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.