Month: June 2020

John Taylor – The Circle

18 June to 1 August 2018

An on-line exhibition of drawings and collages

Despite holding reservations about on-line exhibitions, even in these days of full or partial Covid lockdown, I surprisingly found myself intrigued by John Taylor’s current website initiative. Ideally, exhibitions should be seen ‘in the flesh’ whenever possible, but of course since the reproduction of images became technically possible, this has never been sacrosanct – thank goodness. I last wrote about Taylor’s collage/paintings shown at the Jeannie Avent Gallery, East Dulwich in the Spring of 2018 after coming across his work via my iPhone, which prompted a day out to see if the actual works were as impressive as the miniature versions were on-screen.

As if to challenge the logic of the notion of a current show ‘The Circle’ brings together twenty-five unframed mixed media works from 2011 and is best viewed on a computer or tablet for decent sized reproductions of the works. Having not been able to attend his last show, ‘Abstract Realities’, at Westminster Reference Library just before last Christmas I was pleased at this opportunity to see more of Taylor’s work, albeit nine years after completion. Not that this time element is especially problematic and in fact there is a sense of circumstances being just right for this particular project to leave the studio. For though it’s not a retrospective in the conventional sense, it is something of a treat to see works that were made purely for their own sake, privately as it were, and not for commercial reasons.

Clearly with the convention of a small gallery in mind, the indicative model of the solo show has guided the simple but effective structure of this exhibition. In a sense the display or the event is not at all ‘virtual’ as it only exists in reality as a digital platform, although the original works are solidly ‘real’ as we would normally understand mixed media works on card. Divided into three rooms (there’s no need to use the term ‘virtual’ anymore), the similarly sized works are split into groups of eight or nine images that might be comfortably viewed in three modest salons or vestibules. Thankfully, the works have not been presented to look like they are hung on a wall with some clever Photoshop technique, but are photographed in a straightforward manner lying on sheets of paper with subtle shadows indicating the gentle curve of unstretched paper. They will not be perfectly flat until someone has one framed.

From a recent Instagram exchange of messages the artist confirmed that the works were produced on a daily basis throughout the year in question as a “365 project”. This daily assignment suggests a degree of perseverance, discipline and resolve that, if my own experience of similar tasks with collage and drawing is similar, calls for the contradictory necessity to often see what happens with the process in an informal manner before attending to other forms of studio practice. Taylor also revealed a usefully relaxed attitude in saying that, “It’s my kind of sketchbook really. Bits of cardboard and paper rather than a book of ideas.” But let’s not be deceived by any notion of indifference or impassiveness, as Taylor’s engagement with the selection, disparity and handling of the media constitutes an active form of research that allows for far more than a simple process-lead endeavour. Taylor’s undeniable Constructivist tendency also reveals a highly intelligent ‘eye’ that is a pure pleasure to witness in his work generally. In this selection of works, cutting up, colour-scribbling and the use of linear sub-divisions and boundaries is controlled by impressive skill in the placement of rectangular and circular forms to attain asymmetrical balance within the compositions. In other words, the works are highly sophisticated and exemplary examples of a particular territory of abstraction.

The works could well function as small studies for larger works, significantly grand and spacious canvases or even sculptures set in a large garden or parkland as a feel of the monumental pervades the imagery. Typically, the circular forms float in front of solid colour or sketchier, hand drawn backgrounds, although in two compositions, ‘Combinations’ and ‘Balance’, there are circular forms that might be described more appropriately as discs. By the time I had reached the penultimate image in Room 3, I started to read the titles and found ‘Circle Myth’. Having just read about the newly discovered giant Neolithic structure on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, I could not avoid thinking about the fascination that many artists and writers still have for our ancient landscape. With the Summer Solstice just passed and Paul Nash’s ‘Landscape of the Summer Solstice’ also very much in mind a notion of landscape as a fundamental subject in art history (even if ‘landscape’ is at a low ebb at the moment) now imposes itself on my thinking. Nash’s ‘Equivalents for the Megaliths’ also springs to mind of course, which contains centrally placed geometric forms set in a simply rendered, painterly range of light yellows, ochres and greys that might be sensed in stronger colouration in some of the images in Room 3 of ‘The Circle’ (most especially ‘Sculptural Landscape’). Briefly letting my mind wander still further from the show for a while (an inevitable consequence of sitting at the computer rather than in a normal gallery context) I also recall the ‘Circle: International Survey of Constructivist Art’ publication involving Ben Nicholson, who surely must be a positive influence on Taylor’s work. In fact when I asked about a Nicholson link, Taylor confessed that he “…hesitated showing them for ages because of the inevitable comparison with Nicholson”. But he continued to explain that, “…they show my roots”. This is quite understandable and, I would argue, something to allow to unfold over time as a worthy lineage.

