ARTISTS TALKING

‘Anticipation’, the title of the opening show at One One One (referring to the street address on Great Titchfield Street) appeared less to encapsulate an individual or collective sentiment within or between the works, and more an external provocation designed to harbour expectation around it. The twenty-five artists represented were all recent graduates who largely justified the interest invested in their work. The eclectic and the vastly differing agendas at play made this show more akin to a loose-knit survey of contemporary practice rather than anything that could be considered cohesive.

Highlights included Andy Denzler’s When Darkness Falls, a small painting that depicted two figures in a barren landscape. The remnant of a skull was partially visible in a rock formation that sat alongside a series of rounded hillocks topped with sharp strokes of colour. In their ordinariness, Tatsuya Kimata’s carved objects uncovered contemporary aesthetic concerns that neatly touched on both renaissance and modernist sculpture. Made from marble, slate and bone china, the works appropriated an array of everyday items from polystyrene coffee cups to socks and light switches, although beyond the displacement of material their collective narration as objects remained obtuse.

In contrast, Tom Price’s intricate clay sculptures had a compactness and resolute intensity to their miniature manufacture. The density of expression retained within Price’s heads afforded them a weighty credence that deftly outmanoeuvred the slightness of their physical mass. Overloading colour, Boo Ritson’s photographs prompted an energy-fuelled collision of post-abject abjection and American candy pop. Their visceral and gloss-ridden surfaces were intensified by the use of close-crop frame that both created and fostered a sense of cinematic sumptuousness.

If any sort of collective reference point emerged across the two floors of the gallery it was attached to a sense of displacement. Alterations in perception created through material displacement were the most common collective pathways that drew works together, from Tatsuya Kimata’s array of marble objects, to Frances Richardson’s Brink, and Jodie Carey’s hanging chandeliers constructed from Hoover dust.

Alex Robbins’ Redwood offered an alternative diagrammatic arbitration of displacement. His work, located on the lower floor, reconstructed the year-cycle rings of trees associated to their age as a series of wire fences. The sizeable scale of the work appropriated the significant structure of a Redwood tree but withheld nothing of its physical imposition. Elsewhere, Guillermo Caivano’s paintings Samuel’s Kiss and The Second Body (Apple Thorn) were amongst the most accomplished put forward, while Douglas White’s Owl offered something supremely sublime. The beautiful and haunting impression of an owl imprinted on glass was backlit, forensically revealing the displaced form of the animal enigmatic in its disappearance. Forging links with an emerging generation of artists is here shown to be something that need not be anticipatory.