intervention not unlike a passage of Morris Louis staining. The striking effect of combining those three apparently disparate elements makes up the fourth dose. What’s not to fall for?

The result is also highly distinctive, both visually and in how so much is so seamlessly brought together. Those four elements, for example, can also be seen as four different timescales caught up in one image: the 17th century of the source paintings, the 20th century of the abstract gesture, the 21st century of their combination, the eternity of the void.

That concern with time already starts to suggest big themes. Bennett sees the ships as representing individual journeys through life, and reflecting ‘on the isolated state of people as they make their journeys, whether through passages of calm waters or treacherous high seas’. The paintings are about time, our span of it as living things, the nature of the void we come from and to which we will – or will we? – return. As Bennett says, ‘there is a clarity about the start of life, but an ambiguity about the end’. There are lots of oppositions to get our heads around: life / death; night / day; dark / light; stillness / movement; abstraction / representation; control / spontaneity…. They’re all built in.

Many of those oppositions have been present in Bennett’s previous work, but her newest paintings develop them further by adding ships to the range of Dutch Golden Age images appropriated. The sense of movement, and of the human journey through life becomes more explicit. The history of trade, struggles for power, imperialism, battles, cargo, shipwreck, slavery… there is a whole set of extra implications to think about. But Bennett raises questions rather than seeking to impose answers. Or as she says ‘it’s more about my personal exploration of things that I’m trying to get my head around’.

The question ‘how can painting remain relevant?’ is also addressed. Bennett is a miner of paintings past who picks her favourites from classical and modernist traditions, simply on the basis of what appeals to her and chimes with her own concerns. She then shows how those meanings and techniques can be made fresh for a 21st century context. The result isn’t the more academic type of ‘painting about painting’, in which the main point of the work is to examine different means of representation. Rather, the history of painting and the metaphorical ideas built into the traditions of still life and marine paintings are used to bring history into the work. That’s one way forward with painting: to use its whole past not just as an influence, as every good painter must, but as a direct jumping-off point for doing something new.

Technically, too, Bennett has to operate in four modes. It isn’t the point of the flowers, fruit, ships and smoke taken from classical masterpieces that they are accomplished imitations of the original, but we can admire the incidental fact that they are. The black void against which they appear requires a different discipline, as does the judgement of control and chance which goes into the abstract elements. And then the whole must cohere in a convincing manner.

Furthermore, the themes are built into how the work is made. The paintings are about time, and as well relying on four different periods of time for their content, they use a mixture of fast and slow processes, of precise representation and spontaneous abstract mark-making. The historic is overtaken, as in life, by the modern. The pouring process puts us in mind of the sea’s swell and makes wave-like forms for the ships to sail in. The abstract ground acts as ocean by night, the void we come from and the death we move towards.

There’s nothing wrong with serious topics – in Bennett’s words ‘they cover big subjects but – that’s life!’. But it may sounds as if such themes could come across as heavy-handed. However, there is a sense of play in the use of metaphors from still life and nautical painting being jammed together so there is almost too much going on. It’s done with a wink, I think, and there is also, visually, an element of the absurd in the combinations she makes, in particular in the shifts of scale which pairs giant fruit with ships – or is it model ships with everyday fruit? That touch of humour is necessary to keep any portentousness at bay. We see it again in the replacement of flags with the bows taken from hanging festoons of flowers. It’s there in her previous series, too: fruit which borrows the wings from birds, or deer wearing flowers, for example.

So that is how to paint in four dimensions. The beauty of it is that, although it may sound complicated, and though it certainly gives the viewer plenty to think about, it leads to paintings which are immediately and straightforwardly alluring.

EMMA BENNETT INTERVIEWED BY PAUL CAREY-KENT

2010-05-17T14:34:00.000+01:00

Where did you grow up?

In Brecon in the National Park in Wales. People tend to say ‘oh how beautiful!’, but nature does have its tough side as well. Maybe that has fed into the combination of elements in my work. But I came to London as quickly as I could!

Was it always painting that appealed to you?

Yes, even in school I always liked it as a substance and enjoyed its ability to make an illusionary space.

How has your style changed over the years?

I was painting more physically during my MA, starting with a source image but with no figuration surviving to the end and lots of poured elements. I kept some of that but re-introduced more explicit figuration.

Obviously you have a strong interest in classical painting?

I do, and there is a particular pleasure in the lusciousness of those painters – though the abstract expressionist tradition and the void-like spaces are just as important to me. But I’m not an art historian at all! It’s more a matter of reacting to a random pool of art history which I’ve sort of found my way around. As it happens I find my interests are going backwards in time as time moves forwards…

So is it a bit like looking for love – it’s hard to be too deliberate about it?

I’m treasure hunting for imagery I can connect with in emotional way or which chimes with things I’m thinking about. Often it’s just elements, not whole paintings: I become attached to part of painting. You can’t be sure what will affect you till it does, but I keep my eyes open so I’m ready when it happens. I suppose it is a lot like love.

Why do you set those found elements against a black void?

That’s partly just because of the way that allows you to use light: I get a pleasure from the luminosity of the original paintings and can capture that best against a dark ground. It’s also a nod to the notion of a void in abstract painting. And I think of them as night paintings. I use Lamp Black, which felt like the blackest black I could get my hands on.

What is your process once you have laid down that black ground?

I start with an idea and allow myself to journey with it. The amount of void I leave just depends on what feels right, what lets me get into the work. I don’t pre-collage the images, though I do scale them up to map out the picture until the composition feels right.

Once I have combined elements from several different source paintings, I then add the poured element. That tends to be shellac rather than the oil paint used for the rest of the painting, so they don’t mix. I have some control of the pour, but to some extent you do have to let go, and that creates an element of tension. Then I respond to what has happened. Sometimes I’ll add more figuration in response to the poured element.

How does that pouring taking place?

I pour and move the canvas, tilting it on the floor. Then I prop it so it’s at an angle and the paint can move over the next 24 hours. Sometimes I find the pour covers something I’d painted meticulously for hours and loved, but there is something exciting about taking those sort of risks. You can make really radical changes very quickly to something which took ages, which means you have fast and slow elements, and so the subjects of the painting and how they are made go hand in hand.. Sometimes I think I’ve ruined all that work with the pour, and I’m gutted when I leave the studio, but I don’t hide the poured element. Somehow I always find a way around it in the end: I argue with the work until I reach an equilibrium. The shapes of the pour may suggest what needs to go next. So the abstract can drive the figurative.

