Material Vagueness: Hargreaves and Ashcroft's Magnetite Experimentations

 

At the end of last year, Oceans Apart (Salford, UK) acted as a venue for the Keith Ashcroft curated group exhibition ‘The Problem with People’:18 painters wrestling with, representing or implying the human figure with their work. ‘The Problem with People’ was determined to present a variety of very individual perspectives on the figure; figure as shape, as space, as generator of gestures and motion, as a material event, and so on.

Within the exhibition, painting as potential material event became a form of surrogate for the human form as a presence, a looming or concrete otherness for a visitor to experience, analyse or ‘interrogate’ in any way they chose.

As an icing on the visual cake, Andrew Hargreave’s Tape Loop Orchestra recording of sonic shifts and layers of organised sound acted as the opening event soundtrack. Or, more interestingly, Hargreaves curated the polite babble of the visitors as an additional instrumentation within the sound work.

The soundtrack was a looping playback of a Tape Loop Orchestra recording impregnated into magnetite powdered strips of different foundational materials; magnetite pigment layered onto acetate, paper and plastic. Handcrafted parodies of the early cassette tapes used for audio recordings.

Hargreaves and Ashcroft considered this process as not just analogous to the grey monochrome paintings Ashcroft had been producing, but, as he also incorporated the magnetite dust into the surfaces, more accurately as audio playback of a painterly object-event itself.

In addition, there was the talcum powdery addition of mineral deposits from the earth at the haunted hall of Calgarth in the Lake District. As an object, the haunted painting is a quintessentially literary trope, but text is itself haunted by a markers memorial tracing as much as a gothic painting is possessed by disgruntled ancestors' spirits.

In the exhibition, Ashcroft included his painting ‘Lethbridge as Gogmagog’ (2025). In it a stubby light brown figure perched on a washed out and fading bench-like form and sheltered under an a large grey-white hat. A strong slightly angled horizon line bisected the staging background into a top grey-black, the bottom half an attractive muted green blue.

This painting indicating the totemic presence of maverick archaeologist and proto- parapsychologist TC Lethbridge was the connecting point with Hargreaves sound work. Especially Lethbridge's heavily contested belief in his unearthing of faint traces of gigantic figure drawings on the Gog Magog Hills of Cambridgeshire, along with his speculative ‘Stone Tape’ theory of natural outcrops and mineral deposits holding a recording of past or even future events.

Expanding on Lethbridge’s fantastical musings helps to see Ashcroft's portrait as both a transcriptive embedding of the once living and of the act of fixing itself.

The degree of conscious parodying of a Cezanne painting of a seated cross-legged character, his ageing gardener Vallier, may be questionable. The connection with Cezanne's constructor’s mindset towards painting as a contained arena birthing form from the chaos of the material world seems appropriate though.

Returning to Ashcroft's ongoing monochromatic nonimages, the dark speckling of early photography's anchoring of an object or figure by the bounce of light from the material thing pictured onto a hard chemical coated plate to fix it is presented by implication. In effect, presence by representation is made present through its absence. An analogy with the frittering dots of visual screen static is also there to be mined as an historical precedent, mutating pixels of matter become autonomous shifts breaking with any pictorial transcriptive intention. Clusters of dense tactility become evasively cloudy smears, an orienting pivot of vertical surface as a portal to the imaginal and the imaginary.

Positioning colour as an aside, successful pictorial similitude is founded on modulations of intensity - the push and pull of here-ness and there-ness rather than colourfulness as a patchwork of instances of now. This chimes well with the Tape Loop layering and peppering of grit sanding audio clarity into a new form, amending through erasure and stratas of material excess.

The monochrome is a particular aesthetic experience that co-opts absences as much as painterly solidity as central to its experiential effectiveness.

The comforting pull of certainty, clarity, solidity can also be the tyranny of the concrete. The errant wanderings of the imaginal requires an embracing of doubt. Hence, the intractable ‘wrongness’ and paradox of the monochrome; simultaneously a concrete, air-tightly holistic surface effect and a confidently opaque nesting of implied potentialities.

