Tracer and Wedge

‘Tracer and Wedge’ is an exhibition spread through the L-shaped ground floor project space of Mirabel Studios (Manchester, UK) populated with wall based art work, all responding to 'painting' as a broad thematic.

All artists involved have a historical or active relationship with Manchester art, often going back decades, and this shows in the focus and refinement within their practices; a kind of radical conservatism which seems oddly refreshing.

The relatively small scale of the works exhibited demands an enforced intimacy between viewer and work. An intimacy unconcerned with the surrounding architecture; except as a vertical support for the isolated sparring between surface and eye.  

There is also an added complication, the works tend to allude to the act of using painting as a way of momentarily holding static the act of transcription between artistic forms.

As an introductory example, David Alker's 'The Seventeenth Century Landscape' sequence of five miniature paintings - most about 8 cm square - are transcriptions of photographs of a 1920s diorama of the construction of a large seventeenth century wooden ship. With titles sounding like chapters from Moby Dick ('The Hull', 'Capstan', The Ferry', etc) the horizontal line of representational paintings of the act of construction imply a narrative progression without a promise of chronological veracity.

Rick Copsey's 'Paintscapes' also uses a reduced scale - here all 20 cm square - in a horizontal display of stormy colour-tinted c-type prints of gothic seascapes. They are, in fact, microscopic photographs of paint palettes vastly enlarged. Another frustratingly layered act of transcription.

The relatively simple still life format of Rebecca Sitar's  slightly larger oil paintings 'Untitled (Grey In Pink)', 'Pods' and 'Kernel' momentarily trick a viewer with a stabilizing familiarity but quickly reveal themselves to be equally destabilizing in the readability stakes: 'Untitled (Grey In Pink)' could be a rocky island sat on top of a pale wash of pink over grey or a ragged shape cut in the surface wash. 'Pods' seem to be constructing themselves from the space around them and, best of all, 'Kernel' is an ill-defined shape sat in a seductively deep purple black.

In stylistic opposition are Nick Jordan's domestic scale oil paintings 'California Typewriter' and 'Documentary Sounds'.

Both have the strong graphic clarity of Pop Art; both appear to have been transplanted from a European art exhibition set some time in the 1960s. 

The most demandingly enigmatic pieces are Samantha Donnelly's framed c-type prints which look like collages with fragments of figures, studio shots and suggestive explanatory text - all indicating a magazine article about an artist and their work.

So within 'Tracer and Wedge' the containing rectangle of a picture surface can act as a platform for material play, an impossible spatial conundrum, or an idiosyncratic dissection and re-staging of historical models for fixing visual information.

So, microscopically small areas of paint palettes can transmute into gothic seascapes; severe formal signage allude to senses other than the optical; archaic dioramas can be unpicked and restaged as storyboarded narratives of the paintings own construction, whilst spartan still lifes start to drift away from a painterly and descriptive legibility.

However, edited from the chaos of the real world, all act as a temporary congealing of the movement of thought into a stubbornly solid object event; all allude to actions and forces which escape the controlling stamp of visibility.

'And Breathe...' : Art and Mindfulness

Certain words and associated concepts are forever linked to a particular moment in our collective history. It is hard to think of a more suitable candidate for a 2018 buzzword than 'mindfulness.' 

It appears to have started out as a well-intentioned proposal that everyone should find a period of mental calm from the stress and bullying demands of the everyday. 

Unfortunately, it has morphed into something altogether different; a kind of zen indifference to reality and a social-bonding session for middle-managers in denial about any personal ethical responsibility for their actions.

The 'And Breathe...' exhibition currently wedged into a room at Manchester Galleries (Manchester, UK) tries the unenviably difficult job of cello-taping a relentlessly positive interpretation of 'mindfulness' to selected paintings and images from the galleries collection. 

Predictably the repetitive slap and curl of rolling waves are insinuated in a number of works referencing that holiday-makers favourite anaesthetic the sea. 

Ben Nicholson's 'St Ives Bay, Sea With Boats' (1931) oil and pencil scene of distant sailboats bobbing on a watery green sea has the unnerving charm of a child's painting. The fleshy pinks of a foregrounded rock, the organizing of the view by the framing white window-frame and window sill along with the suggestion of a reflected cloud and bulbous land mass make it a slightly disturbing rather than a becalming experience.

Henry Moore's 'Mounts Bay: Early Morning - Summer" (1886) dispenses with anything but horizon-line, sky and sculpturally heavy ridges of dark sea. 

Similarly weighty J.D. Innes oil painting  'Bala Lake' (1911) is a dark blue, purple and mauve bay with a sickly green-yellow sky, a weird gothic Fauvism. It's ornately elaborate frame makes the whole thing look like an indigestible pastry, but an intriguingly odd one. It is a style of painting which tends to attract the description 'brooding.' The connection to any notion of calming 'mindfulness' is again questionable.

In Tristram Hillier's 'Le Havre De Grace' (1939) parts of a large disassembled ship have been left like enigmatic chess pieces cluttering a dockside. The result seems like a De Chirico seaside scene.

Albert Irvin's abstract oil and acrylic 'Untitled' (1973) shows a wash of Naples yellow, a hazy caramel tissue, anchored at the top and bottom of the slightly bowing stretcher by large daubs of watery paint. The colours of these are uncomfortably muddied as though the paint brushes had not been properly washed.

Catherine Yass's 'Split Sides' digital inkjet of distorted reflected images of skyscrapers is fairly underwhelming and blandly decorative.

The piece which accidentally hits the critical mark by noting humans actual inability to completely edit the badgering tangle of accumulated worries carried around by our grey matter is Marcus Coates 'Sea Mammal' (2003). 

A suited character in front of a cold slate grey sea has its head encased in a tangle of primary coloured sausage shaped balloons. The comic befuddlement radiating from the work combined with its visually seductive simplicity at last begins to address the contrary impulses which co-exist in the 'mindfulness' industries.