http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-02-02/pop-goes-the-art-market/
Wednesday 4 February 2009
Sunday 4 January 2009
DAVID WEBB - Painter, UK
El Fuerteoil on canvas
40 x 40cm
2005
Grey Irisoil on board
36.5 x 30cm
2006
DAVID WEBB
New Paintings
Somewhere in Cahiers d’Art Braque comments that the only thing that matters about a painting is that which cannot be put into words. What Braque is saying is that a good painting by-passes verbalisation, operates entirely through the eyes, between painter and observer. A painting may be recognised or identified long before it is literally understood.
It is arguable also, that what matters as well is what persists in the observer’s mind once the looking is over, the nutritive power that the memory of a painting may have.
A painter worth his salt takes risks. The risks that David Webb takes in his work are those of non-confrontational, apparent simplicity, of quiet subtlety of colour and facture allied to a lean pictorial formality. Yet these natural-looking paintings repay a long and hard look. There is nothing here of proficient bravura or the esprit of the immediately optical, as of a clever conjuring trick. Instead, what in other hands could be merely dumb or tasteful, here become visual statements which both defy easy analysis and yet which stay in the mind.
Close inspection shows that these images are hard-won. A barely detectable, remote red can glimmer through a charcoal with just enough facture to keep the surface alive. Webb has an enviable feel for the way paint behaves. In Suez, for example, an essentially conventional landscape-type composition is given life entirely through the interplay of greeny-greys, near-earth sepias, and just sufficiently brushy mark-making. Without in any way being melancholic, these paintings are subdued yet affirmative. Slow-burners, if you like, their apparent softness is often built round a steely sense of scale.
The old figurative versus non-representational debate is yesterday’s argument and Webb moves easily around in this territory. What unifies this air-filled opus is an instinctive feel for natural light without in any sense being depictive of the particular. Even at their least referential, whatever the image, the work is grounded in a felt reality.
It may well be the case that in the society of which we are a part, it is no longer desirable, or even possible, to try to tell other people anything of much importance. The day of the proselytizing ‘genius’ is over and a latter-day Wagner, for example, would have no place in 2009. All that is necessary is for the artist to be (Braque: “With age, art and life become one”) rather than to seek attention by performing (Picasso often?). Webb, ambitious, totally professional and highly focussed as he is, in being uncompromisingly himself, exactly fits the bill as a painter of our time.
Cuillin Bantock
January, 2009
http://www.aptstudios.org/artists/DW/index.html
Tuesday 9 December 2008
David Tycho Press Release
Petley Jones Gallery
2235 Granville St. Vancouver B.C. V6H 3G1
Tel: 604-732-5353
Fax: 604-732-5669
PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Jennifer Johnson
Office: 604-732-5353
ART DEALERS BUCK TREND AND EXHIBIT ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM
Vancouver B.C., October 1, 2008--Art dealers Matt Petley Jones and Jennifer Johnson have gone against their fellow Vancouver art dealers’ longstanding aversion to abstract expressionist painting and will exhibit the works of prodigal Vancouver artist David Tycho.
“We don’t show it because we can’t sell it,” most private dealers claim. Johnson disagrees. “They don’t show it because they think Vancouverites aren’t sophisticated enough to handle this kind of edgy work. I don’t buy that. Good work is good work, and Vancouver will recognize that.”
The art dealers explain that Tycho had stopped exhibiting in Vancouver, and looked abroad for a more receptive audience. The artist has since exhibited in Geneva, Brussels, Seattle, Los Angeles and Manila, and his work is now collected worldwide.
Barabara MacAdam, deputy editor of ARTnews magazine identifies a trend. “Abstract painting has remained important in Europe, has gained popularity in Asia, and is undergoing a resurgence in New York. (It) is in the midst of a revival, flaunting its brilliant past as it reconfigures itself for the future…The resurgence could in part be a response to contemporary life—to globalization and the desire for a universal language.” Watch out Vancouver—abstract expressionism is at your back door.
The Petley Jones Gallery focuses on contemporary and historical Canadian, American and European art. Tycho’s exhibition, based on the dynamism of the Fraser and Columbia rivers, runs from October 23 to November 13. For further information, contact Matt Petley Jones or Jennifer Johnson at 604-732-5353.
