Presenting Absence (No. 1.)

Considering the fact that writing organises human thought into a structured linearity (a narrative event), it’s sobering to reflect how insanely random everyday thoughts generally are: like a bee in a bucket or idiot spaghetti in a badly made crate. 

In response, plenty of contemporary art embraces the chaos and excess of day-to-day existence; other work pares things down to the point of using different forms of absence as a productive device.

From its establishment as a visual trope, the place of the monochrome within the historical lineage of abstraction seems fairly straightforward. In reality the skeletal framework of potential interpretive perspectives on any bastardised contemporary offshoot of the ‘genre’ is a much more tangled and chaotic mess than any A to B to C simple family-tree model may suggest. Matters are not helped by artists insistence on taking the reductive simplifications of Modernism up strange creative side-alleys. 

One such example is Deb Covell’s exhibition ‘Zero’ at Manchester’s increasingly impressive ‘Untitled Gallery’; a half-dozen rectangles of acrylic paint playing with the physical fact of paint as stuff.

The intentionally grey walls of the show’s installation helps to emphasis the extreme contrast of the yin and yang of black and white layers of paint glued together by the hidden infrastructure of an acetate sheet. A simple twinning of absences.

It goes without saying that the act of building a painting is not the same as constructing an image. Equally the use of paint itself doesn’t necessarily indicate the procedure of ‘painting’. Here Covell seems more interested in forcing paint into a sculptural form more indicative of a sheet of paper or swatch of cloth; the surfaces, however, lack the purity of absolute flatness, the smooth fluctuating thickness of the paints topography radiating a stubborn thingness.

One piece brings to mind a cartoon handkerchief hanging on a nail, or a sleeping bat; another horizontal floor piece an accidentally kicked floor rug; two others show a tasteful fold to a corner revealing a pliable marzipan thickness to all the pieces. A constant is the light repelling, dead plasticity to the deformed rectangles of acrylic paint.

The end results are impersonations of paintings; comic narratives of hapless substance afflicted by the gravitational tug of time.

Under the primary pressure of its concrete object-ness, the surfaces are never allowed to act as a support for brushstrokes or marks, the pieces serve as absences, architectural punctuations and surfaces at one-and-the-same time, without comfortably satisfying any of these criteria.

So finally as three-dimensional events refusing a function the spectre of ‘aesthetics’ is allowed to sneak into the frame. 

That’s really asking for a fight. 

Tasteful indeed but maybe they’re not so polite afterall.