Whatever the associations, intended or otherwise, one must always return to the work of course. So having become aware of the addition of titles (note: Taylor has revealed that the titles were added before going online, which is fascinating as I wonder if stepping back from production allowed a usefully distanced overview away from process and production for different a mode of contemplation) I returned to Room 1. This navigation of the exhibition is a habit I commonly adopt for actual exhibitions, as a sometimes hurried overview requires one to retrace the initial journey. To find myself doing this online was certainly a surprise, though a reassuring one.

Looking again, giving more than cursory glances that may happen in walking around a show, an initial impression is formed of non-perspectival space compositions in which shape and placement is paramount. In these images visual space is essentially flat, although some of the rectangular forms could indicate perspective rendering. But on closer inspection vertical and horizontal lines also suggest spaces or areas receding. Occasionally a rectangular, trapezoid, form literally overlaps a drawn line to also create a sense of recession. Ins and outs, adjacent to, atmospheric backgrounds and bodily foregrounds are generated by the content. The circles, relatively large or small, often create a sense of floating but in a very slow motion akin to our experience of the moon or notions of the planetary. More forcefully intimating a notionally ‘real world’ are the titles. In Room 1 ‘Night Circles’ references a time of day and ‘Circle Talk’ could allude to a relationship between the three circular entities or the smallest group of people beyond a pair, with whatever narrative or consequences one might imagine. In the next room, ‘Sculpture Clouds’’ and ‘Sculpture Circles’ reference structures that could well be constructivist forms or ancient standing stones that predate what we culturally call ‘art’. ‘Dusk Moment’also summons a specific interval of time between day and night. Back in the final room, ‘Circle Myth’ again attracts my attention and now I am further intrigued by the various combinations of circular forms that feature in all of the works, but perhaps more emphatically here in Room 3. The works are suggestively intimate as two, three or four and a half discs converse in a rectangular environment. Perhaps these are conversation pieces, alluding ever so subtly to the eighteenth century English painting tradition of group portraiture in landscape or interiors. So, once more, the works take the observer on a digression by design or unintended intimation, fascinatingly open to the imagination.

‘The Circle’ prompts me to re-think my aversion to the online exhibition phenomenon – particularly as it’s here to stay, pandemic or no pandemic. But for an even more satisfying experience of the works another option would be to invest in one, and without a gallery mark up, there are bargains to be had from this show.

Geoff Hands (June 2020)

All images © John Taylor.

LINKS/FURTHER INFORMATION:

John Taylor – http://www.johntaylorpaintings.com

Abstract Voices review – https://fineartruminations.com/2018/04/21/john-taylor-abstract-voices/

Abstract Realities on ArtRabbit – https://www.artrabbit.com/events/abstract-realities-paintings-by-john-taylor

Guardian article – https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/22/scrap-stonehenge-road-tunnel-say-archaeologists-neolithic-discovery

The Stonehenge Hidden Landscape Project – https://lbi-archpro.org/cs/stonehenge/

Tate: Paul Nash – https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-28-summer-2013/paul-nashs-equivalents-megaliths-1935

Rushing through an exhibition: Review of Calder on CFA – https://www.conceptualfinearts.com/cfa/2016/02/09/the-good-art-generates-new-art-a-short-story-about-alexander-calders-retrospective-at-the-tate/

 

Carol Bove at David Zwirner

June 8 to August 3, 2018 at 24, Grafton Street, London

The Covid-19 pandemic has closed galleries for many weeks, and a plethora of online initiatives for displaying art, both contemporary and historical, have been taking place. From virtual tours of our major galleries to shows specifically curated for the digital platform there has been much to see, albeit in understandably compromised and impaired form. I must admit straightaway that the increased online content has not particularly engrossed me, probably because I have not tried hard enough, but in my defence, I just prefer to see the ‘real thing’. These would be not only the exhibitions I may have seen last week or even yesterday, where the experience would be fresh in my mind, or the shows I anticipate for tomorrow or next month, but also the shows from some time ago. This wishful thinking is due to focussed reminiscence, rather than some quirk of the lock-down effect on the deeper layers of consciousness, but is a welcome indulgence.