How long does a painting take you to make?

Probably a month on average, during which I really enjoy seeking a balance between the elements in it.

Presumably much of that time is spent painting the detailed realistic elements?

Yes, and the time it takes to make them makes it more of a physical involvement and a life with the work. You’re up close and intimate with it for hours. That is time-consuming but absorbing. I work my own way out, though, rather than trying to research and imitate the traditional techniques. As it’s not about replicating the original, it’s odd when people get the wrong idea and want to compare them with the original to see ‘how well I’ve done’.

Do you stick strictly to the original elements you start from?

Not necessarily. I’ll often change the scale and relationships, and anything else if I feel like it. I’ll allow them to be inconsistent in perspective and absurd in how the scale works. There is a playfulness in that, and in how I use the different languages of painting. There’s also a joyous and celebratory aspect, just as the original paintings of fruit and flowers celebrated life while presaging its end.

Your new paintings include ships. What excited you about them?

The paintings are very much about life and death, and so I want to include a sense of our movement through life. That is already present in the poured elements, and in how the fruit and flowers in earlier pictures could be falling or levitating. To take that further it was natural to think about travel, and ship paintings occurred to me. I’ve always liked the quality of the light in Dutch still lives, and that’s present in the ship paintings too. So the ships are vessels on a journey towards the inevitable, and the fruit or flowers are the cargo spilling out, standing in for human life and its preciousness.

Are there references to particular issues in human life?

Those fragile forms from still-life painting take the place of the cargo and sailors. That could suggest the various ways in which people attempt to add value, meaning and longevity to their lives. For example, accumulating wealth gives some people security and confidence, whereas others are more motivated by developing relationships and seeking rare moments of compassion and understanding.
What is the movement towards?
I wanted to represent the movement through life and the certainty of an end, while recognizing that there is a clarity about the start of life, but an ambiguity about the end. There is the potential for some energy remaining afterwards, like ghosts or an afterlife. But it’s more to signal that I’m thinking about death, not to propose solutions or say what I believe. I don’t want to be seen to see them as preaching. It’s more about my personal exploration of things that I’m trying to get my head around. They cover big subjects but – that’s life!
There is also smoke from battle scenes?
Yes, because these particular ships are from battle scenes. So that refers to the desire of imperial powers to conquer the seas and gain worth. And I’ve exploited how the ships allow the process of pouring and the look of the expressionist elements to remind you of the sea.
Is there also an economic dimension?
Yes, in that the work can be seen as questioning the mercantile value system that has become synonymous with the Dutch Golden Age, and is still prevalent in western society today. But the value of life is a more important to me in the paintings than the value of trade.
Why do some ships have a bow where one might expect a flag, and one ship flowers in place of the sails?
Because I was looking at paintings of festoons of fruit and flowers, where they are hung up on a peg with a bow on top. That was part of what led me to ships, as I saw a similarity of form between the festoon and the sails. I also felt slightly uncomfortable about waving the flag of a particular nation. And it’s a fun way of tying in the still life.
Which artists have influenced you most?

The fruit and flowers use Dutch and Flemish painters such as Willem van Aelst, Abraham Mignon, Jan Davidsz de Heem, Rachel Ruysch and Johannes Bosschaert. The ships are mostly from William van de Velde. The light against a dark ground is influenced by Rembrandt and Carravagio. I am just as affected by 20th century abstractionists: De Kooning, Rothko, Pollock, Newman and especially Morris Louis: I love his veils of poured colour. Weirdly enough, given that I favour black paintings, I particularly like how Robert Ryman’s white paintings take the act of painting to its logical conclusion.

PAPYROPHILIA Preview Images

2010-04-22T13:14:00.001+01:00

Claire de Jong

Keith Haring & Andy Warhol

Jasper Joffe

Cathy Lomax

Robin Mason

Mark McGowan

Chris Ofili

Michael Scoggins

Dominic Shepherd

Caro Suerkemper

Gavin Tremlett

James Unsworth

PAPYROPHILIA at CHARLIE SMITH london, PV May 6th

2010-04-21T14:05:00.000+01:00

In association with Westbrook Gallery

INCLUDING:
Martin Lea Brown
George Condo
Leon Golub
Keith Haring & Andy Warhol
Luke Jackson
James Jessop
Jasper Joffe
Reece Jones
Claire de Jong
Cathy Lomax
Robin Mason
Mark McGowan
Hugh Mendes
Kieran Moore
Alex Gene Morrison
Paul Noble
Gavin Nolan
Chris Ofili
Tim Parr
Claire Pestaille
Michael Scoggins
Liam Scully
Dominic Shepherd
John Stark
Caro Suerkemper
Gavin Tremlett
James Unsworth
Stephen Walter
Miranda Whall

Private View / First Thursday
Thursday May 6th 6.30pm–8.30pm

Exhibition Dates
Friday May 7th – Saturday May 29th 2010

Gallery Hours
Wednesday–Saturday 11am–6pm or by appointment

PAPYROPHILIA is a celebration of an artist’s treatment of one of the most exciting and enduring mediums, work on paper. Often considered as secondary or preparatory, this exhibition aims to highlight how working on paper can be a vital and immediate process that is free from constraints often endured by working in other mediums.

Combining artists who specialise or work predominantly with paper such as Reece Jones or James Unsworth to multi-disciplinary artists like Luke Jackson or Miranda Whall to those who are known only for working in other mediums such as Mark McGowan, Dominic Shepherd or John Stark, PAPYROPHILIA will illuminate these various approaches and invite the audience to gain an insightful view of the artists’ working practice.

In its totality PAPYROPHILIA will provide an overview of pencil, charcoal, ink, watercolour, etching and collage on paper by an essential selection of rising and established artists.

GAVIN NOLAN Installation Images: 'A King's Gambit Accepted'

2010-03-31T16:39:00.000+01:00

‘Demonology: The Art of Extreme?’ By Delphine Neimon

2010-03-24T17:17:00.000Z

“Demonology : the study of demons, their natures, their forms and their behaviour, particularly with regards to humans.”

The word is ancient, descending from another age. It encapsulates a multitude of superstitions and beliefs; it has been so often misused, incorrectly associated with extremes, with changes in fashion… Using it as the title of an exhibition – what a risk! At best it might sound like media hype, at worst foolhardy… but just perhaps daring flare?

