BETWEEN THE POSSIBLE AND THE REAL 4 British Abstract Painters Jon Thompson, Ben Ravenscroft, Andrew Graves, Andrew Bick
Jon Thompson
For many years, Thompson has been profoundly affected by the written and recorded work of the great Canadian pianist and theorist, Glenn Gould. He draws many parallels between Gould’s approach and his own or, more precisely, Gould’s understanding of musical expression and his own understanding of the business of painting.
Gould’s idea of repetition through translation – the building of an imaginal entity capable of taking passage from the inside to the outside followed by the translation of mental ‘stuff’, ‘the music itself’, into a perceivable form, is not one unfamiliar to painters… Colour, mood, atmosphere, sense of place are all factors which come to exist in my mind’s eye in an utterly compelling and extremely precise form.
Colour, mood, atmosphere, sense of place – these are the flesh, blood and bones of Thompson’s remarkable paintings.
There is a very real sense in which the great pianist recomposes the work as he plays it. And you can hear the tension that must exist between the pianist as composer and the pianist as performer – the maker and the listener – at work, stretching phrases to breaking point, making breathless the silences, delaying and sometimes thickening, deepening and drawing out sounds as he strives to ‘resurrect’ the work into new meaning; strives to match the continuum which is playing endlessly in his mind: ‘the music itself’. Precisely the same kind of things occur in the act of making a painting except that in the case of painting, each action and each judgment is made against the presumption of a final simultaneity; ‘the thing itself’.’
Extract from an article by Sam Sherman, writer and artist based in London:
About the earliest paintings in the show, The Toronto Cycle (inspired by the pianist Glenn Gould who lived in Toronto) subtitled ‘The Beach’, Thompson says: “I have tried to get Gould’s skittish sense of distribution into the new paintings by using two proportionally related grids, one oriented vertically and the other horizontally, as a way of controlling the distribution of the two different patterns of coloured ‘holes’ They are absolutely not ‘spots’ My ‘holes’ have an entirely different relationship to the ground—the very opposite of the figure field relationship that occurs with spots—they have no easily describable spatial location—they are not simply ‘in front of the ground.’”
The most recent paintings in the show are paintings in the form of a ‘zigzag’ or an uneven, serrated line pattern that could be read as repeating as our eyes move down the canvas. But Thompson seems to denature or mutate the repetition, as if he were allowing the unevenness of his thinking or structuring to take hold in the paintings’ forms. Thompson quotes: (Glenn Gould in conversation with Jonathan Cott, 1974) “By analyzing these two segments from Opus 219 one could determine that Beethoven was playing with absent roots... roots that were not actually sounded but which produced an absolute mathematical correspondence... Drawing on the teaching of Sechter... one could have a certain cluster [of notes] and there would be one absent from it that was the key to its function as a cluster, the key to where it was going and the point from which it had come.”
The painting Toronto Cycle #10, has a subtitle, Absent Roots and consists of three colours: two stripes or waves painted on a ground that also forms a thin frame of colour around the edge of the work. The absent root, however, is the fourth colour, which flickers between the two hard-edge bands of colour—it is an optical effect. These could be construed to be an Op Art pattern, as if one were staring at the isometric design of some wonky staircase. The “design” is graphic, Op and Pop. It is loud and glaring, but on observation, subtle in its gradually shifting logic. Note that Thompson is not striving for a Vasarely-type effect; however, this optical quality or absent root is a key component of what he is seeking. The absent root could also be an allusion to a kind of visual intelligence, rather than a conceptual one. The graphic and “loud” quality of this group of paintings perhaps overshadows and distracts us from the subtlety that the work advocates. This painting from the “Absent Root” group, has an additional permutation: folds. One fold, two folds, three folds—these are trompe l’oeil disruptions in the pattern, but also I feel another kind of disruption to the thinking or logic of the visual structure. It is still a flat painting with a seemingly hard-edge pattern, but disrupted, as if a fragment of the same pattern were laid over it; they could be folds in time, they are certainly folds in logic, but they are not matter-of-fact, as in Stella’s “what you see is what you see.” Rather, Thompson’s thinking, I believe, allows an element of time to enter and thus contradicts the presentness of this hard-edge language.
