GAVIN NOLAN
Mise en Abyme
Private View
Thursday May 16th
6.30-8.30pm
Exhibition
Dates
Friday May 17th
– Saturday June 22nd 2013
Gallery Hours
Wednesday–Saturday 11am–6pm or by appointment
Points
of Departure | Sue Hubbard
In the
spring of 1945 the French artist Jean Dubuffet wrote of painting in his Notes
for the Well-Lettered that: “The point of departure is the surface one is
to bring alive… and the first stroke of colour or ink that one lays on it; the
resulting effect, the resulting adventure. It is this stroke, the degree to
which one enriches it and gives it direction, that shapes the work. A painting
is not built like a house…but rather facing away from the end result; gropings, going backwards!...And, you,
painter, look to your palettes and rags,
strokes of colour, patches and lines, that’s where you’ll find the keys you’re
looking for.”
The collapse
of faith in the conventional motifs and forms of art that had been unable to
prevent the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust left sceptical
artists with few places to go by the middle of last century. Such was
Dubuffet’s response to the failures and protocols of culture that had failed to
prevent a European blood-bath that he turned towards the primitive and
unschooled. Graffiti, the art of
children and the insane were seen to speak with unmediated authenticity and
stand in contrast to what was considered civilised in a world of post-war
angst. Within the avant-garde the artist’s expressive concerns were central.
The artist as shaman and hero became one of the central constructs of
modernism.
But for the
postmodernist painter such a position is no longer tenable. The artist as
outsider and tragic hero is a script that has long been played out. Gavin Nolan’s current exhibition Mise en
Abyme is permeated by a sense of nostalgia and irony. Nostalgia for the
loss of the possibility of direct expression, and a self-reflexive irony, which
acknowledges that for the contemporary painter an interest in the expressive
quality of paint is seen as a retro cliché.
With their nervy impasto and febrile mark making his paintings ask what
now counts as authenticity in a world of surface and simulacra, when the death
of painting has been debated ad nauseum? What role is still open to the
contemporary painter?
By
projecting himself into his artistic archetypes, with their borrowed signifiers
such as Joseph Beuys’s hat or Jay Joplin’s glasses, these paintings act as
mirrors, conduits between artist and viewer where Nolan is both subject and
maker, audience and object. The unmasking of the unconscious process of creativity
is emphasised in his works where the outer layers of the face have been peeled
back to reveal the armature of skull beneath. Not only do these invoke ideas of
mortality, as expressed within vanitas paintings, but they suggest the
subterranean world of the id - one full of anxiety, narcissism and self-doubt -
which lurks behind the public face of the artist. Two fists tattooed with the
dual words PAIN and TING pugilistically punch through the picture surface to
assault the viewer with the single word PAINTING. Both a challenge and a
rallying cry, it is a provocative gesture. In Private View, the artist
is depicted nude, apart from a black leather jacket. The mask-like face
suggests the public persona that such an event requires, whilst the level of anxiety
at being caught naked as the Emperor with no clothes, clings like a noxious
smell to the canvas. This duality of
artist as both vulnerable and exhibitionist is highlighted by the mythic feel
of the painting and its expressive volatile brushwork.
So who are
such paintings, where viewer and artist coalesce, for? The truth is that an
artist largely sets about creating his own audience. In facing the canvas he
chooses not only to face himself but to create an ethical and aesthetic
dialogue that is the prerequisite of all interesting art. The relationship a viewer strikes up with a
painting is about a decision to give an artist time, to engage and take him
seriously. The author, Flint Schier, in his essay, Painting after Art? composed as a commentary on Richard
Wollheim’s concept of What the Spectator Sees , argues that “what gives
value to the wide assortment of artistic projects is that some community of
artists in fact genuinely cared about them and tried to make others care too…
to appreciate them we must step into the perspective of the artists who took
them seriously…”
The role of
the contemporary painter is to make work that is the focus of attention and see
to it that the viewer’s experience of giving that attention is worthwhile. To this end a painting must pose questions in
the mind of the viewer. In these energetic diaristic works Nolan re-affirms
painting as a continuing quest: one that is both self-reflexive and universal.
Sue Hubbard is a freelance art critic,
award-winning poet and novelist. Her latest novel, Girl in White, is published
by Cinnamon Press and her new poetry collection The Forgetting and Remembering
of Air by Salt publishing. This coincides with a collaborative exhibition with
the artist Rachel Howard, Over the Rainbow at Elevenspitalfields.
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| Gavin Nolan The Crash, 2013 Oil on board 122x92cm |
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