That’s the question I ask myself as I read the title on a London cultural events site. In the Renaissance too, King James the First used that word; his Daemonology imprinted itself on contemporary minds; it is even said that it inspired Shakespeare to write Macbeth. The study of demons and their hold over the world of the living nourishes English seventeenth century culture. It would seem that it still does. But how? Why does an art gallery in the heart of one of the most modern cities in the world choose to return to this ancient subject? And how can it hope to do it justice?

The best thing is to go and see for oneself. I find the director’s address, send him an email, to which he replies within ten minutes: we fix a date. I arrive at the appointed hour… and find myself in front of a pub instead of the gallery I was expecting: the art is exhibited in a space right over the bar. Bare walls well lit by a combination of big windows and spot lights. The director, Zavier Ellis, welcomes me at the foot of the stairs, shows me around, shows me each piece, and introduces me to each artist like members of a family. Ceramics, paintings, sculptures, the pieces explore the links between belief and reality through art. At least that’s what the press release says. A single question ties it all together: where does the devil reside today?

Derived from fairytales, the ceramics of Prue Piper are it seems inspired by traditional superstitions about elves, fairies and dryads. Looking at “Two Headed Vessel” it is Ariel or Puck that one sees hidden among leaves. Gentle, harmless demons are these. One finds this innocence again, twisted slightly in the painting “Demonology” by James Jessop; wherein he mixes all the Z-grade movie themes from Creature from the Black Lagoon to Godzilla via the vampire movies of the Hammer House of Horror, the whole lot in a frenzy of garish colours and Munch images. At this stage, one is still somewhere between the grotesque and the naïve.

Things become considerably tougher with Boy (George), a ceramic sculpture by Jonathan Baldock; an androgynous glass-eyed, grey face, with ears of wheat for hair… already alarming. But the ears are tied with a black ribbon stretching from the mouth like a string of imprecations; this is much more twisted, a destructive curse to destroy all fertility, all life, all prosperity. Pure black magic, of the same kind painted magnificently by Claire Pestaille or John Stark. The former is inspired by surrealist collages or Goya’s paintings to create a spell that reverberates with the double feminine absolutes of seducer and destroyer. The latter takes up again with the tortured world of Bosch and Brueghel. His painting Fear Eats the Soul entirely fills the dark room of the gallery with its maleficio. How can one avoid thinking of the witches in Macbeth?

The heat rises by another degree in the paintings of Alex Gene Morrisson. Everywhere in this artist’s work, oily blackness meets faded pastels. Black Bile (Shark Face) is perhaps the most striking: a faded rainbow background from which erupts a sort of black larva, its mouth wide with a cry of bitter rage. Its voracious mandibles render the whole business deeply unpleasant: suddenly it’s like being faced with a tyrant infant, monstrous and yet feeble. And one is totally helpless before this spectacle of pain at once inflicted and suffered, such as one also feels elsewhere in the works of Gögel.

If the latter puts one in mind of the dehumanised atmosphere of Otto Dix, the skeletons of Schleime and Shepherd immerse us, the former in the world of the Vanities and zombie films (it’s hard not to think of the creations of Tom Savini), and the latter in the colours and shapes of macabre Mexican paintings. As for Danny Treacy, it is not a human but a cow’s skull that he portrays in Fertile Ground No. 51. A reworked photogram, in which this symbol of death stands out from the dark shadow with nuances of blood red and candy pink. Eroticism, masochism…the wooden frame, the chain hanging the work, all evoke an inseparable mix of sexual pleasure and pain. The heart of Saint Valentine, a blood filled uterus, death nestled in the folds of fertility. Eros and death-wish mixed once again in a suffocating miasma.

Spotted with wax like clotted blood, this is the most upsetting work in the collection. Jasper Joffe’s The Cursed Box both resembles a clock and a letterbox… and a guillotine. Decked with warnings etched in the wood patina, it is pierced with bloody holes through which can be discerned short texts. A reference to the chain letter spam that infests our inboxes, bearing omens that one must send on and propagate or risk being cursed; ironically the artist announced his work with a childish and particularly squalid email. A lucid and unforgiving take on the scourge of the Internet? The computer as Pandora’s Box, flooding one’s consciousness with all human suffering, which must under no circumstances be opened?

No answer of course…but a thicket of questions, and that’s the real merit of these pieces and of the exhibition that gathers them together. The only thing for sure as one leaves this gallery is that, despite the scientific age, the diabolical exists yet. In the sixteenth century, demons helped to make sense of the incomprehensible, helping to deal with it if not actually to dispel it: the mentally deranged labelled “possessed”, women who were too liberal in their ways accused of witchcraft, natural scientists condemned as warlocks… a well known phenomenon. The problem is that it persists. Despite today’s technological advances, or perhaps because of them, demonology remains a deep seated need, a drug, and the ultimate means of warding off the violence of our times. One shivers before these pieces; their message is unequivocal: in the twenty first century, demonology chimes with violence, death, seduction, naivety and childhood. Nice view of the future, isn’t it?

To find out more: http://www.charliesmithlondon.com/

Gavin Nolan Exhibition Images: 'A King's Gambit Accepted'

2010-03-19T15:48:00.000Z

Alexis Milne 'Witch Finder General' at CHARLIE SMITH london

2010-03-10T16:46:00.000Z

Alexis Milne performance at CHARLIE SMITH london on youtube now: Alexis Milne: 'Witch Finder General'

‘Choose life or celebrate at the party of suicides’ by Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield. Written for Gavin Nolan's exhibition 'A King's Gambit Accepted'

2010-03-09T12:29:00.005Z

And what a party: Walter Benjamin, Jesus Christ, Joseph Goebbels, Ernest Hemingway, Adolf Hitler, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Socrates, Virginia Woolf. There are no painters here, though according to the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard they top the table of suiciding artists. Well, okay, Plath and Hemingway, but they’re relegation material paintingwise. And there is Hitler of course; but his speciality, and Goebbels’ too, another failed artist, was more in determining what ought not to count as art, burning books and quarantining degenerate paintings, and befriending the filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. It is difficult for a filmmaker to commit suicide says Godard, because you are not alone, to make films you must work with at least one other person. A painter or a writer on the other hand can become isolated, can lose himself. But this does not mean losing oneself in one’s art, but that it becomes easier to lose oneself in one’s solitude. There are no painters here because these are paintings.