By denying clarity to pictorial form and layering a surface with dotted intensities of sooty speckles, the effect is more like a presentation of a near-sentient murmuration, one in sync with the muffled ambiance of the accompanying soundscape.

Each panel is suggestive of a sampling of iterations of the near infinite permutations possible with painterly materiality. Or even of the grainy indexicality of early spirit photography's capture of protoplasm's cloudy masses; a reanimation of static materials capturing of the will-to- movement through a staging of a muddied evanescence.

The insecure architecture of misremembered 2D or 3D space or place is also the staging of a threshold space. Viewers are compelled to perceive surface as loaded with the emerging potentialities of a murky fog. Rather than passive acquiescence to the force of the image asserting acceptance of chaos is also asserting a degree of agency.

Here the inevitable failings of art is more than just a sense of failure to adequately anchor, with images, a recognisable reflection of the quotidian fact of the substance of the world.

There are intimations of the failings of painting as a mechanics of connection; that is the irony of painting as simultaneously a connective and distancing process. A straining towards a display and diagnosis of the rough mechanics of touch and intimacy which will always be undercut by the necessarily cold descriptive and simplifying transcriptive demand of any lived moment fixed in paint.

Reconfiguring the fragmentary or sampled as a praxis is a decades long given, but the greyed ghostly milking of sound through its grounding in material necessity proposes a very different ‘otherness’.

The combined results are a kind of kinetic visual and audio conceptual synaesthesia - muffled structures hovering around and invading the viewer whilst their forms entangle and cross-fertilise. An unanchored and indeterminate lo-fi crackle transcribed into an unstable visual grit. Rather than blank and intentionally illegible, the surfaces feel out of joint, scuffed and abraded instances of times movement.

Hargreaves and Ashcroft's almost pataphysical experimentation of embedding sound in the surface of painterly surfaces stands in wilful opposition to the coldness and clarity of digital visual certainties, the sound and appearance of fallibility and decay muddying the visual waters.

John Moores 2025 Painting Exhibition

 

At Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery is the John Moores 2025 open submission painting biennial, a gathering together of examples of work from the UK’s painterly art practitioners.

Established in 1957, it has long since been a mainstay of the British ‘art scene’, priding itself on being a fairly good indicator of the diverse mutations of contemporary painting. This 33^rd incarnation is the most enjoyable for some time, a straightforward presentation accommodating for all things flat and largely rectangular. Reining in that hoary old incarnation ‘painting as expanded practice’ has paid off.

Artist-makers in mid-process are pictured in David Caine’s ‘Monstrous Endeavour’, in which a stern sculptor chips away at a rough stone head, warm grey rubble littering the studio floor, and in Oscar Grasby’s ‘Portrait Of The Artist’, blue-whites showing a painter working in his studio on a circular picture of a figure painting, a sleeping dog adds a bold diagonal, a figure is framed in a distant doorway. All very meta and self-referential.

With a nod to unsettled times, nomadic shelters populate surfaces in Joanna Whittle’s ‘Darkened Heart’ and in Deborah Grice’s ‘Safehold’, the use of phosphorescent paint a bit showy and unnecessary.

The anonymity of figments and fragments of memory, often mediated by photography and the digital then transcribed into painting, will always show within contemporary group exhibitions. There’s the rearing, restrained attack dog balanced with a narrow column of fleshy hand spread acrylics in Colin Crumplin’s large, unbalanced diptych ‘Dog’, an outsourced family portrait fabricated in China in Jamie Holman’s ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’ (the hooded father figure emphasising the makers anonymity undercutting much contemporary work).

 The most resonant example of this stable of practitioners is David Gledhill’s transcription of a flea market sourced 1940s photograph of a young woman ‘Untitled (Arrested)’. Gledhill’s facility with paint avoids being flashy, never at the expense of the importance of the arresting image with its nuanced and considered cropping and feathery charcoal browns.

 The boozy funscape of urban life is largely sidelined by a greater weighting towards the psychodrama of interior spaces moving between the shadowy profiles in Clare Haward’s ‘The Party’ or the functional chaos of personal spaces in Tim Patrick’s ‘Nightbed’ or Louis Pohl Koseda’s Marlowe’s Room’.

