Enlarged bleached maps on telly

Sue Novell: Bionica
Antoinette Godkin
8 April - 8 May 2010

The seven paintings displayed by Sue Novell at Antoinette Godkin’s feature a colourful pixelated line where paint is applied in linear formations of small squares. They are a sort of grid painting (with tiny modules) where three varieties of overlapping map, representing topographic landforms, global contours, and inner city streets, coalesce with a form of aerial perspective that seems to show a high up, three-quarter view of city buildings.

So while they are highly abstract, and hint of the gesturally random and jumbled, you still think of maps, perhaps television screens, and rug or basket weaving - while also spotting the occasional rooftop, courtyard, park or waterfront. While at the first glance these paintings may seem formulaic, it doesn’t take too long to realise that the works greatly vary in canvas size, pixel size, chroma range, tonal range and density of mark. Some have surprises like double lines that look like knitted bike chains, or rectangular jutting forms near the bottom edge that look like fuzzy wharves or jetties.

Within these apparently competing systems the ones that aesthetically work best seem to be the densest in terms of surface covering and layering, and which feature fluid compositional movement and dramatic use of dark tones. The ambiguity of various interwoven amorphous forms is not undermined by too much openly airy space or perpendicular geometry.

Novell’s largest work here is the pale and less griddy P926000 VI. It has an all pervading looseness, and is the earliest of the series. The pastel squares are in fact blobby dots, whilst the whole surface is more painterly as a series of marks and less referencing of electronics. In contrast the middle sized works often have a diagonal movement of shimmering organic shapes while the smaller paintings have a nuggety compactness caused by relatively large dark pixels. That makes them somewhat graphic, bringing a crisp concision, an appealingly robust energy.

The half-remembered landscape of capitalism,

Andy Tolhurst: Slow Burning
Antoinette Godkin
3 March - 1 April 2010

Andy Tolhurst’s computer designed vinyl paintings examine globally famous logos, and reshuffle or alter some of the visual elements to make a new image that is usually much larger than the original. Those original brands include beer bottle-tops and labels, cigarette papers, bubblegum labels, chocolate bars and local dairy chains.

They connect with Pop Art, yet are different. They retain links to their sources of advertising or branding inspiration, retaining the same colours and many of the shapes or images, yet they also have these odd mutated shapes, often squared off. The compact symmetrical ones have a compelling iconic look about them.

Usually you try and puzzle out what has changed and if the differences are an aesthetic improvement. They don’t veer towards abstraction so that the sources become hidden, like say perhaps the much vaguer and more poetic Jim Speers glowing and translucent abstract lightboxes – which often allude to art history as well.

Tolhurst’s paintings are usually high in colour saturation, as a result really of something small and optically punchy made much bigger. They seem sort of eighties in mood (despite the digital technology), like a variation of Matt Mullican and his use of logos. They are not a critique of consumerism and its promotion in any way, nor an endorsement of marketing’s processes. They accept and comment on a ubiquitous mental commercial panorama (remembered or still seen) that accompanies us all wherever we go – and from which we can’t escape.

Summer on the Lorne

Summer Group Show
Antoinette Godkin
2 December 2009 – 31 January 2010

Nine artists connected to the Antoinette Godkin gallery present old and new work to be perused over the Christmas holidays. No prints or photography, mainly abstract paintings and drawing.

While the Godkin regulars here do provide excellent contributions, there are few surprises. Andre Hemer has a characteristic predominantly yellow and red canvas laden with vigorous computer-stored gestures and negative slashes, while Miranda Parkes has one of her large, striped, voluminous canvases - plus two small paintings with glued on paint fragments. Though they have been shown before, Esther Leigh has some superbly elegant milky/pink works of translucent film and ink on reflective mirror.

The startling revelations (for me) come from paintings, such as the predominantly blue, shimmering abstraction by Sue Novell, based on a landscape photograph processed digitally. It generates open abstract forms packed with wiggling wormlike strokes. These teeming pockets of energy seem connected to Pat Hanly’s ‘Molecular’ paintings of the seventies inspired by Blake, Huxley and lysergic acid.

Andy Tolhurst has two wonderfully pristine vinyl ‘paintings’ as well, crisp geometric compositions related to Matt Mulligan or Peter Halley. One is based on a squashed Lion Beer label found on the footpath. Its red, grey, black, white and yellow colours have been applied to a squared-off Gordon Walters-like ‘koru’ structure with the panel’s vertical proportions divided into thirds and then sixths. The other work is an elegant arrangement of carefully selected squared signs taken off Japanese noodle packets and placed onto a silvery field.