So, as I contemplate exhibitions I am now missing – most especially ‘Titian: Love, Desire, Death’ at the National Gallery in London and ‘Young Rembrandt’ at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford – I also recollect exhibitions that I would love to travel back to see and to experience again. My initial wish list, though never possibly definitive but inevitably autobiographical, would include the tenth John Moores show at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool from 1976, where John Walker’s ‘Juggernaut with Plume – for P Neruda’ won first prize, and The Hayward Annual 1980, selected by John Hoyland.

In Liverpool, Walker’s ‘Juggernaut’, a collage of painted canvas segments is still lodged in my memory, albeit without detail or the ‘plume’ that I am reminded of by seeing it again on the gallery’s website. Along with a visit to Manchester Art Gallery and The Whitworth during the same academic year as a Foundation art student in Shrewsbury, the pigment encrusted surface and painterly physicality of a small Camille Pissarro landscape definitely propelled me towards applying for a fine art degree. The real thing, before the advent of the digital-visual and a more mainstream understanding of hyperreality (beyond anything the surrealists may have conceived), was physically and visually rendered as form, surface, colour and materiality. Not that this was an intellectual realisation for a fledgling art student; it was simply emotive and felt intuitively.

Having completed my Fine Art (Painting) degree at Farnham (WSCAD) the year before, the Hayward Gallery show rejuvenated my post-graduation period of rudderless struggle without the luxury of tutors, fellow students, workshops and a well-stocked library. Several decades on, a lingering sense of something significant about seeing canvases by the likes of Gillian Ayres, Frank Bowling, Jeff Dellow, John McLean, Mali Morris, Fred Pollock, Terry Setch, John Walker et al that was subsequently scuppered by the following years of conceptualism and a diminishing lack of faith in abstraction from the art world power brokers, still niggles. But Hoyland’s choice of Albert Irvin’s ‘Bodicea’ for the Annual made a great impression and this exuberant painting still resides prominently in my mind’s eye as an overwhelmingly visceral experience of paint, colour and shape celebrating an unashamed abstract visuality.

As I linger at the keyboard, there are other shows from the past that bob-up to resurface in a state of lock-down reverie: ‘Ian McKeever: Recent Paintings’, at the John Hansard Gallery, Southampton 1984; ‘Francis Bacon’ at the Tate in 1985; ‘Georg Baselitz’ at Wiener Secession, Vienna 1986 (the upside down imagery was clearly more than a gimmick when viewed in the flesh rather than in the magazines and catalogues); but I must stop here, as Constable, Blake and Patrick Heron shows from the Tate emerge from the depths of memory.

What links these exhibitions for me is not only the pictorial content but also the impact and tangibility of the materiality of paint (including Blakes’s watercolours). The pre-digital ‘medium specificity’ of art works, before reading Greenberg years later for consuming his purist/modernist angle, has never been quite satisfied by the digital screen. Hence my predilection for first hand experience.

A relatively recent show that I recollect, albeit from 2018, is Carol Bove at David Zwirner in London. Had I not been so busy on other projects I chose not to review this colourful and impactful show, despite the temptation. I was already fully committed to reporting on Patrick Heron at Tate St Ives for AbCrit and was on this particular day heading for Gagosian in Grosvenor Hill for ‘Howard Hodgkin: Last Paintings’ and later for the opening at Assembly Point in Peckham of ‘Everything – An artist multiples event’ in which my eldest daughter was participating. It must have been Thursday 26 July.

There was, I realise in retrospect, a personal conundrum implicit in this decision not to explore Bove’s work further, as I was not sure if the work was abstract or something else. Had I made a little more effort I would have reconciled any questions of abstract purity issues with Heron in mind as his work was so embedded in qualities of local landscape from Eagle’s Nest, his Cornish enclave, that references or echoes from the world beyond the canvas or sculptural form do not necessarily undermine abstract intent.

If there is already too much anecdotal content in the story so far I can only defend my position within what is still a semi-lockdown mode wherein subjectivity might understandably outweigh a more objective line of conversation. Whilst taking time out, as it were, recalled images of Bove’s objects resurface more than from other exhibitions. A faint memory, gaining visual strength as I ponder and allow something to come through, gains colour and form with a sense of a long-lost video replaying in piecemeal fashion. Deliberately letting the slenderest of re-imaginings take hold and become concrete is the luxurious order of the day, as these sculptures, as memory traces, somehow change from lying dormant to becoming visually active.