The painting, subtitled ‘Northern Lights’, offers another kind of change: in addition to the shifting or mutating pattern, the colours gradually shift chroma or hue as they move down the canvas. Perhaps a hint of the flickering aurora borealis? Or a reference to the novel by Philip Pullman? With Gould as a muse, Thompson’s graphic abstraction is not quite about seeing what you get. There is, as he says, a sense of place, perhaps time, and, of course, abstraction’s language.
Jon Thompson (born 1936) is an artist, curator and academic known for his involvement in the development of the so called YBA artist generation. Thompson was instrumental in changing the way the art school system in the UK worked. He opened up the departments at Goldsmiths College in London and allowed students to move freely between the different specialisms, such as painting, sculpture, photography and printing etc. This separated Goldsmiths from the dominance of art schools like St Martins. In 1988 he was involved in the curation of the now legendary Freeze warehouse exhibition. Jon Thompson has also been head of the MA Fine Art course at Middlesex University's School of Art (previously Hornsey College of Art). He has curated major exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery and the Whitechapel in London.
Jon Thompson lives and works in the U.K.
Ben Ravenscroft
Ben Ravenscroft was born in 1971, in East Sussex and lives and works in London
Statement
My paintings are reactions, searches, responses and expressions. My paintings often have a structural dimension. The most important part of my painting is the ground. The ground contains the nutrients for the growth of the painting. The ground is either rich in nutrients at the outset or I enrich it before starting work. Robert Ryman has been a big influence on me in this respect. I like drawings. A work in black and white contains all the colours there are in the world twice. In the light reflected by the white and held by the black. A simple drawing has all this before it even has a subject. I am not trying to find order in chaos. The drawings in the paintings deflect the paintings from seeking easy comfort in geometry whilst helping the composition cleave to the ground. I like a lot of different paintings. I never have a composition in mind. If I built a house it would not look like one of my paintings in the way that Mondrians’ did. I like Morandi’s etchings better than his paintings. (Until I see a really good painting). Many of Turners sparest watercolours are better than some of his most worked paintings. I try to resist style but I like it when I can refine my practice. I’m uneasy with words like ‘practice’. I would like to be sure about a lot of things but I’ve got a questioning way of thinking that makes that difficult. But it does help with painting. I like working. I often like my work to have porous boarders (edges) sitting close to the wall. Although a frame can be a good thing. Particularly in a house. But you’ve got to be careful. Being careful is not always good advice. I am resistant to process being the identity of the work. That said, every painting has one. Like I said. I like Robert Ryman. I used to live in the country. The tension of missing it gives me creative energy. Each new painting feels like moving to a new environment and working out how to live there. I like vernacular architecture over architectural style. I sometimes think I would like to paint landscapes but I don’t think they could tell the whole story. I did once do a drawing of a pile of wood and I was very happy with that. I put a high value on creative force, expressiveness and rigour in art, even if it is subjective. I do not think of my paintings as constructions. Constructivism implies an ideology, metaphor or manifesto for social organisation. A rigidity of dogma that cannot cope in real time but instils a false sense of security at the outset. Diminishing there after. I don’t want to preach with my work. I would rather give if that doesn’t sound too pious. I don’t think abstraction is a movement any more. It is another way of working. Richter shows this to be the case. If you have a problem with abstraction then you have other problems too. I used to have those problems. I overcame them. For a long time I didn’t like Elsworth Kelly’s work. I do now. I like that I might change my mind about other artists. Everyone is being forced to re-establish their relationship with technology and the natural world. It’s interesting to see how that works out. For me there is a metaphorical relationship between the making of art and how we find solutions to current problems. I get a strong sense of this issue when I look at the work of Wolfgang Tillmans. Pop art feels much more dated than expressionism to me. But maybe that was inevitable. I like Andy Warhol. A lot of artists seem to let themselves down later in their careers. I really don’t want to do that. I like Alex Katz too. "Some of the best paintings happened in five minutes. So do some of the worst." Someone else said that. Sometimes I wish that all my work was the same affordable price so that anyone buying one could just buy the one they wanted most, rather than the one they could afford. I don’t know if that would work. Maybe they would always just choose the biggest.
