press release
This exhibition presents a snapshot of New British Painting.
Introducing a young generation of artists, the exhibition celebrates
contemporary painting through the current practice of their
work. Many of the works have not been exhibited before, and
some have been made especially for this exhibition.
Marta Marcé, inspired by board
games and geometrical structures, creates colourful abstract
images. Katie Pratt will produce some
new work for this exhibition, illustrating the sumptuous textural
surfaces for which she is well known. The depth of Danny
Rolph‘s work is achieved by layering sheets
of industrial plastic roofing. By painting on the front and
back of successive layers, his bold shapes and images are made
more complex by the resulting real space relationships. Hans
Scheirl (originally a filmmaker) will show a site-specific
installation commissioned by the John Hansard Gallery. The careful
installation of objects and the painting of a gallery room’s
walls will provide the backdrop for the creation of the bright,
schematic imagery. Clare Woods paints
on aluminium, using the techniques of gestural abstract expressionism,
thereby exploring lush textural surfaces.
This exhibition has been curated and organised by the John
Hansard Gallery. It is the first of two parts, each featuring
five artists, which will run consecutively. Part
II runs from 17 February – 7 April 2004.
A publication including artists from both exhibitions will
be published during March 2004.
artist's interview
Bernadette Buckley: Andrea, thank you for
agreeing to do this interview for the JHG. Perhaps we could
just start by your telling me something about the works that
you’re submitting to New British Painting II. Can you
tell me how they came to fruition?
Andrea Medjesi-Jones: OK. I guess it was from
the idea of animation, if you like, of cartoons which is kind
of an ongoing obsession with me. I started to think ‘How
would something that’s a moving image translate into still…to
still cameras?’ I tried to envisage almost a dead space
of animation where cuts happen…where you don’t see
the action. It’s very much to do with timing, to do with
motion if you like…that’s where the major influence
comes from I guess….trying to take something that is mobile,
that’s in action, that’s live, and put it into something
that is very still. But most of the time, I try to make that
leap of imagination…try to imagine the image going places,
moving.
BB: That makes a lot of sense actually, because
the paintings do seem to be suspended between these [motion
and stillness]. The images aren’t frozen as such –
they look like they might move. They’re not moving but
they just might move any second. And that’s kind of interesting
– that sense of some kind of suspended movement, rather
than of ‘actual’ movement.
AMJ: I guess it’s also about the idea
of possibility. Life is so unpredictable but yet at the same
time possible – the likelihood is always there…maybe
it will, maybe it won’t. Going back to the cartoons and
the way they’re drawn…there is something wonderful
about it – about how something that is very graphic can
all of a sudden obtain life and have that sort of spirit about
it. Critically as well, I think this is a good point, say when
it comes to the difference between figurative painting and something
more abstracted. These paintings just sit on the fence between
both. I thought it might be interesting to pursue and play with
that and see where it takes me to.
BB: Yes they’re on the interim between
abstraction and figuration – to use that old cliché
which we can now dispense with – but also you could say
that they were between Minimalism and Conceptualism as well.
But there’s also something about the ambiguity of space
in the paintings, which reminds me a little of early Renaissance
paintings – something by da Messina say, or Filippo Lippi
– where there’s a figure in the centre of an open
architectural structure and you can see into several spaces
at once. There’s that sense of shallow and of deep space
at the same time.
AMJ: I always conceptualise it to myself as
being like a composition. I like to take this quite literally…almost
to associate it with music – with the flow that you have
to created in the painting. There are spaces hat either clash
or network and create extra space and it’s the inevitability
of that that I love about painting. Unless you stand right in
front of the painting, you never know whether it works or not.
And it’s a really nice analogy – comparing the work
with Renaissance painting because you know that that works and
you can ask ‘how do I borrow from this? How do move on
from this to move somewhere else, to create my own language?’
BB: Your paintings have that same sense of
near-illusion as well don’t they? Of an impossible space
that cannot occur but at the same time, that you kind of believe
in while you’re looking at the painting. You could say
it was something that Escher created in his work too perhaps…when
you look at the image, you can see how all the parts fit together
logically, but how impossible they are at the same time. Richard
Hamilton does it in some of his paintings of hotel lobby spaces
too. Could you perhaps say something about that ‘illusionistic’
effect in your work?
AMJ: I think it’s very much to do with
perception. I’ve tried to do some work on this and really
look into it. I think that perception can be like illusion and
I’m very much interested in where one stops and the other
begins – as far as our eyes are concerned. It’s
as though something’s being accomplished on the inside
with the imagination. You know it doesn’t exist but it
all depends on what kind of space we’re talking about.
I think all this is very much open to exploration. I guess that’s
one of the aspects of my work – thinking about that space
possibly between the conceptual and the emotional possibly.
