In celebrating the notion of both an idea and a chosen medium transcending itself, L’Entrée des Groites, 2010, is a work that seems to perfectly encapsulate this aspiration. A monochrome postcard of three men outside the entrance of a cave has been overlaid in part by a deep red acrylic paint. For the artist this work, as a consequence of its appropriation, has the power to be simultaneously sculptural, filmic and painterly. Other works appear to take their lead from this approach to making. Large-scale floor based paper works operate like spacial drawings with fine lines of thread, glass spheres and foam balls accentuating gestures that allude to both landscape and human forms. These works play with an aesthetic that again challenges the viewer to consider inherent material qualities and their subversion.
The Everything of Nothingness, 2010, is a work that takes this investigation further. A small grey table, suitable to accomadate only two people, plays host to two postcards of seemingly anonymous rooms. The rooms, filled with neatly arranged tables and chairs, are somehow and in some way reminisent of the films of Bergman or Hitchcock; they are expectant, void of human presence, but waiting nonetheless for a seminal scence to be composed or imagined. A sheet of glass covers the cards and on top of this, small foam balls appear to plot different points within the rooms, simutaneously alluding to some sort of game or challenge. From a work that appears at first to be severely reduced, what is apparent on further reflection are the themes and complexities that infiltrate all of the artist's recent pieces. An opposition is at play and complicit conflicts are always present transforming the aloof and intangible into something mysterious yet strangely familiar.
Simon Le Ruez
Lives Sheffield (UK) and Berlin (Germany)
Sheffield
United Kingdom
Europe