Though a little indeterminate, I can see the sculptures in my mind’s eye quite strongly. In terms of writing this down a handwritten list will have to suffice before flowing prose tidies things up. I sense ‘modern’, perhaps ‘abstract’, pre-formed architectural forms, at once toy-like and yet suggestive of a larger scale, carefully arranged and mounted on white plinths in two rooms. Elongated steel boxes set at various angles seem dominant. Previously vertical forms that are no longer upright, but now bent and twisted by gravity or some calamitous circumstance. Careful placement, a degree of deliberate arrangement holding back from over indulgence – yet not minimalist. Some component parts painted yellow and green (is there red?), or rusted, that’s not so clear. Is there orange too? Yes, and black. Out of the tin colour, decorators’ pigments I guess (hints of Caro), rather than organic and earthy; satin rather than gloss finish, although I think the rust was real. Where did the rust come from – can you paint it on? Here I am uncertain – and holding back from searching for Bove imagery on-line or visiting the gallery website too soon.

Related to and arising from the experience of seeing the works in situ, lasting impressions are generated: a sense of collapse, of degeneration held for a while. A sense of time stalled, at least apparently so. Natural change is often unnoticeable from a human perspective, as we seem to live too fast. Nothing is permanent, is this implication generated from the work intended by the artist or from my own interpretation two years on? Not so much the flux of nature that Heraclitus pondered, but the impermanence of the built environment comes to mind.

From form and imagery I have shifted to associations. The work is certainly suggestive – though this might be the beholder trying to make figurative sense, literal definition. This is always an imposition on the abstract in art, until you tune in to what you are actually looking at. But any judgment of the works in terms of a simplistic like or dislike; finding the purely formalistic or recognising narrative content; or suggesting (especially as this is sculpture) monumentality, perhaps undermined by a sense of the mundane are put on hold. Despite disparity of form and colour the works appear to be coming together rather than disintegrating. Pleasingly composite forms that reference industry and applied design rather than nature, but somehow neither too big nor too small for the human scale of experiencing, tie everything together. I am neither physically overawed nor obliged to enquire close-up. There’s something about these sculptures that give more joy than promote fear, despite knowing that collapsing steel would mercilessly crush my bones. The addition of colour seems to imbue lightness and movement.

Is this ‘abstract’ sculpture? The works appear to be constructed from recognisable artefacts, designed, ‘modern’ forms – architectural, toy-like. How are they assembled as if they are virtually weightless, cardboard box forms? These disparate but related parts feel kind of wholesome and complete in themselves, though they could as easily be 3-D fragments collected from a skip and reassembled by some chance process. Experiencing (as well as seeing) several together in the same space emphasizes the artist’s dexterity in combining forms with visual as well as physical balance. I get a sense of humour, or is this an engagement with the unmonumental? (Which I shall later discover that it is.) There’s a sense of refined sophistication on display, if only because the sculptures look effortless. Others may disagree, but these are seriously playful pieces.

So, if they are not abstract are they figurative? There is an essence of bodily physicality – a sense of lying down, fallen, at rest or in flight. The works could be made to live outside as well as inside a home, gallery or public space. The plinths could be discarded, though I see the forms placed on a surface beneath them rather than suspended or attached to a wall. They are confidently themselves and could look good in any environment; urban or rural; homely, public or corporate.

Recollection, particularly from memory, can appear crystal clear or play tricks. But when I finally allow myself to search on-line for these works I see that all I recollected was reasonably accurate. The interpretation of the works might be way off the mark but I am pleased that I allowed myself the indulgence to revisit the show via my memory and further gratified by seeing the works brought into sharp focus and clarity by the installation shots of the exhibition kindly sent to me from the gallery on request. There’s a purpose and place for the virtual after all.

LINKS/FURTHER READING

Carol Bove at David Zwirner – https://www.davidzwirner.com/exhibitions/carol-bove

Reopening information – https://www.davidzwirner.com/news/paris-and-hong-kong-galleries-reopening

New Museum – https://archive.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/918

Frieze – How to Write in a Pandemic – https://frieze.com/article/how-write-pandemic

Patrick Heron at Tate St Ives on AbCrit – https://abcrit.org/2018/07/13/105-geoff-hands-writes-on-patrick-heron-at-tate-st-ives/

Assembly Point – http://assemblypoint.xyz/project/every-thing/

Robin Greenwood writes on the Possibilities of Abstract Sculpture – https://wordpress.com/read/blogs/77587112/posts/10598