 Art can act as the culturally sanctioned transgression of staring at the otherness of another body for a sustained period carrying an element of pleasing incorrectness. In Heeyoung Noh’s ‘A Mother And Her Daughter’ the wet skin of the seated bathers and blankness of the faces radiate a comfortable indifference to the viewers eye.

The potential intimacy of surface materials shows in the crumpled white of Katy Shepherd’s ‘Bedscape’ and Stig Evan’s ‘000022-286’, painted grey rectangles of folded vintage toilet paper reflattened for window-mounted presentation.

More aggressively tangible, Eleanor Barlett’s ‘Mother Matter’ shows the stubborn presentness of physical stuff, Molly Thomson’s ‘Proposition’ has angular creamy flat off-cuts constructing a different kind of solidity. At the overtly painterly end of the spectrum in Louise Evan’s small ‘Frayed At The Sides’ lumpen troughs of the real stuff of paint fan in muddied warm oranges across a wooden support.

The dematerialisation of the image, a milky fading of image and form also gets a look-in, the fogged perception of a Reinhardt or Rothko in Tom Chamberlain’s ‘Come What May’ or the skeleton of a potential interior painting in Shaan Syed’s two-panel oil on linen ‘The Judge’s Quarters: Facing West’, an architect-style drawing of an old court-room now converted into a restaurant. It seems like a blankly functional statement of blue lines but niggles seductively.

Particularly successful as a visual brain-worm of muted oddness is Evan Thomas’s ‘Souvenir (After Chardin)’, a small canvas peppered with unfocussed transcriptions of a floral design lifted from a Chardin still life.

Within a painting, to be visible is to be inert, passive: a static almost-object for contemplation. A painting can also operate as a shallow ghost-box carrying intimations or iterations of spectres of solidity, of things departed or about to arrive. The surface acts as a buffering screen commanding a viewer’s wait time and impatience, eating time whilst momentarily compacting potentially contradictory spaces.

Ally Fallon’s winning entry ‘If You Were Certain, What Would You Do Then?’ accommodates for all these facts in an enjoyably pithy way. Colourful but restrained, an implied simple interior space constructed from rectangular areas presenting the different ways paint as a material can be applied to a surface.

It presents ambient washes and bleeds of colour, a hovering rectangle of an off-white crawl of looping paint, a suggestion of a pale decorative base or floor area with a cartoonish Lovecraftian tentacles moving in from stage left. A darkly humorous nod towards the infective needling surface crawl of colour that patterns areas of the painting – all presented at a scale smaller than the often bombastically large entries which tend to bully space for the viewers’ attention.

For Fallon, the simple pleasure of building the visual is proposed, a playful opposition to the nostalgic melancholia ingrained in an automatic acceptance of a more regular and traditional picture space. It’s a straightforward reminder of paintings unique ability to fold and ossify movement and time.

The works success is in the way it tangles complicated propositions in a delightfully exuberant display of the liveliness of painting as practice.

Awarding a prize for best painting always feels strangely wrong but, if it has to happen, this year the jury have made an intelligently considered choice.

Sunlight: Roger Ackling

 

Curated by Amanda Geitner, Leeds Henry Moore Institute (UK) recently had the second posthumous staging of ‘Sunlight: Roger Ackling’: sculptural pieces, collected writings and drawn work by artist and respected educator Roger Ackling. Supplemented by filmed interviews with Ackling’s peer-group, ex-students and collaborators, it jigsawed into an affectionate portrait of a popular artist and supportive teacher.

There’s a dogged consistency running through the practice with its foundations in the 1960s and 1970s art school impulses towards both sculptural minimalism and a contrary liking for a romantic attachment to recording the landscape and land art.

The majority of displayed works were produced by focusing the sun through a hand-held magnifying glass to burn marks and lines into and onto card, found scraps of wood, rickety fragments of driftwood, twigs, gardening utensils handles, lolly sticks, overlooked scraps and leftovers. When applied to fully three dimensional sculptural cast-off objects the miniature circular desire lines go nowhere, a circling ornamentation of banding rings in a shadowy charcoal grey.