The Nazis were the expression of the state become suicidal – after the Jews and the gypsies it would have been the turn of artists and redheads, until there was no-one left but the executioner of the executioner. The true Nazi could never be a true Nazi, because the Nazi absolutely at one with his ideology, the Nazi whose very identity is his cause, could never be pure enough, his self-identity would need to take the form of murdering himself as the act of distinguishing himself from himself. Such would be how the longest Knight’s path closes, having taken every possible step it arrives back at itself obliged now to cross its own path at the very point of its departure. And such was the fate of art which in the name of an historical necessity claimed for itself the ability to discern the moment when it could touch its own propriety and sense the purity of art within itself.

If you choose to live in a society capable of mass destruction says Peter Sloterdijk (from whom the title of this essay comes) then you are a ‘semi-agent’ of a “cynical community of suicides”. But you cannot overcome the problem simply by escaping or emigrating. Not by escaping into leisure time, which would be to party with the suicides, and not by going as far away as possible, whether it be outward (you could never get far enough away) or inward (an act of the mind to an inner elsewhere-than-here which would be Godard’s lost writer). Either of the latter is a splitting and an accession to schizophrenic existence and thus a form of suicide in itself. A schizophrenic structure is one in which the I that kills is no longer distinguishable from the I that is killed. No, the only way of avoiding suicide is to choose life. And to choose life is to affirm possibility in the form of embodied enlightenment. But that possibility is nothing less than the creation of a new body. The chessboard at the mouth of the suicide, emerging from it or receding into it, is the stage of the choice, the staging of the choice between the new body of an embodied enlightenment or suicide.

Or perhaps what we have with these paintings is the long-awaited wall of ‘the Federated Commune of Suicides’, something that Paul Virilio anticipated as the natural outcome of anti-representational art mirroring the decline of representative democracy. But even then it would at the same time be the re-emergence of the very thing Virilio thinks contemporary art is putting to death: painting, the slow born-again flesh and blood of paint, laying claim not to purity but to the body of the artist.

Either way, these paintings are about suicide, and paintings made under the condition of suicide; not paintings made when the artist was feeling suicidal, or at least I don’t think so, but paintings about suicide made when suicide appears to be one of the conditions determining the possibility of contemporary art.

According to one of the leading philosophers of art today, Alain Badiou, there are two conflicting and constitutive poles of contemporary art, two norms of what a subject is, two subjective paradigms at war with each other: the subject as its body, and the subject separate from its body. For the subject who identifies with its body the limit would be experimentation with death. In art this would be the body artist committing suicide in public. Nonetheless this paradigm is called enjoyment, because in the end experimentation with and identification with the body in life is enjoyment, in which death is part of life. But for the subject who refuses identity with its body the paradigm is sacrifice, because a refusal of the body in life is death. Here life is but part of death, where pleasure occurs in a world after this one, the same world where the suicide bomber projects himself. Today’s war on terror is the struggle between these two paradigms. If the choice is between enjoyment and sacrifice then no art is possible says Badiou. The artist today must neither identify with his own body nor separate himself from it. The artist must seek a way between two suicides. And perhaps what we have with these paintings, the game played in front of the eyes of these suicides, is an image of Badiou’s ‘third way’ between two suicides, an image of ‘immanent difference’, neither the immanence of identification with the body, nor the transcendence of its rejection. A game spilling from the mouth of the suicide or receding into it which opposes the choice between escape or emigration in favour of forms of living that what, open up play?

If it were not for art, or rather the way in which art can show us a certain truth about ourselves, that we are capable of the untrue and must welcome it as the condition of the true, then we would all have committed suicide long ago. So says Nietzsche. If we had only science and the ways in which it shows us the untrue, then by our honesty we would have been led to suicide. Only art makes existence bearable, as a fictional appearance. Art gives us the eyes and hands to fashion ourselves as fictions, so Nietzsche. But more than that it provides us with the good conscience to do so, art is the good will that lets us play, lets us float above ourselves to a place beyond our morality and our honesty from where we can laugh freely and playfully and experience our freedom. So Nietzsche.

But it would not be a freedom absolutely free from those things at which we laugh and still less a freedom from ourselves; on the contrary, we become tolerable to ourselves at this moment. Freedom is not simply our own property, if it were then we could decide on the freedom to kill ourselves and still survive. To decide on death believing that you are deciding for freedom is to meet with the resistance of what conditions freedom and is the condition of freedom, the experience of an other, the otherness of another person, another person in me or in front of me, through the experience of which I gain my freedom. That I laugh at that moment, that’s the moment when the game and the saying of thanks are one and the same.

REFERENCES

Alain Badiou, ‘The subject of art’, trans. Lydia Kerr, Deitch Projects, in The Symptom, 6, 2005.
Jean-Luc Godard, ‘Quand j'ai commencé à faire des films, j'avais zéro an’, Liberation, 15 mai 2004.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
Paul Virilio, Art and Fear, trans. Julie Rose (London: Continuum, 2003).

'A DARK CURRENT RUNS THROUGH THE LONDON ART WORLD: THE EMERGENCE OF THE OCCULT' by Tom Jeffreys

2010-03-09T08:39:00.000Z

Against a darkly-clouded twilight stoops an elderly tree. From one branch, hanging by a rope, a raven; skewered oddly by another a lightly bloodied fish. In the foreground a coterie of mythological creatures teem and jabber: a crimson-eyed goat, an electric blue skeleton, a long-haired red-skulled monkey, an eagle-headed warrior, an axe wielding goblin. At their head, a crazed, semi-clad figure puts a light to a cauldron. Smoke billows backwards, and a scorching medieval glow illuminates a richly yellow-robed figure, arms crossed under folds of fabric, head bowed and cowed.

The painting is ‘Fear Eats the Soul' by London-based contemporary artist John Stark. It's on show at Charlie Smith London as part of an exhibition entitled ‘Demonology'. Elsewhere in the gallery are weirdly anthropomorphic ceramic jugs, a kind of clockwork wellied devil, mysterious, dark, photographic images and strange symbolic collages.

Just down the road on the same night is the opening of Boo Saville's latest solo show at Trolley Gallery. ‘Totem' consists of two series of paintings examining death, and the way that different cultures respond to this most universal of everyday occurrences. Amongst the skulls and the odd heads and the mummified figures, the most affecting work - because the hardest to read - is entitled ‘Meme'. Made by applying household bleach to blackout canvas, this is an eerily blank work. Like perhaps the Turin Shroud, death is there, but you can't know exactly where.