Andrew Graves
°1967 Rochford, United Kingdom. Andrew Graves lives and works in London. He studied for his BA at Kingston University and his MA at Middlesex University in 2005. Solo shows include: the-solo-project 2008, Basel, Switzerland; ‘All Falls Down’ & ‘Most Things Worked Out’ at Galerie Kusseneers, Antwerp; ’24 Hours’ Galerie Gana-Beauborg, Paris. He was in Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2005) and ‘Wandering Star’ with Mark Wallinger, Muzi Quawson, Jon Thompson, Sam Porrit and others, curated by Jeremy Akerman at Gana Gallery, Seoul, South Korea (2006). In 2009 he was selected for ‘Jerwood Contemporary Painters’, at The Jerwood Space, London and completed an Artists Residency at Gana Gallery, Seoul, South Korea.
Andrew Graves makes paintings that sit at the edge of what is recognisable, yet at the moment when revelation seems imminent they shift and blur. They contain a promise that at some point, soon, their nature will become clear, their meaning unfolded.
What dictates their forms? Perhaps the imagery is somehow pre-selected by the materials of each paintings construction. Chalk gesso boards produce a surface that seem to both absorb and reflect light, and when its flat surface is stained and rubbed with colour it seems to produce a paradoxical plane which offers both flatness and depth.
Yet they are not exercises in virtuosity, each work uses only the minimal technique to bring them towards an idea, each form employed receives only the most rudimentary definition. His work seems to be produced with an urgency that allows no time for pause, the simple elements on the surface are produced and then left to pursue their own hermetic interrelationships, the painter denied any more part save as a passionate spectator.
At what point does something become a painting, what decisions make someone a painter? Rather than becoming en-mired in the supposed limitations that end-game theories attach to the practice Andrew Graves seems to celebrate the possibility of promise that constructions of painting contain.
Andrew Bick
Andrew Bick was born in 1963 in Coleford, Gloucestershire, UK. He lives and works in London.
Bick received his BA in painting at the University of Reading and his MA from the Chelsea School of Art in London.
Bick has shown extensively in Europe and the US. His work is included in numerous collections; such as the British Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Simmons & Simmons, and many others.
Bick’s multi-layered paintings use various shapes in free and geometric abstraction. His paintings are executed in a combination of oil paint, marker pen, wax, acrylic paint and perspex and play with opposites such as transparency and opaqueness, depth and surface, line and plane, colour and non-colour, glossy and matt surfaces.
Statement
On the painting: The painting that I have been making for the last four years has been increasingly concerned with adjustments and revisions that come out of its own repeated but dysfunctional systems. They are built out of sequences of pencil, watercolour, acrylic paint, oil paint, marker pen and encaustic on wood panels, canvas and Plexiglas, as well as compounds of these materials in some cases. All works start with a plan, re-processing inevitably follows, as a sort of engrained doubt in the looking-after-making. If works were left in the studio, this process would never exactly stop with any painting, making the role of the gallery and collector somehow vital in arresting the process [even if temporarily]. The continual wager on what cannot be completed is the justification for the frequent elegance of the images generated; they are balancing, as gracefully as possible, until the next active moment of doubt.
On abstraction now: The alert viewer engages in a sensual and mental unravelling of the sequences and codes built up through the material combinations of the finished artwork. To describe this process as “reading” and the work of art as a “text” is a disservice, t