The disciplined drag of a burn mark acts as an ossified string of negative miniature suns tattooing wood and cardboard. Haecceity, a thing’s uniqueness, is undercut by Ackling’s repeated compulsion to mark in a simple artisanal but near-mechanistic fashion, a branding of objects surfaces to regularise things into groups.

In the flat card surface of ‘Cloud Arc’ (1979), a stack of parallel burnt lines showed stuttering interruptions in the lines consistencies as clouds cut off the power source of the sun’s rays hitting the magnifying glass.

For ‘The Turning Of The Earth The Falling Of The Sap’ (1978), five curving ash white branches of varying lengths carried a burnt line of roughly equivalent lengths running down the front facing verticality of the wall mounted wood. They acted as compacts of visualities, both elusive line and sculptural mass as modes of presentation.

The majority of objects and wooden scraps used in Ackling’s work may be discovered out in a landscape, natural entropy and the cycle of the seasons carried in the surfaces and fragmented forms, but they invariably already carry markings and constructive signs of human intervention.

Many of Ackling’s displayed works and assemblages were constructed from bits and pieces, spaciously infecting the gallery walls. An implied organizing matrix of verticals and horizontals always underpinned his act of transcribing the chaos of reality’s messiness into the stuff of art.

An example was ‘Voewood’ (2011-2012); chip forks, lolly sticks, wooden clothes pegs, etc presented as a wall-mounted line of vertical objects each item scored with horizontal pileups of burn lines.

For Ackling there appeared to be a material stratum underpinning the process of thinking. Disciplined materiality became a form of technology which prompted thinking with the selected objects treated in such a way that they became stamped with a certain tonal character, the results suggested melancholic spectres of solidity pointing to a nostalgia for the tradition of hand-crafted objects.

Examples of Ackling’s obsessive recording of details in drawn plans, notes, photographs, and documentation served to stress the centrality of recording process and a compulsion to order the randomness of experience, ordering that which just is.  An obsessive archiving of moments of productive disengagement.

A good example was Birdlist 15/07/90 from his Orkney Isle travel Journal.

This listing procedure served to record what had occurred but maintained Ackling at a distance, a dispassionate observer / recorder, curiously absent whilst physically present.

In the accompanying exhibition catalogue for ‘Sunlight: Roger Ackling’, Louis Nixon grouped Ackling in with Richard Long and Hamish Fulton as an artist who took the productive process of doing ‘art’ out into the environment of the landscape.

Dr Rosy Gray’s preface seemed more pithily germane emphasising that the work prompts conversations about ‘’…the status of the object, the significance of material, the process of making, and the transformative power of display.’’

The central importance of the aesthetics of display cannot be overstated.

On the gallery’s longest wall, a number of pieces from different periods were presented on nine boxy shelving plinths at varying display heights. A clumping of plinths was avoided and the objects became curiously flat and heavy against the 3D whiteness and the side shadows of the boxy shelves.

For Ackling’s practice it seems more accurate to note that he used studio and gallery as a directive funnelling and editing of his material tinkering towards aesthetic display, the unavoidable final element completing the ‘art’ process.  

Both in his handwritten notes and in the playful gnomic utterances recollected by his students, he seemed to consistently double-back to a consideration of the most effective and seductive qualities of the material elements co-present in an artwork. Compressing these into a purely visual experience, removing the intimacy of touch whilst suggesting its centrality to the wider process of production, all seemed important to the construction of the final displays.

For Ackling, ‘art’ appeared to be a compensatory transcriptive aestheticization of the playful energy of authentic object-events from the real world.

Finally, Ackling’s work humanised larger forces with a lightness of touch which sat in contradistinction to the comedic egotism of his practice. After all, artists who purchase volcanoes or cut passageways through mountains seem tragically unambitious in comparison to one who tethered the sun to a controlled focal point, disciplining the chaos of the universe into enjoyable aesthetic events with humour and humility.

Dean Hughes: Felt Tip Drawings

 

Dean Hughes - 'Felt Tip Drawing No 2' (2024), ink on paper, 210mm x 297mm.

Photograph by Michael Pollard. Courtesy Moon Grove.