BB: Yes, there that sense that you’re
punning on the word ‘space’. Because there are the
images of ‘outer space’ (sci-fi or futuristic scenes)
of course, but there’s also the fact that as a viewer
you’re thrown back into your own ‘space’ to
try to make sense of those images…into an inner space
of reflection. And the images seem to converge somewhere between
those two spaces. Is that a plausible reading?
AMJ: Oh very much so. ‘Outer space’
is something that we can only just imagine. Its really interesting
at the moment, seeing all the satellite images from Mars but
I’m kind of disappointed in a way too. You know, that’s
not how I see it. I still want to have that space inside my
head. I guess that’s where interpretation of space lies
– not necessarily what is out there as knowledge, but
what’s not there, what’s foreign, unknown and open
to exploration I guess.
BB: Because the paintings depict a projection
of space – I mean in terms of the kind of ‘space’
that crops up in science fiction anyway– that reminds
you of childhood strangely. Perhaps because the images are futuristic
but retro at the same time. Even the colours are very much the
colours of 1950s magazines. There’s something quaint about
them – you feel slightly nostalgic when you look at them.
It seems like a contradiction in terms of course, when you’re
talking about the future or a projection of the future, because
you’re ‘nostalgic’ for something that hasn’t
happened yet.
AMJ: I think you’ve put the right word
in the right place. Nostalgia is something I’d very much
like to address in the work. And to me, not having been there
in the 50s but having seen the images and the writings of the
period – you get a sense of the overt optimism of the
period. It was when space exploration began and it’s amazing
what that brought to people – that huge sense of optimism
and a world of fantasy as well. What’s it going to be
like? How are we going to fit as a human race within all of
this? I find all of that really interesting. So I like to play
on that – use it as an idea, if you like. In contemporary
times, we’ve gone the opposite way completely –
we’ve become too knowing, not to say cynical…
BB: …which again puts us in an interesting
space because it’s a childlike vision in some ways. It’s
a vision of the future but it’s a Flintstones future.
AMJ: It’s a clumsy future…naïve…
BB: …yes naïve but jolly also and,
as you say, optimistic. I mean for example in the paintings
behind me, we have the molecular models floating about but we
also have those amoeba-like shapes. Those shapes crop up quite
a bit in your work. Could you say something about those?
AMJ: Yes…and going back to what we were
saying earlier about cartoons…I always think, what does
one paint? As a painter I always have to think about the ways
and the objects and the shapes – the elements that are
going to best describe a certain vision. So I guess those elements
started appearing properly in my work about 2-3 years ago –
almost as a replacement for something – for language,
for words, for the figurative. Put into a painting, these are
elements that repeat themselves. It’s almost to contradict
the idea of inspiration. They remain the same. I like to put
them in the flow of the painting.
BB: There is something bubble-like about them
– they’re in the process of changing from one shape
into another. They’re not completely still because there’s
a sense of them floating. They seem to be, not frozen, but floating
so imperceptibly that you can’t see them move.
AMJ: Yes
BB: In our talk at the John Hansard Gallery
last night, Gerard Hemsworth made a reference to the moon landing
too – as being one of those absolutely crucial historical
moments – a moment in which we both lost something and
also at the same time, gained something. It sounds as though
you’re going a little way down those lines as well.
AMJ: Yes it’s an amazing thing. For
me, the first step on the moon was narrated to me. I only know
it through images. I couldn’t pick up on the optimism
of that time. I think that Gerard is quite right to say that
there is always something lost in transition from one time to
another. I’m very much interested in those spaces of loss.
You can never put your finger on it but I think that loss is
something to do with the nature of time – which can always
bring its own interpretation to things. It tends to mix things
up a little bit.
BB: That’s interesting because we often
think about painting in terms of pictorial space and the ambiguity
of pictorial space. But to think about painting in terms of
questions of time is perhaps something we’re less accustomed
to doing. Yet these paintings are trying to convey a sense of
moving through time as well as space.
AMJ: I guess I’m almost using them
as metaphors for – exactly as you say – that sort
of unbound that you can’t put a limit on. I’m very
much against that thought that you ought to present time in
terms of limits of past and future. That leads to a notion of
time that has a linear progression and I don’t really
think it’s like that. I can’t, from a personal point
of view, conceptualise even the period of the 50s and the 60s.
To different generations the 60s means different things. I feel
as though I can dip into the 50s and can take the things that
I like. Someone else might not agree with my interpretation
at all but I do hope that I leave enough food for thought. That
my work doesn’t keep you stuck to one period in particular.
BB: Again, it used to be said of painting,
that it was ‘timeless’ or that a really good painting
was ‘timeless’. But your work is not saying this,
and deliberately plays about with the way that our vision is
so often fixed in a particular time.
AMJ: And also to break out into snippets of
time and possibly create a longer span. I think if anything,
I look at painting as a process. It might sound like a cliché
and it’s certainly been over-said, but to me, painting
is precisely like this – not only in terms of its making
its own technicality, but also in the way that you think about
painting as well – the desire to move from one canvas
to another and to create that sense of space and sense of time.