James R. Ford presents four mono-coloured rectangular jigsaws, under glass with thick black frames. They use colour from colour printing (demonstrating what is termed ‘subtractive’ for the mixing of absorbed light) to reference the three primaries (cyan, magenta and yellow) and the result of their mixing (black). There is a strange humour implied by the interlocking jigsaw pieces because these separate colour units would work only by juxtaposition. This would inevitably result in grey (not the commonly expected secondary hues that come from overlaying and transparency). Perversely, the proportions are those of landscape painting (a different principle again from mixing light ['additive' from reflected colour] and printing with separated primaries).

Ford’s use of jigsaw modules has links with the drawings of Carol Fletcher who repeats tracings of details from discarded wrappers or her own drawings, to construct gridded rectangles with rows of repeated units. These she covers with liquid wax.

Whilst there is a certain droll humour in making faint pencil drawings out of rubbish, that reference industrial mechanization and artists like Warhol, the stacked images seem too understated to me, and not obsessive enough. They need to be more extreme, to be in their thousands, not just under a hundred.

Matthew Dowman makes more convincing works with tone rather than colour in my view, especially with his complicated swirling nets of stencilled and airbrushed black and white lines, overlaid with toothbrush-flicked fine mists. They create considerable impact with their different points of density and clashing directional alignments; so that whilst almost chaotic, they still retain order and invite mental immersion.

Helen Calder’s painting/sculpture of a peeled-off, blue, acrylic/enamel hide hanging off a short rail doesn’t have the impact of the works in her recent City Art Rooms show. The pleasure found in her painting is in the striated, pitted textures of the surface and its edges, so when that skin is repeatedly folded over those chances for scrutiny disappear. A wide fleece then becomes a narrow towel or floppy shower mat in a hotel bathroom, and while such humour about painting’s social after-effects might be intended, I suspect not. The ambiguous, possibly utilitarian function of the portable and very rubbery ‘painta-derm’ in an architectural setting is not really anticipated as a question.

Images of works by Andre Hemer, Sue Novell, Andy Tolhurst (2), Matthew Dowman (2), and Helen Calder alongside James R.Ford. In descending order.

Philately rollercoaster

Lianne Edwards: 2nd nature
Antoinette Godkin
3 November - 29 November 2009

Lianne Edwards is known for her meticulously assembled, floating grids of repeated used-stamp sections, hovering in mid air like the paper birds or butterflies she takes them from. Her practice has lots of similarities to Peter Madden’s except he uses magazine pages not stamps, likes to create sculpture with real depth, and fabricates even denser clusters of imagery. He is not interested in rigorously gridded order like Edwards with her shallow space, being more prone to chaotic forms motivated by global eco-politics.

Using Madden as a foil for discussion is useful because it makes us more aware of Edwards’ attraction to old used stamps, and what they contribute. Their colour for example, in conjunction with the white behind them, is delicate and restrained. Dark tones are rare – unlike say photos in magazines.

Edwards seems to be moving away from rectangular formations, and exploring other varieties of collage composition. Often she creates linear looping, figure-of-eight formations, or spirals or vortices. Each time with one motif relentlessly repeated obsessively.

Though the artist comes from a family of philately enthusiasts, it could be argued that she is a vandal cutting out sections of so many identical images - for the sake of Art. Yet in her variety of regimented organisation Edwards is moving the fauna of these stamps towards an interesting purpose, especially when inventing new compositional formats. In her art the stamps work best when they create a new counter-image that dominates over the initial tiny document. It transcends the material’s original context.

Some of these ‘stamp fields’ also create optical after-images, strange patterns of shape edge that materialise and then disappear in conjunction with the bright gallery light on the walls behind them. The white walls tend also to bleach the saturated stamp colour. The works operate as a form of op art.

Edwards I think is one of those artists who works by tinkering with an object or item, playing with it as a raw material (singly or in groups) to see what imaginative possibilities turn up; by mentally locking onto an item (perhaps by fetishising it by severing it from its function) and analysing its properties to discover new forms or meanings. Most artists in fact do it. They don’t start off with an idea or concept, they start by exploring a material or substance to see where it leads them.

Edwards’ challenge is to move away from the easily identifiable stamp grid, and to introduce further wit, like Michel Tuffery did a few years ago with his yellow bull made from corned beef cans. To let the newly created form take over to give the recycled raw material new life.

Recent Drummond

Andrew Drummond: About Rising and Falling
Antoinette Godkin
2 September - 3 October, 2009

This exhibition by ecologically motivated, seventies performance artist and sculptor Andrew Drummond, features a suite of drawings, some wall sculptures of gilded, balanced poplar branches, and a freestanding kinetic sculpture.