The Moon Grove contemporary art space (Manchester, UK) is currently home to Dean Hughes exhibition 'Felt Tip Drawings'.

Hughes has spent the last few decades editing the white noise of the world by producing small sculptures and domestic scale work on and with paper. The linearity of threads and cuts, the puncture and catch of stitch, process and procedure directing him towards a binding reductive aesthetic, but all carrying a polite invitation to concentrate on the materiality grounding his minimal interventions on A4 paper and miniature cardboard birdbox-like shapes. Small articles compressing the ponderous heft and bulk of traditional minimalist sculpture into intimate moments, removing the aggressively impersonal quality of the monumental.

So, considering his previous work, the prospect of a 40 piece drawing show on Moon Grove’s exhibition walls threatens to verge on rococo insanity.

Fortunately, the badgering meanness of meaning is healthily wrongfooted and the work avoids the dampening slap of academic reductionism, an undermining playfulness humanizing his trademark disciplined attention to detail.

As always with Hughes, modalities of attention are at the fore bringing to mind William James notion of ‘attention’; the taking possession by the mind of one out of what seems several simultaneous trains of thought, the withdrawal from some things to deal effectively with others, as, without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Foundational to cognition is a selective precision within focussed attention and the work hinges on this observation.

The first drawing on the entry passage wall shows an anaemic curvature of looping forms sitting on top of the empty substrate of a blank white ground, as empty and weightless as a balloon it still has the organisational certainty of an architectural plan. On closer inspection the lassoing number 8 shape proves to be cuts in the paper. A regular density of cut maintains the illusion of a drawing deposit of ink or pencil graphite; drawing as an absence and as a tangible marking. Additionally, colourful bleeds of felt tip pen inks stain the paper edges on both sides of the cut giving the twinkle of a rainbow thread to the reassembled collaged drawing. There is a gentle phosphene complicity showing the limitations of the visual, the glitching flicker of rods and cones defamiliarizing the materially known.          

This technique of colourful staining by a fine bleed into the edge of papers fibre further complicates matters as it embeds the notion of the painterly into the mix.  A muffled molecular nervousness at odds with the confidently regular width of the cut lines. Almost apologetically discrete coloured sutures, they hijack the meditative hum of a doodlers meandering output.  

The other 39 drawings are roughly grouped in different spaces according to a connective tissue of stylistic similarities. The front room area has largely geometric shapes; inset rectangles, individually or in twos and threes, a simple stacking of triangle into boxy squares, and so on. The next, more idiosyncratic forms mixing straight lines and curves, some seem like overinflated alien letters, there’s an occasional circle. Other display areas have solo works with the line casually wandering with a dreamy indifference, sometimes barely registering as though a cameo from another drawing.

However, the drawings source material may well not originate with Hughes. This is never clear. There is also a wilful amnesia regarding drawings presumed functions, is it a disciplining of mark-making for constructive transcriptions, directive rumblings from the psyche, a mapping of the body’s mechanical capabilities? By reducing hand-generated marks and lines to alien traces of all these possibilities simultaneously the ‘doodles’ become apparitions outside the confines of any notion of lucidity of functional expressive intention. A dismantled codex of drawings formal possibilities infecting Moon Grove’s exhibition walls.

Further, the various groupings and clusters of framed A4 drawings tend towards an implied conventional grid format but with gaps and absences leaving static overhead views of changing car-park huddles of the rectangular format. A suggestion of movement and interchangeability between the A4 units which adds a further feeling of long-term mutability to the drawings internal structures.

So these drawings are both absences and compressions harvesting echoes of loose expressive mark-making and the functionally diagrammatic for decorative and formal impact. 

For all their apparent simplicity they demand a degree of attention to detail from the viewer paralleling the attention to detail required for their production. The mediums unanchoring flexibility is placed on display but with a caveat. Drawing is a playground and straitjacket for imaginative wanderings. 

Any mediums fuller potential can only be perceived by a shift in the conceptualising perspective of the viewer. A richer engagement with the grounding materiality of the medium becomes the beginning of the pleasurable act of thinking sideways. 

Surely a positive outcome for any art show.