###
AGAINST THE GRAIN
“Going into the studio, I could wish that, after all these years, I had a system or fail-safe mechanism that would allow me to execute daily portions of work in a finite and cumulative manner. However … I am always glad that I do not have this safety-net, though I am slow and timid without it.” (Marilyn Hallam 1998)
At a time when the visual arts can seem dominated by populism and the cult of personality, it is startling to find an artist talking about her work with such naked honesty. This determined rejection of a reliance on habituation or a repertoire of manners, is likewise true of the work itself. One consequence is that each painting comes as a surprise, each with its own resolution of convincing pictorial identity. Another is that, despite Hallam’s doubts, the continuity which unifies this oeuvre has the strength of a steel cable, marked by a series of works of impressive conviction.
Hallam’s choice of subject matter is conservative, even pointedly commonplace: views through a window, interiors, still life, people by the sea. However, there is nothing conservative or commonplace about the treatment. In 1994 I wrote of this work: “ … treated here without a trace of that secondhand softness that sometimes tries to pass for the Bonnardesque … (the paintings are) tough and put together with a cool lightness of hand which conceals the lucid pictorial intelligence which has gone into their making.” What I had not taken wholly on board at that time is the highly evolved artifice involved in these complex works. Despite being figurative, or ‘depictive’ as Hallam prefers, these are not naturalistic paintings. Every component is subject to the demands made by considerations of scale, surface flatness, edge and design, the literal facture and objective truths of what a painting actually is.
Oil paint is marvellous. Luscious even before you start, it is tempting for a painter at once to give way to the siren seductiveness of the stuff itself. Hallam eschews this obvious route. The paint is used quite sparingly, the palette is high-key, the chroma exploratory, and the gaze considered. The actual touch of the paint on the surface is both exact and steady. As a result, this painter can integrate pinks, reds, ochres and violets which in other hands could be self-indulgently over-heated, or just plain fussy. Instead, we are aware of a cool astringency informing the entire picture-plane and which lifts the overall image to a new and discursive level of ‘representation’.
The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch once made the point that the best art “offers an objective vision of the world and that what matters is not its individuality but its impersonality, this being the best guide we have to the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Thereby it can both humble and edify”. The commonplace, quotidian subject matter in these paintings is without drama. Any drama in Hallam’s work is of consciousness and is to be found in the handling, as if the painter were momentarily shocked to find herself alive.
Cuillin Bantock
Director
SE1 Gallery, London
http://www.se1gallery.com/November, 2008
Saturday 6 December 2008
Visual or Literal? Art can’t be both...
Painting and sculpture have become highly evolved and elevated disciplines dealing with certain powerful areas of the human imagination, and we should not abandon them to contemporary trivia or fashion and especially not to the current vogue for an art of weakly-constructed figurative fantasy. It is in the structured substance of painting and sculpture that their ability to timelessly communicate resides, rather than in subject matter or indeed the often superficial and contingent intentions of the artist. We must continue to recognise the higher achievements of these disciplines as being closer to our own enduring condition of physicality than they are to any manifestation of shallow contemporary aesthetics.
Robin Greenwood
Visual or Literal? Art can’t be both...
How do you judge the Turner Prize? What are the criteria, and do they relate to previous art history? Can we compare one work to another, or to the rest of the art in the Tate, or to the paintings in the National Gallery?
I suspect the answer to the last question is, no, we can’t, because the work in the Turner Prize is mostly literal, and the work in the National Gallery is mostly visual. The criteria by which we judge the work in the National Gallery are for the most part based upon the success or otherwise of the visual structures of the paintings, about which we can endeavour to some degree to be objective. I presume that the criteria by which the Turner Prize works are judged are more subjective, based upon personal feelings generated by the literal content of the work. The visual and the literal can and do exist together in most art, in varying degrees, but as one increases the other diminishes. In the work in the current Turner Prize batch, the visual is almost entirely missing, the literal is totally dominant.
The work in the Turner Prize and most contemporary art in the galleries takes its precedents in literalism from the revolution in art that happened in the second half of the 20th Century. In the Sixties artists rapidly expanded their claims for the physical and intellectual territory that sculpture occupied. This was a different claim from that made by Duchamp’s ready-mades earlier in the Century. This new claim was more profound, being not just a claim for literal objects as art, but a claim for infinite literal space as sculptural space. This presented a huge freedom; acute, beneficial and extraordinary in prospect, it has yet to be in any great part explored; and because of the confusion between what is sculptural and what is simply literal, it came with a downside. The term ‘sculpture’ became a catch-all tag for just about any art activity in real time and space - save for traditional painting - from digging a hole in the ground to going for a walk in the landscape. Artists wanted to explore fully the ‘condition’ of this new spatial context, but for the most part only had literal means at their disposal to do so. So, no sooner had abstract sculpture differentiated the whole discipline from any link with the past, particularly from its previous dire confusion with statuary, than we immediately attained a new and perhaps worse state of misunderstanding, between the sculptural and the literal. The consequences of this have allowed for much if not all of the dumb literalism of contemporary art. Sculpture has pitched itself headlong into the real world, and now it has no idea at all what it is and what distinguishes it from anything else in the world. Many would say that nothing does distinguish it, and that nor should it. Differentiating sculpture from other objects in the world now seems to be thought of as an elitist practice.