A few weeks previously, at the London Art Fair, I came across the works of Latvian/Russian contemporary artist Henrijs Preiss, exhibiting in the UK with Sesame Gallery. Behind a lush red curtain hang a host of paintings on board - in bold reds, blacks, gold and cream - that feature an instantly familiar vocabulary of esoteric symbolism. You recognise it immediately but cannot know quite from where. Pagan pentagrams, cabalistic diagrams, Byzantine icons: all overlap in layers of abstract composition. And yet the referential specificity has been removed, leaving these images empty and meaningless, and all the more powerful for it.

SIREN SONG

Death, paganism, mystery, ritual, the occult, the darkly weird: this is what is happening in London right now. Exhibitions at Vegas Gallery, Transition, Standpoint and Riflemaker have reinforced this dark undercurrent in the capital. The activities of the Last Tuesday Society - and their recent opening of Viktor Wynd Fine Art in Hackney - confirm it. Preiss notes that, even though he's "been working on the same project for over ten years, it does seem to be gaining more attention today". But why now? And why here?

In ‘The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark', first published in 1995, American astrophysicist Carl Sagan writes: "I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic and national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir."

Might this hold a clue? Certainly there's a prejudice and worry afoot. Words like ‘terrorism' or ‘recession' are everywhere we look. "At times of scarcity," Boo Saville explains, "we reach for comfort". And comfort is often associated not with logic but with something more primitive or child-like.

It's perhaps interesting here to look at artists like Nick Laessing, Kit Craig, Ryan Leigh, and - to a lesser extent - Keith Tyson, whose works all explore the boundaries between the arts and the sciences. Leigh's work fuses the aesthetics of these two traditionally disparate disciplines - the use of graph paper a particularly neat motif here: "I like to use graph paper for a number of reasons," Leigh explains: "firstly, it has an interesting aesthetic quality which interpenetrates all areas of the work reminiscent of the ‘aether' in classical physics. Secondly, it has a reference to the scientific ‘result'. Thirdly, it creates tension between the seemingly un-ordered marks of drawing and the rigid framework of the graph grid."

FUNNY

It is this tension between order and disorder that seems at the heart of today's London, and thus a crucial element of much of the art coming out of it. But it's not all dark misery and endless references to Freud's ‘unheimliche'; certain artists around London at the moment can, thankfully, see the funny side. By its very nature, a symbol is about the potential for duality of meaning, and this is one of the fundamental elements of British humour. The double-entendre, the pun, even irony itself: all rely on the fact that a word or image can mean several different things according to context, intention, the attitude of the viewer etc.

In October 2009, for example, David Marron had a wonderful solo show at GV Art in Marylebone. Throughout the various downstairs gallery rooms twelve horrific, ochre, corpse-like figures loomed, lurched, hunched, stretched, grabbed and pointed at the unwary visitor. Each one of these life-size zombie-type creatures represented a different character, so there was The Mother - a multi-armed monstrosity carrying a baby in one hand - and The Arbiter - a wailing figure hunched in a cage. These are direct, raw and uncompromising works, shocking and powerful, and yet - to my surprise at the time - humour emerges. These works are actually quite hilarious.

My favourite figure - and the artist's too, he said when I spoke to him - is ‘The Senile'. A baffled looking figure sporting a blue hospital coat points vacantly into the middle distance. The expression is as if he has just remembered something frightfully important, but in attempting to articulate this fact, has completely forgotten whatever it actually was. In his breast pocket sits a packet of forget-me-not seeds and out of his tartan granny shopper pokes the head of some weird mutant lizard. It's made of varnished parma ham.

There's a fine line between pathos and humour and Marron skips along it with evident glee. The same could be said for the vast swathes of weirdness that fill the recently opened Viktor Wynd Fine Art or the bizarre performance art of Marcus Coates. I interviewed Coates back in June 2009 ahead of his collaborative performance with experimental funk/metal collective Chrome Hoof, entitled ‘A Ritual for Elephant and Castle'. Not only did he stress the importance of seeing things in new and unusual ways - he took project managers on the local council on "imaginary journeys" for example - but also in having fun. "Everyone's really up for this," he'd said, "because it's basically a party."

And what a party it was! With Chrome Hoof taking to the stage all clad in silver as if all the baddies from Doctor Who had got together for a bit of a jam, and Coates himself tottering about sporting a real horse's head, it was definitely a spectacle. Funny and ridiculous - yes, but ultimately it was also a strange and fantastically thrilling journey. One that meant something.

TRANSIENT TREND

Interestingly, Marron and Coates present very different reasons for what is currently taking place in the London art world. For Coates, "it simply reflects what's going on in society really. There's a need to believe in something else, particularly now after the collapse of consumerism and capitalism. But people are reluctant to engage in things like religion or New Age self-help, so ritual can serve that purpose."

Marron on the other hand says it's "probably just another transient trend. People will always be drawn to look at the apparently strange whether some art oddity, some misshapen person or a traffic accident. People are compelled to look."

As much as I agree with Marron here - and as much as I love his work - I don't think one can dismiss the notion of the "transient trend". That is what art criticism and art history are about, to some extent. Cubism, you could argue, was a transient trend. What I find interesting I think is the way that reference points are colliding - but not in the way that they did under post-modernism with an appreciation only for irony. Now a clash of different potential meanings creates something more, something seemingly bigger. I think this is the power of art, and something that Sagan misses. Not everything always has to be serious, rational, logical etc. Nor, indeed, can it be.

I think a Blakean relationship to the systemic is beginning to emerge, one that combine order with passion, sincerity with irony. In Blake's epic Jerusalem, Los declares: "I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's; I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create."

Today, artists are constructing their own personal systems of meaning and belief. Symbolism is intensely personal, but of course rooted in belief systems of yore. This is unavoidable but also something worth celebrating. As Boo Saville puts it, "There is certainly a sense of helplessness in the futility of life but I think that actually that can be liberation. As an artist I have constructed a belief system for myself, which enable me to deal with this futility."

Henrij Preiss may be seen to exemplify these very processes: "My paintings represent a sense of order. What I do is remove the particular stories or narratives, and take the underlying framework, so that I end up with what you could call symbolic archetypes, both in particular motifs and in the geometrical structures. I then layer these into the paintings to create objects that address a form of universal geometry, or a basic symbolic language, which is common to all human visual systems."