Dean Hughes - 'Felt Tip Drawings' 

31 May to 27 July 2024

Open Thursdays and Fridays

12pm to 6pm during exhibition

Moon Grove

7 Moon Grove

Manchester

M14 5HE

United Kingdom

+44(0)7713930510

mail@moongrove.org

Imogen Reid: Works on Paper

Imogen Reid's work on paper maintains a compromise between informational clarity and poetic formalism. Erasures, mirrored forensic repetitions and layered overprinting coexist within the tonally ambient meshing of papers textured materiality and artisanal fragility.

Against the obdurate solidity of the concrete Reid posits a multiplicity of repetitions, deformations and subtractions, paper acting as both substance and display screen. Attracted to the transformative movement of the sequential, a way to activate these necessarily inert spatial concretions, Reid conceptually disassembles form, line and the quiet texturing of the page and reassembles momentary constellations of these foundational elements.

The standard directional drag of the reading process is never fully discarded but subtly reweighted in Reid's work. The patterns and grids present themselves as fractal lines of alien text and holistic unities at one of the same time. An active conceptualising process, an anchoring pivot swings the viewer's mode of apprehension from the linearity of text to the bold certainty of graphic solidity.

However, no matter how formally fixed these renderings seem they side-step the calcifying deadness of geometric solidity. Taut and colourful parallel threads imply the anonymity of structuring language’s granular multiplications of atomic units whilst foregrounding the vibrancy of communicative potentialities in a fresh creative jigsawing together of basic visual elements.

A reader-viewer’s physical proximity to the page also allows a visual blurring, a humanizing vulnerability announced by the subtle tactility of the structuring linearity of the printed designs. The implied narrative pull of parallel lines reveal themselves to be territorial mappings of the material, simultaneously synthetic and organic, the burr of fraying threads momentarily static but always straining towards a breaking point and alternative constructive possibilities.

Interweaving and interleaving constructive options for patterns of illegibility within the ecosystem of a book form adds a further temporal dimension to the process of absorbing the visual. The publication becomes a gentle feedback loop of austere calligraphy, a layering of mutating woven genetic codes, a wiry motility embedded in the material fact of the book- object.

An implication of the ambient pin-point flicker of illuminated pixels seems to comfortably coexist with the disciplined rigour of the hand-crafted, the tender bleaching of a potentially strident palette maintaining a consistency of decorative restraint.

Ultimately, the work acts as a refined glossographia of the barebones of visual constructions, an organized grouping of visual elements dependent on activation by the readers eye and hand. Looking and experiencing become sensitive manipulations prompted by the author-artist but never at the expense of losing the democratic and participatory nature of cultural discourse. The hands of the readers as much as their eyes will finally dictate the cumulative resonance of the pages.

A new publication will shortly be released through http://www.rossicontemporary.be/

Reid’s work has appeared in Hotel Magazine, LossLit, Gorse Journal, Zeno Magazine, Elbow Room, and ToCall Magazine. She has participated in Steven J Fowler’s Poem Brut events, and has a pamphlet with Gordian Projects. 

 

Simon Pantling: Flyover

                                                                                                                   '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. 

Rebecca Sitar: The Obstinate Muteness Of Things

                                                                   'Casket' (2021)

Manchester-based artist Rebecca Sitar’s recent joint exhibition with Dan Roach, ‘Mudlarks’, was a pleasant reminder that, in a zeitgeist still rather taken by formal hybridity in contemporary art, an unshowy refinement of a practice has its own benefits.

‘Mudlarks’ was the name applied to nineteenth century riverbank scavengers patrolling the intertidal flats of the Thames to unearth objects still carrying a use value. It is also suggestive of the magpie lark of Australian descent which builds nests from mud and twigs, a kind of constructive and functional alchemy not unlike the building site of a painting, itself constructed from stubbornly solid surfaces and painterly muck.

 

The vague, almost recognisable, single objects that dominate Sitar’s paintings either hover in front of surface washes of milky and muted colour or emerge x-ray-like from the quiet ground of the pictures. So, in ‘Under the Skin’, a horizontal twig shape is sharply foregrounded on a background of cool blue-white; whereas ‘Red Velvet In Thin Air’ seems to gather a cloudy orange-pink block of haze from the warm but pale ground of the painting.

