Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
John Hansard Gallery, Southampton
2 December – 31 January
Reviewed by: Steve McDade
The latest exhibition at the recently refurbished John Hansard Gallery is the first of a two-part series "which celebrate[s] contemporary painting' a snapshot of current practice amongst a younger generation of artists, all of whom have trained and are currently working in Britain". 'Part 1' presents the work of five non-figurative painters (the more figurative, graphic-orientated work comes in 'Part 2').
The exhibition raises the question as to whether painting can exist in a self-reflexive dialogue with its own processes and methods. There has always been 'leakage' from other areas of popular/cultural production that push against ideals of 'transcendence' or 'purity'. Indeed this leakage presents painting with broader opportunities for a critical practice with depth as well as surface. It's hard to know what painting can offer in the face of its own histories and our image-ravenous culture; it's more difficult still to find a place amongst digital, photographic, video, film and the whole image-saturated media machine. Yet painting prevails because of the obstinacy of artists who bring tenacity to the possibility of its evolution. It has never lost its place as a major art practice. It is into this context that this new work at the John Hansard arrives.
At first sight what strikes is the confection of colour and surface that ricochets around the gallery. Fashion-orientated magentas, aqua green-blues, yellows rendered in paint in a range of processes: splashes, drags, flung and stencilled marks. There is something akin to a glossary of processes and methods, an index of what paint can do. This is a catalogue that has been visited and plundered for years in endless exploitation of effects. What is it that these painters do with this vocabulary? One has to say, not much.
Danny Rolph is the stand-out artist: his work is the strongest in the show. He describes his work as questions rather than assertions, and this provisionality is part of its intrigue. His paintings use roofing plastic as supports with paint, applied front and back, in layers of coloured shapes and brush marks involving both illusionistic and physical space. They are sophisticated yet paradoxically crude. The works are a lexicon of methods, kaleidoscopes of fractured references that evoke other artists. This critical tension in the work differentiates it from the work of the other artists in the show.
Superficiality is cited by one of the artists, on a video commentary in the gallery, to describe breaking with the gravitas of the abstract expressionists. It is a disturbing comment: the work relies entirely on superficial visual effect. There is no deeper resonance. The claim made by the artist that the work grows from specific rules which can be broken at will just leads to arbitrariness.
In one of Katie Pratt's paintings the pigeon- or gull-shit splodges of paint are like her own abject responses to the random watercolour-thin splatters of paint. In other works the obsessive marking and fake stitching signify hardly more than 'mystery maps' and 'hard work'. They are neither subtle nor sensitively constructed. Clare Woods' enamel on aluminium are more interesting, with grim fairy-tale and camouflage connotations and Gary Hume surfaces. Marta Marcé's thin drags of fashion- or playroom-related colour in Scalextric tracks avoid going too far with the figure – ground push and pull. Any potential for the work to generate emotional resonance evaporates when the accidental impression of the stretcher bar in a field of green-blue becomes the only thing that calls one's attention.
In the face of digital imagery, video and performance work, abstract painting could assert a rigorous critical practice; the majority of this work doesn't. Interestingly, Southampton City Art Gallery was showing an exhibition of photorealist painter John Salt at the same time. In terms of commitment, skill and conceptual clarity the latter would be hard to fault. Even if one doesn't like the genre his paintings totally eclipse the work in 'New British Painting'.
Writer detail:
Steve McDade, artist and principal lecturer in fine art.
Venue detail:
John Hansard Gallery
University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ
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