New orders emerge, rooted in those of the past, straddling science and psychology, Freud and Darwin - unique and personal, but accessible through the medium of the symbol. Can they answer all our questions? No, nor should they. "I believe in science and the possibility of what it offers," Saville admits, "but I sometimes wonder, if I was about to die, would I say a prayer?"

Tom JEFFREYS
is the Culture Editor at London listings and reviews website spoonfed.co.uk.

Art, Chess, Suicide - An interview with Gavin Nolan

2010-03-08T15:09:00.000Z

04 March, 2010

by: Lauren Romano

Artist Gavin Nolan gives Lauren a crash-course in chess tactics, shares what it takes to be Hitler's stunt double and lets her have a sneaky peek at some of his latest paintings.

In the depths of Bow I enter the warehouse studio of figurative artist Gavin Nolan, with nothing but a Dictaphone and a chequered knowledge of chess. But I leave an hour or so later, decidedly better acquainted with the great game. Not only are the half-finished canvases of A King’s Gambit Accepted at my perusal, but I’m soon confidently throwing around snippets of chess terminology like a pro.

While it's no doubt obvious to most, given the title of Nolan’s forthcoming solo exhibition at Charlie Smith London, Nolan’s paintings of famous suicides are subtly interwoven with chess references. The series has been inspired by an eighteenth century chess-playing automaton known as The Turk: it's an odd amalgamation, but it works. The Turk, Gavin helpfully informs me, was an elaborate hoax, which concealed an internal chamber just large enough for a human chess player to hide inside and operate the machine.

Gavin’s small studio space is a hive of activity, and the work-in-progress portraits beam discordantly down: all sweeps of paint, highly expressive eyes, and kinetically charged corrosive swashes. These include Virginia Woolf, Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath, Socrates, Joseph Goebbels (The Nazi propaganda minister who gassed his wife and children with cyanide - a “real charmer” Nolan pipes in), Adolf Hitler, Jesus Christ and, of course, The Turk, cast as a Napoleonic, stallion-riding victor.

“I made a painting last October which was a portrait of Robert Benjamin Haydon, a British painter who committed suicide,” Gavin explains. “He shot himself and missed any vital area, then cut his throat and that didn’t work, so he cut his throat again. It was a sort of romantic gesture but it was obviously a terrible failure. After making that portrait I was thinking along the lines of how a death affects the reading of a life.” This is where the chess references come in: “One of the simplest moves against a beginner in chess is the King's Gambit where you sacrifice a piece really early on. Then people will inevitably take the pawn, and it gives you an advantage even though you’re a piece down.”

The overwhelming element of sacrifice – a simultaneous sense of victory and defeat – guides this group of paintings, which see Nolan moving away from the self-portraiture of earlier works. “The thing with the self-portraits was that I was tending to make them into stereotypes, caricatures even. And I just got the impression that the audience couldn’t really connect because they didn’t really know any history behind the person.”

Despite branching out into photography, and tentatively foraging in film, Gavin isn’t about to give up his paintbrush any time soon: “The great thing about painting is that it allows you to jump through time – you can have lots of different things and different times happening on the same surface. That seems to make sense with these, as I can have the figures looking both alive and dead. I can’t think of any other medium that I can do that with.”

That’s not to say his painting isn’t void of hitches, and disasters seem to be a frequent occurrence in Nolan’s studio: “Basically anything I try and impose on the paintings is a disaster. Anything that happens beyond my control usually works.” Gleefully Nolan admits, “Just a few days ago, I nearly killed that large one over there – Christ. But I resurrected him. It’s happened quite a few times where I’ve killed paintings just before a show. But the way I work, it tends to be that I try and make things sit in a place where they’re half destroyed, where destruction is part of the work. So I deliberately put spanners in the works: I throw lots of things at the painting and let it bleed. And then I impose myself on top of that. That’s when it becomes cheesy!”

More laughs ensue when Gavin shares his reference aids with me, rummaged from an assorted pile of photographs. He shows me a picture of a women, head angled in a stern, serious kind of a way. “Believe it or not, this girl here is Hitler’s stunt double. She has no idea.” Poor girl. Gavin then goes on to show me the stunt doubles for Christ’s hair – a girl with cascading curly locks – and Christ’s beard – this time, thankfully, a man.

With not long to go until the opening, Nolan’s got his work cut out to finish these paintings, as well as the botanical studies of hemlock and opium which are to stand alongside. I ask him if he’s looking forward to the private view: “It’s terrifying – I’ll turn up at half past eight after a bit of Dutch courage. I’ll just spend all evening gauging peoples’ responses – looking at them from the corner of my eye for tells, like a poker player.” So a note to those who are going: the shifty looking, slightly sloshed figure in the corner, casting his beady eye over all – that’ll be Gavin.

Alexis Milne performance at CHARLIE SMITH london

2010-02-23T15:52:00.000Z

ALEXIS MILNE

WITCH FINDER GENERAL

Performance / First Thursday
Thursday March 4th 7.30pm – 8.30pm

This performance is part of the exhibition DEMONOLOGY featuring:

Jonathan Baldock, Sebastian Gögel, James Jessop, Jasper Joffe, Alex Gene Morrison, Claire Pestaille, Prue Piper, Moritz Schleime, Dominic Shepherd, John Stark, Erik Tidemann, Danny Treacy

Exhibition Dates
Friday February 5th – Saturday March 13th 2010
Gallery Hours
Wednesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm or by appointment

Address
CHARLIE SMITH london, 336 Old St, London, EC1V 9DR

Performance artist Alexis Milne will be conducting a modern day witch hunt at CHARLIE SMITH london. The age old tradition of demonization and hunting out of convenient scapegoats induced by mass hysteria and intolerance of alternative views will be resurrected in the contemporary arena of the art gallery.

Modern day peddlers in the occult and the forces of neo-paganism (such as Harry Potter, the bastard offspring of single mother J K Rowling and the necromancer novelist Phillip Pullman in his ‘Dark Materials’) will be targeted by the Witch Finder General, a transgendered alter ego of Alexis Milne based on a characterization of Valerie Solanas. Solanas was the founder of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men), a figure from the 1960’s New York art scene who embodied a seemingly contradictory nature, advocating a radical feminist doctrine of hate towards the regime of male hegemony whilst earning money as a street prostitute and courting the famed and male dominated circle of artworld star Andy Warhol. Her own mental health deteriorated to such a state that she famously shot Warhol after being repeatedly rejected from his factory.