 

Enigmatic but intimate, keening towards the mimetic and an elevation of the fragmentary, it is impossible to gauge the scale of the suggested objects; they could be delicately microscopic or as substantial as handleable human artefacts and everyday objects. Rarely do they radiate the aggression of the monumental or the sizeable clutter of a natural landscape.

 

A mnemonic woolliness hovers around them; they feel like the restatement of objects previously forgotten or abandoned, but, as Richard Davey observes in the exhibition catalogue, ones fleetingly sighted in the blurred boundary of peripheral vision.

 

Davey notes that ‘we exist in the ‘here’ – bounded bodies interlocked with time and place, unable to escape the ever-unfolding present of ‘now’’ whilst simultaneously acknowledging that ‘Our memory is a palimpsest, where fragments from times past and the dreams of our unformed future collide with the present moment…. Into a familiar picture of reality in the mind’.1

 

Observations which emphasise a paradoxical truth: although we can never ‘escape the ever-unfolding present of ‘now’’, we never really live, fully, in the ‘now’; our minds being formed from fragmentary snippets of past experiences and dreams interlocking with new sensations to allow us to construct our picture of reality.

 

This introduces significant elements often foregrounded within contemporary painterly practice, Sitar’s included. The thematics of duration and flow.

Duration and flow have been resurrected time and again within critical discourse; the fertile lineage of Bergson via Deleuze and a detour through the photographic and its digital offspring.

 

Organically, paintings carry the potential of being an ontological flattening into a single object-space of the spatial gameplay evidenced in previous historical precedents. This may suggest a mere expansion of the possibilities inherent in an investigation of ‘the painterly’.

 

But it is important to remember the degree to which painting as a technology, as much as painting as a conceptualising discipline, has always simultaneously absorbed and colonised parallel media.

 

If duration and flow are the DNA of twitchy digital pixels and contemporary moving images, they are also, in parallel, discretely hidden and quietly resonate within contemporary painterly practice.

 

That is why it is impossible to extricate a single temporal pace from this admixture of maternal referents within many contemporary paintings. Sitar’s paintings graphically state this sense of layered, contrary fluid perceptual shifts, discretely acknowledging the impurity of painting as a comfortably static and definable practice.

Further, in abstraction the interest moves from the mechanism of perception to the work of paint beginning to think at the level of expressive matter. Sitar plays with this, suggestively concerned both with the mechanisms of perception and with painting as a 'memorial' to painting as a practice.

This is very different than the tired constraining stricture of perpetually restaging 'the death of painting' as the paintings here act as a network of becomings and stagnations. Stray matter congealing into the visually apprehendable overlayed with its obverse, a flow of creeping entropy and deterioration.

This balance of contradictions make 'Casket' and its bleached out sugary tones efficiently seductive and needlingly off-putting at one and the same time. Like an overexposed printed photo of a Wayne Thiebaud cake painting.

 

As spectres of material presence, the almost-images pictured in Sitar’s works maintain a subtle discordancy between solidity and visual slippage. The minds’ eye sweeps around them in a predatory circling of the isolated object-events which act as enigmatic and unstable visual bait. The implied objects are haunted by alternative objects; other material possibilities occupying the same space at the same time.

 

Importantly, here images are not just traps for the eye but suggestive pivots towards other possible images.

 

The liminal imaginal spaces of these paintings are often almost interchangeable and, experiencing a grouping of this work, it is interesting to consider the possibility that they actually function as an ongoing serial production of a single work. One in which absence acts as a binding factor.

 

Afterall, on constructing a resemblance, the thing referred to is generally removed. The operations of this work may usefully be viewed as cojoined absences revelling in the obstinate muteness of things.

 

 

1. From ‘Kaleidoscopes of Atomic Shards’ by Richard Davey, an introductory essay to the catalogue ‘Mudlarks: Rebecca Sitar and Dan Roach’, published by University of Worcester, School of Art, 2021

(ISBN:10:9780903607360 and 13:978-0-903607-36-0)