Modern Love

Simon Oldfield Gallery presents Modern Love.

Since the advent of Conceptual Art in the 1960s, many of today’s contemporary artists have experienced a love-hate relationship with art historical definitions of Modernity.

Estranged by the Post-Modernist ‘death’ of the author (or artist) in the 1980s, and beyond the critical strategies of 1990s Appropriation, the possibility of visual discovery has undergone a thorough, theoretical interrogation. Modern Love brings together 12 contemporary positions by artists with a shared interest in the achievement of Modernism to inextricably blend visual form with conceptual content. Paintings, sculpture and digitally rendered images will be exhibited by the cross-generational artists in the show, underlining the ongoing development of art practice, as well as the dialogue between the past and the present.

Notes about the Exhibitors

Chris Baker makes optimistic paintings, with a mild-mannered approach to the history of art. Without resorting to pastiche, their nervous lines and muted colours recall a range of ‘Modern Masters’ – but without the bombastic ego. In Baker’s paintings, pleasure is always under pressure.

Nicola Carvell uses obsolescent computer graphics programs to create layered hybrid imagery, plundering the current preoccupation with the design aesthetic of the 1980s. Executed in clashing combinations of pastel colours and acid-bright neons, her bold digital cut-outs also recall the work of high Modernist artists such as Frank Stella.

Emma Biggs & Matthew Collings collaborate in the production of their paintings; activities are shared and suitable arrangements are made to suit them both. The surfaces of the paintings are articulated by subtle shifts in colour, tone and deft handling of the paint. Biggs & Collings seek to ‘expose the historical fragments of ideas that underlie the way all of us see’.

Matt Franks investigates the legacy of Modernist, formal sculpture through a contemporary repertoire of synthetic materials including plastics, resin and styrofoam, coupled with mass-produced pop-detritus. Quantum Yield employs a black monochromatic plinth, in its self an icon of modernity, as well as a nod towards Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but in this work, a resting place for three neon-coloured stripes, with a characterful playfulness.

Richard Kirwan employs the mathematical clarity of geometry, alongside a limited palette of saturated colours. Masquerading as unnervingly precise, these hard-edged compositions reveal their hand-made qualities, hovering between construction and collapse. Dark Fire juxtaposes an almost baroque form, composed with repetitive ‘sprite’ motifs, against a ground of strict vertical stripes.

Andrea Medjesi-Jones makes drawings and paintings that ultimately privilege the various techniques and processes inherent in their making – accreted layers of ink, paint and graphite build up the surface of the work into precarious, fragile and explosive compositions. Medjesi-Jones acknowledges a personalised ‘prism of time and memory’ but also gathers information from the incoherence of the visual world.

Daniel Sturgis’ recent work employs smooth, geometric shapes and chequered conflations in such a way as to suggest micro-macro Romantic landscapes, although these associations are never fully confirmed, as conventional pictorial devices are altered through a variety of pictorial crops and divisions. The gently skewed elements of the painting inspire the viewer to visually re-arrange the composition and to consider it’s diagrammatic implications.

Neal Tait‘s creates painterly works on canvas and paper that engage with the complex relationship between the psychological interpretation of the visual and physical world. Seen in this way, Tait’s work shares an interest in surrealism, but perhaps more explicitly with the psychoanalytical experimentation of modernist artists such as Henri Michaux or Andre Breton, whose fluttering mark making haunts Tait’s images.

Jonathan Trayte is concerned with still life as sculpture – teetering stacks of fecund melons and phallic gourds are cast in bronze and then painted. Their lurid, synthetic colours are far removed from nutritious goodness, creating a friction between notions of desire and appetite. Trayte’s sculpture flirts with domestic scale decorative ornamentation, but their visual exuberance exceeds such mundane association.

Roy Voss works across most visual media; but for Modern Love he returns to drawing, with tender renditions of scarecrow figures executed in pencil. These melancholic identities have all but disappeared from the contemporary agricultural landscape, but recall a time between the two world wars of the twentieth century, when Modernity flourished. These exquisite corpses rely on a variety of sources, hand-me-downs and jumble sale bargains to create a whole, echoing Modernity’s similarly eclectic heritage.

Daniel Wallis manipulates found materials and ready-made objects into beguiling sculptural works that play with notions of proportion and balance. In this way, Wallis’ work, with its intricate sense of touch, recalls the work of modernist Constructivism, albeit contaminated by a sense of the contemporary world, evident in the domestic source materials used to make the work.

John Wilkins’ recent paintings are preceded by an ‘accident’. Spills of acrylic glaze are laid down upon on the canvas, and, once dried, the artist decides whether the ground is suitable. If not, the process is repeated, again and again. Floating over this surface, a carefully rendered stencil drawing depicts a variety of motifs, suggesting hotdogs, bald heads and bulging eyeballs. Wilkins’ paintings are perfectly perverse – reflecting his interest in the absurdist interests of modernist painters such as Philip Guston and Roy Lichtenstein.

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