The volatile and contradictory nature of Solanas as the Witch Finder General will be evoked to highlight the irrational hysteria inherent in demonization that has occurred throughout history from medieval witch hunts to the McCarthy communist trials of the 1960’s to the current War on Terror.

Sam Jackson Installation Images | Vas Deferens

2010-02-23T15:32:00.000Z

Timeout: Danny Treacy

2010-02-12T18:05:00.000Z

DEMONOLOGY Installation Images

2010-02-09T17:43:00.000Z

GAVIN NOLAN: A King’s Gambit Accepted

2010-01-29T14:32:00.001Z

Private View
Thursday March 18th 6.30pm–8.30pm

Exhibition Dates
Friday March 19th – Saturday April 24th 2010

Gallery Hours
Wednesday–Saturday 11am–6pm or by appointment

CHARLIE SMITH london is delighted to present Gavin Nolan with his first London one person show since 2006.

Nolan has become internationally known for his brutal self portraits and portraits of those around him. More recently, however, the artist has begun to depict historical figures of consequence, leading on from his abject painting 'Portrait as the Suicide of Robert Benjamin Haydon Attempt no. 3', where a self portrait is superimposed onto the death mask of Benjamin Haydon, complete with gunshot wound and open slits to the throat.

For 'A King's Gambit Accepted' the artist has created a collection that continues to draw on historical figures, and in particular those who have committed suicide or chosen a definitive path of action that drives them towards an inevitable death, for example Adolf Hitler, Jesus Christ and Sigmund Freud. Nolan seeks to render biographical aspects of the subject in the painted surface, whilst aligning knowledge of their particular method of demise to art historical references. And by investigating notions of image and adornment in relation to interiority, the artist explores aspects of the subjects’ private and public lives. A revelatory sense of psychological turmoil, paranoia and violence seeps out, with horror set against beauty and unease underpinning precocity.

Corresponding with these notions are a consideration of power and authority and their projection upon others, where a public surfacing of one person’s private will can lead to populations adhering to cults, religions and schools of thought. We are encouraged to question the correlation between fame, notoriety, death and even mental illness; the ensuing relationships between them, and the consequent impact on society and the individual. Ultimately Nolan serves to emphasize how complex and interconnected are personal and public histories, interior and external worlds, and how the nature of a death can come to define a subject’s life.

DEMONOLOGY: Private View February 4th at CHARLIE HQ

2010-01-21T16:48:00.003Z

Featuring: Jonathan Baldock, Sebastian Gögel, James Jessop, Jasper Joffe, Alexis Milne, Alex Gene Morrison, Claire Pestaille, Prue Piper, Moritz Schleime, Dominic Shepherd, John Stark, Erik Tidemann, Danny Treacy

Private View | First Thursday
Thursday February 4th 6.30pm – 8.30pm

Exhibition Dates
Friday February 5th – Saturday March 13th 2010
Gallery Hours
Wednesday – Saturday 11am – 6pm or by appointment

Address
CHARLIE SMITH london, 336 Old St, London, EC1V 9DR

‘I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things’. (Isaiah 45:7)

Since the Palaeolithic age art, religion, myth and magic have combined to represent man’s impulse to reach beyond his physical limitations; to communicate, comprehend, harness and overpower both benevolent and malevolent forces of nature. Significant passages in the lives of individuals and societies were and are marked by symbol and ritual whose genesis lay in Pagan rites and Wicca: birth, death, marriage, fertility, harvest, coming of age.

Throughout the ages magical and spiritual systems developed organically but also, of course, suffered extreme subjugation and suppression. Monotheistic religions appropriated, banished, persecuted and condemned in order to subdue the threat of age old beliefs. In 1484 Pope Innocent III issued a Papal Bull that denounced witchcraft, declaring that witches were harming fertility by associating with demons. Soon afterwards ‘Malleus Maleficarum’ was published and became the bible of the inquisitors, hammer of the witches. The horned Hunter God and other deities were demonised, newly cast by the church as malevolent and malicious, and the end game was in place. An omnipotent religion had strangled a set of traditions as old as man himself, and the Gods of the old religion became the Devil of the new.

Throughout this time sorcerers have maintained that they can summon demons in order to do their bidding. From locating treasure to curing disease to inflicting madness on one’s enemies, demons have apparently been pressed into varied services. But of course the practitioner must take care to protect himself during any such rituals or risk unleashing malevolent spirits or indeed possession.

‘Demonology’ is a call to investigate and embrace this other, lost world, and in some ways draw parallels between the practices of art and magic: creativity, instinct, flux, becoming, myth, imagination, individualism and the workings of the great unconscious standing against prescribed and immutable doctrine. Magic, beasts, curses, apparitions and the after-life; all can be found here in paint, pencil, collage, video, ceramic, photography and performance.

Emma Bennett: New Works

2010-01-08T21:17:00.001Z

Emma Bennett Solo Show at London Art Fair, Stand P8: 'Ghost Story'

2010-01-04T17:19:00.003Z

Following sell out shows for Gavin Nolan in 2009 and John Stark in 2008, CHARLIE SMITH london is delighted to present Emma Bennett with a one person exhibition at London Art Fair’s Art Projects.

Bennett’s contemplative paintings are contemporary manifestations of the classical idea of the memento mori. By depicting fragile life forms such as flowers, fruit, small birds, fish and hunted game set against dark, monochromatic grounds, the artist engages with notions of time, transience, life, death and life after death.

Still life forms are appropriated from art historical sources but are recomposed and set out of context. Combined with expressive techniques within and against the monochromatic fields, Bennett introduces a set of dichotomies that create tension and dynamism: figurative and abstract; modern and classical; fast and slow; surface and depth; instinctive and predetermined.

This new set of paintings also begins to explore the energy and momentum that propels all things through space and time. Composition and fluidity of paint suggest a gravitational pull of elements through a spatial void, with the once fecund but now expired conjoined or about to collide. And the work seeks to portray the potential of these energies continuing beyond life: we are therefore presented with the certainty of a beginning and the ambiguity of the end.

