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Wayne Lucas, Lothar Gotz, ‘Large painting and Horsemeat Disco’, mixed media and installation, 2003-4 and 2004.
Hales Gallery, London
8 September – 10 October
Reviewed by: Roy Exley
Ever since its controversial debut almost a century ago, the progression of abstraction as credible artistic genre has gone through many incarnations and has followed many evolutionary twists and turns, completing numerous cycles of exhaustion and revival. ‘Obstractivist’ proves that this is a history still in the making. But, in the search for itself, could abstraction be lost up its own backside? I think the evidence here refutes that line of enquiry. Each new generation of artists to engage with abstraction inevitably adds a new layer. In this show that layer is permeated and perforated by a playful freedom that seems to say, take this seriously at your peril.
Experimentation and abstraction go hand in hand. Here it is the experimentation with materials, whether paint, plastic, wax, cardboard, found objects, sound or animated forms, that brings a freshness to much of this work. Neill Gall’s mini-installation, Cast, looks like something Tomoko Takahashi might have put together in Lilliput. Ben Ravenscroft’s Flight Distance seems to have experienced a schizophrenic struggle between the forms painted in aluminium primer and the counter-painted layers of translucent acrylic that have attempted to cover them up, only succeeding in enhancing and enriching them. Wayne Lucas’ paradoxically titled Large Painting is a wacky relief whose simmering stew of fluffy and furry toys, hung like a painting, is totally ‘off the wall’. Andrew Bick’s Logo and Danny Rolph’s WÜrstenhÜtte are chaotic collages whose whimsical nonchalance belies the sense for form and colour that subtly informs them.
I could have sat all afternoon and watched the sliding, gliding hand-painted organic forms whose mesmeric processions animate Katy Dove’s DVD projections, Cruel when Complete and You. The accompanying sounds, derived from bytes sampled from ‘Velvet Underground’ and ‘Dome’, manipulated and re-worked by Dove, powerfully reinforce the ‘lo-fi’ psychedelia here that contrives to transport the audience somewhere else.
Writer detail:
Roy Exley
Venue detail:
Hales Gallery
G3 Tea Building, 7 Bethnal Green Road, LONDON E1 6LA
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