ARTISTS TALKING

We are all aware that the world has gone mad. News bulletins and headlines in papers celebrate this daily and since 9/11, for many of us reality has become more surreal. ‘World Gone Mad’ seems a most unlikely title, therefore, for a show by fifteen UK-based artists celebrating the return of the Surrealists’ legacy in recent British art. But then, didn’t Surrealism originally offer a way out of the chaos after the First World War and the rather anarchic Dada movement, using irony and the estrangement of the familiar?

Surrealism has become a visual style embraced by popular culture, the media and advertising, but its absence of late as a topic in art education makes this show much needed and a refreshing must-see.

John Stezaker’s brilliant collage Third Person evokes and references paintings by René Magritte and still manages to retain an identity of its own, without becoming historically objectified. Liz Arnold’s slightly cartoonist painting Uncovered shows a fly or beetle in a bra and knickers, wearing black boots, standing in front of a factory surrounded by a darkened landscape, facing three tiny white bones. Is this pointing to a post-industrial disaster or is it an exercise in the absurd? Does it have Freudian undertones or Kafkaesque elements? The play with the viewer’s mind, the eradication of the boundaries between the real and the imaginary work well here and leave one craving more.

Sam Basu’s work Automatic Revelation 1 and 2 shows a landscape made of resin looking like an architectural model for something prehistoric, or maybe marks left by an alien cutting into a familiar natural landscape. Is it a psychic space or Guantanamo Bay, perhaps celebrating the Surrealist fascination with the secret or showing the world beyond an apparent reality? Gary Webb’s wall-based sculptures made from glass and aluminium, shining like some oversized jewels, could be part of a 60s or 70s sci-fi film set. The viewer is left feeling uneasy about its possible function, if any, further supported by its title – Big Ben’s legs – which might just be linguistic game-play. They work as hybrids, having seemingly mutated out of a Surrealist tradition celebrating the bizarre and our fascination with mass culture.

Guy Bar-Amotz’s piece, Angola points to a contemporary interpretation of the once novel approach of the found object. He uses Portland stone dust, acrylic resin and fibreglass to create floor-based sculptures resembling skulls. They display deeply embedded, apparently randomly chosen objects with a possibly fetish character. In addition to these bold pieces there is a selection of works on paper, for example Ansel Krut’s Head on the Side, an ink and watercolour painting. Krut shows a dismembered head with a mouth like a gaping hole trying to formulate a prismatic scream hinting at the surrealist denial of a culture of reason, an important legacy left behind by Antonin Artaud and others labelled as ‘Outsider Art’ or ‘Art Brut’. The greatest thing about the show is the immense variety of applied methods, strategies and visual devices of the Surreal period and their application by different artists portraying their diverse visions which is stimulating and refreshing. I left inspired by Jack Duplock’s mixed-media painting Back to the Garden, dreaming of a long-lost innocence and feeling an odd nostalgia mixed with irony, while I overheard other visitors contemplating Mark Harris’s fantastic nightmarish creatures Pike and Jackal.

It was Roland Penrose together with Herbert Read who originally brought Surrealism to Britain. One of the titles of Penrose’s lyrical texts was ‘The Road is wider than long’, which summarises this show well; it is definitely wider than long, but less world gone mad than real – though even reality isn’t what it used to be.