The latter, the slowly turning flowerlike About Rising and Falling - related to Len Lye’s Fountain with its turning, splayed out rod-petals - has an illuminated golden ball moving up and down a glass tube that is its stem. It is the key work here, striking with its allusions to the sun and to forms like plants or feathers, though its similarity to a fibre-optics table lamp is unfortunate.

Drummond’s airbrushed, gilded and pencil drawings on paper of geometric landforms have an austere architectural drama that grows on you, especially with the flashes of reflected light on the gold, silver and copper planar surfaces. They are slick, and vaguely fifties illustrative, yet the grey crystalline geometry on a pristine open plain draws you in, like a children’s sci-fi animation fantasy.

The wall reliefs allude to the delicate vulnerability of gold leaf in their sensitivity to wall vibrations and currents of air, for they are poplar branches tremulously balanced on steel fulcrums. Seemingly simple, these quivering gilded limbs allude to divining rods, feelers, spindly fingers and finials – warning devices that can help save us.

These understated works are Drummond at his very best. They are restrained yet loaded with poetic significance. Worth a trip to Lorne St to see.

A 'story'...

André Hemer: The real bad painter and the story of everything in real time
Antoinette Godkin
8 July - 1 August 2009

Flush irony down the dunny and listen: André Hemer is not usually a ‘real bad painter’; he normally is a very good one. But this is a dreadful installation. No doubt about it.

The reasons are formal. The visual dynamic of parallel striped lines placed on a large wall (the optical rush they create) kills any paintings hung there – even if some reflexively refer to their own installation. They are impossible to look at with such a backdrop. It creates nausea.

Hemer nevertheless has some good works here: those that are round or oval and without any parallel lines. You can enjoy the pool of masked painted or negative shapes that he likes to repeat: the slashing stroke lines or flicked on masked drips. The way the different complicated elements all interweave and lock in together. Hemer is very good at that – at making painted objects that intrigue.

His awful hang reminds me of Judy Millar’s first installation in a New Gallery show curated by Robert Leonard. Some of the massive paintings were the best works she has ever made, but the installation - with the partially painted walls behind them – was appalling. However for her the show was part of a learning process of how to jump from making discrete paintings to making installations that lash out at architecture. There was a logic that gradually came to reveal itself – even though she still straddles both sensibilities. But she got a lot better at subverting interior space.

Maybe this exhibition is transitional for Hemer. That he is heading in a particular direction, searching for an as yet unarticulated discovery. As his title says: a story to be unfolded in real time.

Godkin on Lorne

Four artists
Antoinette Godkin, Level 1, 28 Lorne St.
3 June - 4 July 2009

Antoinette Godkin, in her comparatively exhibiting new space in Lorne St, presents four slightly disparate artists: Ana Horomia, Sue Novell, Esther Leigh and David Morrison.

Ana Horomia’s work is positioned in a corner near the entrance to the gallery. Hundreds of identical Vinyl lozenges (rectangles with curved corners) are arranged in two bands that descend to meet in the central crease. Each band is five lozenges thick and though they are white on the outside, they are painted in four types of fluorescent colour underneath. Each unit is held in space by a Perspex stem so that the tinted lolly colour glows on the white wall, to be seen only indirectly, reflected.

I am not sure about the inverted v-formation in the corner. It seems too understated, and might work better as a block with horizontal bands in the middle of a whole wall. It lacks impact that is memorable.

Sue Novell shows four canvases. Two have thinly painted coloured organic shapes evenly positioned throughout on white fields. They look vaguely landscapey. A third is of fragmented lines and dots - and is more interesting because it is not so regular but denser nearer the top right-hand side. It has a dynamic that creates an intriguing visual tension. Novell’s fourth work mixes line with translucent blobby shape. The interwoven formations have a complexity that holds your interest.

Esther Leigh is the most experienced artist here by far, and it shows. Her Glade and Wade images of papier maché forms and feather boas photographed through sand-blasted glass are remarkably evocative, suggesting underwater ruins or foggy cliff-forms. There are also 2003 works where she is using mirror paint and red ink with repeated layers of cut-through film matt to create abstract pink doorways floating in a beautiful milky haze.

Leigh knows how to make haunting images by controlling light on reflected surface. David Morrison’s square oil paintings have similar concerns and are more minimal compositionally, but somehow the surfaces and scale seem inappropriate. The modulated tones and muted colours end up looking very ordinary. The problem is oil paint is too coarse a medium for his interests. Photographic digital techniques might be more successful.

Overall this is not a memorable show, though Leigh is the star with work that carries on from what she exhibited at Roger Williams a couple of years ago. Her Glade and Wade images are well worth a trip down to Lorne Street.