Collectors Preview

Tuesday January 12th 6pm - 9pm

Exhibition Dates
Wednesday January 13th 11am - 9pm
Thursday January 14th 11am - 6pm
Friday January 15th 11am - 7pm
Saturday January 16th 11am - 7pm
Sunday January 17th 11am - 5pm

Address
Business Design Centre, 52 Upper Street, Islington, London, N1 0QH

Biographical:

Born: 1974

Education: 1997 - 1998: MA in Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art and Design; 1993 - 1996: BA (Hons) in Fine Art (First Class), Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design

Selected Exhibitions: 2009: The Future Can Wait (curated by Zavier Ellis & Simon Rumley), Old Truman Brewery, London; New London School (curated by Zavier Ellis & Simon Rumley), Galerie Schuster, Berlin; 2008: The Future Can Wait (curated by Zavier Ellis & Simon Rumley), Old Truman Brewery, London; 2007: The Future Can Wait (curated by Zavier Ellis & Simon Rumley), Old Truman Brewery, London; Equinox, Sarah Myerscough Fine Art, London; 2006: Nocturnal, Sarah Myerscough Fine Art, London; John Moores 24 / Liverpool Biennale, Walker Gallery, Liverpool; 2005: Between Dog & Wolf, Clapham Art Gallery, London; 2004: Forever Beautiful, Clapham Art Gallery, London; 2002: Emma Bennett: New Paintings, Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London

Selected Awards & Residencies: 1997: British Academy Postgraduate Award; 1996: ACAVA First Base Studio Residency 1996-1997; 1996: Arte Viva Residency, Senegalia; King Sturge Art Prize (Highly Commended); Thames and Hudson Painting Award

Collections: K & K Kollektion, Monaco; David Roberts, London; private collections in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States

In Process: Demonology

2009-12-21T13:19:00.000Z

My last official working Friday of the year was spent having the pleasure of visiting studios around Hackney with one eye on the next show: 'Demonology'. First up was James Jessop, where he is working on a classic large scale painting of a giant, marauding monster that is wreaking havoc on an undisclosed city some place, some time. This painting will be a centre-piece of the show and I can't wait to see it once the Jessop text / graf has been worked in to take it to the next level. Welcome to Charlie's James Jessop - the beast is loose!

Next was Danny Treacy and John Stark. I was tipped off about Danny Treacy pre-The Future Can Wait by John, and I was not disappointed by his recommendation. Rumley and I brought Danny into the show with a large scale photographic figure work that became one of the key pieces, working perfectly with the derelict industrial location that we had atop the Old Truman Brewery. Treacy's practice is intense, precise, disturbing and incredibly engaging. From identifying what he calls 'fertile grounds' to collecting disgarded garments and sewing them into outfits in his studio, that he then photographs himself wearing, there is a murderous, forensic and fetishist side to his work that is chilling yet dangerously seductive.

Stepping next into Stark's studio, I had the pleasure of seeing a work in progress that is nothing short of sensational. John is making a technical materpiece that takes Salvator Rosa's 'Witches at their Incantations' as its inspiration. Here we have demons, monsters and beasts from the underworld overwhelming King Saul. This painting is an illustration of the fundamental interests that 'Demonology' looks to navigate, and I simply can't wait to get the painting up in the gallery.

Finally I had a date with Jasper Joffe, who is making some really interesting still lifes, if I can call them that. Painted from the imagination, there is one piece in particular that I would be happy to add to my collection. Its a couragous decision to make large scale flower paintings. Recalling both Picasso and Matisse, Joffe's Modernist leanings are clear, but with its scale, off square format and sheer ebullience this is quite a painting. From here though we went on to discuss the 'Demonology' show, and I'm confident that Jasper's viral curse painting / object will be quite something. The show is shaping up nicely...

Spoonfed Premonition

2009-12-15T11:36:00.001Z

"Originally established in October 2006 by all-round art impressario Zavier Ellis (he also co-runs art fair The Future Can Wait) Charlie Smith is a project-based contemporary art dealership. In October 2009, Charlie Smith London opened its gallery space on Old Street. With an emphasis on focused solo shows and curated group shows, this is likely to become one of the best places to see cutting edge contemporary art in London." - Spoonfed

Miami Day 6: When All is Said and Done

2009-12-14T17:36:00.000Z

The Miami operation has proved to be a very successful adventure. Without being here last year, it is encouraging to hear from so many people how much more bouyant the market is - it seems there is confidence returning within reason.

All four artists have achieved some success here, from sales to museum interest and exhibition offers, and I'm pleased to allow myself a night out with the irrepressible Max Presneill, chief curator at Torrance Art Museum in LA. 'Deuce' is the venue, a dive bar on South Beach, and we play it out until closing - its early Sunday and its light. And sadly for a proud man such as Max, I have still beaten him at every game of pool we have ever played, even only on US tables. I'd like to continue the punishment but London calls...

Miami Day 5: Score Draw

2009-12-06T19:37:00.000Z

I wake up to the news that a 7 year old British boy has recently sold his watercolours for $28,000. According to his enthusiastic gallerist 'He is red-hot. The last child artist in this bracket was Picasso.' I'm deeply sceptical but looking beyond the hyperbole the paintings are actuallly very good for a 7 year old, if indeed they are made by little Kieron. I think I'd sooner have one of these hanging than a Stallone.

Back at Pulse Charlie's boys are still receiving a lot of attention. Between Jackson, Nolan, Shepherd and Stark they are pulling in collectors, museums, art fair directors and international galleries. The week is progressing well with the bulk of the weekend to go. Its a shame the same can't be said for Liverpool, who are on their way to a no-score-draw away to Blackburn. As I wonder if the mythical Aquilani has made an appearance yet I console myself with the thought of England's World Cup draw - excellently described in The Sun as E.A.S.Y. - England / Algeria / Slovenia / Yanks.

Miami Day 4: New Discoveries

2009-12-05T19:57:00.000Z

My most resonant discovery so far has to be Caro Suerkemper at Galerie Romerapotheke. Born in Stuttgart in 1964, her work consists of delicate watercolours on paper and ceramics. Using found imagery from books, magazines and the internet, Suerkamper depicts women restrained by ties and gags in various positions. Although immediately fetishist, Suerkemper prefers to emphasise notions of desire, control, power and helplessness, concerning herself more with feminist tenets than the erotic. However, it is undeniable that these pieces lie somewhere between the erotic and pornographic, with a strong a sense of sexual violence belying the gentle and seductive brush work.