'Support' (2023)
Photographer and film-maker Simon Pantling has an exhibition of digitally rendered drawings at Matt Houlding’s Studio2 in Todmorden.
Using an Apple Pencil to simulate pencil on paper, Pantling has produced a dozen sketches of areas, hidden no-places and voids beneath and abutting Manchester’s Mancunian Way flyover. Some are largely transcriptions of digital photographs; others compacts of remembered generic spaces and actual locations.
All are approximately A4 size and quite painstakingly detailed echoes of concretely material solidity.
Drawing as a process, procedure, discipline (whichever you prefer), has always been intimate with scientific tinkering and optical structuring of space. Reclining nudes viewed through wire meshes, all the better to accurately transfer the view onto a rectangular surface. Figures and objects projected onto canvas to trace and compose. And so on.
That said, the artfulness of drawing as an expressive concept, even if using pen, pencil, or even old school indexical photography, has always been, in reality, commensurate with a hidden historical assumption that technology's ability to anchor the pictorial is restrained by a controlling human, almost metaphysical, directive. Or at least a human capacity to milk more from the mechanistic image thievery than just casual attractive renderings of fragmentary moments of the world as it plods through its daily cycles.
Pantlings images question the disingenuous ethical solidity of this barely hidden presumption. And that is their primary strengths. The quotidian dependence on a distancing faux sentimentality is really emphasised by this process of image production. These places, spaces, concrete moments, like the deformations of faulty memories, just are.
Formal slabs of material seem like sliding areas demanding a conceptual opacity to allow the eye to architecturally negotiate the dead spaces. They prompt a suggested visual wandering through non-areas between more presentable expressions of contemporary urban living. There’s a constant deferral of emotive engagement by the transcriptive process of photo to linear drag and fill of sketchy space. This onion layering of contemporary media, photographs, procreate transcription, editing decisions using new technology, the final prints, these all depend upon images which could only happen through the ‘digital’. They are a presentation of an aestheticised staged environment with an austerity dependent upon a peculiarly contemporary compact of media.
For all their blocky solidity there is no sense of actual material reality, no room for the beige slop and seepage of puddling muck of the dead spaces of urban centres in these pictures. The addition of fragmentary torn posters and graffiti seem like simulations of stains of human engagement; sarcastic mucky fingerprints announcing an urban pastness of no more consequence than a casual smear or footprint; a qualitatively pointless addition to the directive physical masses undergirding an urban centre. Decorative additions of limited consequence outside a misremembered past they seem to strain to give character to spaces indifferent to human presence.
To further emphasis the compact between scientific tomfoolery and the hand wrought, the transcriptive feathery markings digitally formed to mesh into drawing-like expressions of a remembered moment are both convincingly engaging and offputtingly unnerving.
Sophisticated and attractive, efficiently rendered but coolly indifferent, the cumulative effect is one of aesthetic pleasure in the alienness of the functional everyday.