This merging of art and literalism in the case of very great art can plainly be seen to be neither good nor true; the finest painting and sculpture are very special and distinguished objects indeed. It is true that just occasionally one encounters art of such overwhelming and apparently artless greatness that it seems closer to life than to art, but such works (like, say Titian’s ‘Diana and Acteon’ currently on show at the National Gallery) have gone the full circle to get there. In the case of most art, the separation from the literal is reasonably distinct. In sculpture, for example, most objects in the world are not built to encompass the extreme conditions of total three-dimensionality which the scrutiny of being a sculpture ought really to require it to fulfil. This failure to be fully and profoundly three-dimensional in a visual sense is true not only of most objects which are casually now labelled sculpture, but also of the best furniture, or complex and beautiful machinery, or 3-D design. It requires exquisitely difficult thought and practise to enable the visual and the fully three-dimensional to co-exist. Most contemporary artists are not going to bother trying to untangle the confusion between sculptural and literal three-dimensionality. It is much too exciting whilst it remains a confusion; too difficult and obscure to unravel; and containing as it does a seductive opportunity to benefit from the ensuing perplexity and mystification, it is seen as an advantage to their art. Whilst the freedoms won for sculpture in the Sixties were real, the popular belief that the literalists and conceptualists have been able to fully utilise and develop such freedoms needs testing to the full. These freedoms require embedding in strong visual form for them to be of proper value as content, and therefore extend meaning. They are potent values that weak form cannot contain; nor can illustration, nuance, mild sensibilities, good taste, literalism or conceptualism. Complexity, uncertainty, and difficulty come with these freedoms, and they are not to be addressed by simplistic notions about ‘issues’ in literal or conceptual art. The truly radical and liberating thing for sculpture to do now would be to begin to unravel the confusion of sculptural and literal three-dimensionality.
Visual structure in art exists as distinct from, and only distantly related to, the literal structures known by the terms of the engineer. It is certainly not quantifiable in the way that actual structural engineering is, yet it determines how we feel, often subconsciously, about a lot of what we see, from art through to design and architecture – including engineering itself. It is why, for example, the Clifton suspension bridge looks so strong and 'structural' and the Millennium Bridge can look by comparison so limp, even though both are structurally feasible in literal terms (the best engineers, of course, will make their structures visible and lucid as best they are able). In our visual terms, 'structural' becomes a qualitative value relating to the most basic responses to arrangements of visual form. More importantly still, visual structure implies more than just aesthetics, encompassing as it does a necessary sense of principle and purpose. So that the good-looking advert or car or film, despite being available for qualitative visual assessment, does not possess visual structure to anything like the degree or depth of a painted masterpiece by Rembrandt or Poussin or one of Degas’s best sculptures, wherein every part contributes to the visual activity of the whole, without redundancy. Painting and sculpture at their best have something unique to offer, which you can't get from any other art form, and you can't get from design of any kind, including even architecture – which gets nearest - and you certainly can't get from conceptual art. This special thing to painting and sculpture is in greater part the resolution without compromise of vast formal and spatial complexities, synthesised into believable and purposeful new visual matrixes. If this is done in such a way as to make the decisions taken during the progressive creation of the art properly available to the eye - one of the reasons Cézanne succeeds so often is his ability to achieve this ‘openness’ of thought and action - then an intelligent and emotive ‘communication’ may be achieved which no other visual media, such as photography, graphic design, even film, can get close to. What is more, such communication operates upon areas of human responsiveness that no other art form can aspire to affect. Painting and sculpture have become highly evolved and elevated disciplines dealing with certain powerful areas of the human imagination, and we should not abandon them to contemporary trivia or fashion and especially not to the current vogue for an art of weakly-constructed figurative fantasy. It is in the structured substance of painting and sculpture that their ability to timelessly communicate resides, rather than in subject matter or indeed the often superficial and contingent intentions of the artist. We must continue to recognise the higher achievements of these disciplines as being closer to our own enduring condition of physicality than they are to any manifestation of shallow contemporary aesthetics.
Robin Greenwood
Poussin Gallery
London, UK
December 2008
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