To me that is the essence of painting.
BB: And what is it that excites you about
that sense of space and time that you’re creating by painting?
AMJ: Not knowing it! In spite of the fact
that you always try to come at a painting from some source of
knowledge, there’s always the hope that this time, you
will do something completely different that will set off a completely
different set of rules. I think it’s fantastic. You have
to challenge your own rules.
BB: What are your rules then?
AMJ: [Laughs] I have no rules.
BB: Well painting is a process that is bound
by its own limits – its own kinds of rules…
AMJ: It is, yes absolutely. I’m contradicting
myself. I’m just trying to break out and think of painting
as unlimited. But with painting, you’ve always got a space
of a frame that you have to work within. I used to think of
it as limitless. Now I think of it as ‘that’s your
space – that’s what you got given’. I can
control it. I can decide not to control it. I tend to work towards
a certain balance that again refers back to music. Maybe it’s
a tonal thing. Maybe something that connects on one level and
on other levels, it goes off in a completely different direction.
I’d say that balance is one of the things that I try to
achieve.
BB: In formal terms, who would you see as
being particularly important to you?
AMJ: Gerard Hemsworth and his painting was
a huge inspiration to me. And Patrick Caulfield. I love his
work and I’ve always enjoyed it. But I tend to also not
necessarily just look at paintings – I tend to look at
advertising, photographs, and cartoons which I mentioned already,
also film – to see how effective those things can be when
trying to describe a particular movement or motion. I’d
say Kubrick has been fantastically influential as well. So it’s
a wide language I think, that I try to pull into the work.
BB: I get the sense in speaking to many younger
painters that painting these days is a very much larger and
more expanded field than perhaps it was thought to be. It’s
not limited to, shall we say, painting in ‘itself’.
It’s free to draw on a variety of different languages.
Your work clearly draws on lots of these different languages
and this gives it a fluidity, a mellifluousness which is interesting
to watch.
AMJ: Possibly this is a sign of the times
that we are living in. Everything is mixed and matched and cropped
and chopped in order to make something completely different.
I think that there’s something wonderful about this, but
I also think that there are elements that also do remain the
same. And its good to have those too and to use them.
BB: And I suppose that the question that comes
out of this though – and I apologise for having to ask
it – but the question that comes out of this is why paint?
Because there are all of these other fantastic forms and technologies
– high resolution imaging techniques which graphic design
uses for example. But you don’t work at this end of things
– you don’t create the world of Lara Croft do you?
Why for you, is painting the best technology to render the future
in?
AMJ: I ask myself the same question every
day and I don’t think I’ll give you an answer that
will satisfy you – I can’t give it to myself! But
it’s a drive. It’s a form of language that I think
is unavoidable. To me, it’s primal, it’s visual.
In comparison with all the new techniques that we’ve got,
and that we use – and again referring back to Gerard –
things are lost in transition, in translation and I find in
painting. You can’t document painting. You have to produce
painting. You have to make it. So I think that’s one essential
part of why I use painting. It’s that layering that I
enjoy – that sense of putting one thing on top of another.
BB: I’m interested in that word that
you used earlier – ‘primal’. Why ‘primal’?
AMJ: Well I’m kind of thinking of the
stone age and all the paintings and drawings done then. It’s
a kind of instinct that comes at a certain time that is why
I think of it as primal. Because it’s natural to almost
visualise the things you can’t say. And I think it works
very differently with language and other technologies. They
can’t compete and that’s why. Video, photography,
they all have wonderful qualities and are wonderfully used.
Personally I think that painting works best with my own inspirations
and my own desires.
BB: Sometimes the word ‘primal’
is used in an attempt to evoke some kind of notion of universal
experience. Is that what’s going on here?
AMJ: Could be… That word [universal]
can be very dangerous though – particularly given the
times that we live in. This is something which I really don’t
know how to tackle yet. I don’t know if this makes sense
but I don’t think that you can in a way. I think also
that opinions are very subjective. To one person, what’s
been said and done means one thing and to another, it can mean
something completely different.
BB: But there is the sense about your work…and
you’re not trying to make big grand statements or conjure
a utopia as such…but there is the sense that you are dipping
into a space which is free or free-ish (not completely free,
just freeish) of some of the normal cultural associations. I
mean it’s a projection of the future, not of the present,
and even and granted, we’ve already alluded to the 50s
and 60s here, so it does have a sense of its being in time,
even so, we don’t in this work, look into a culturally
specific space do we? It’s not a Croatian outer space
or an Irish one…
AMJ: [Laughs]That is a difficult question
as well. It’s not a question of how you open these issues,
these borders up. I personally don’t see it and I supposed
that’s why I present it like that in the work. Because
it really doesn’t matter. It’s people. We all put
our own limits at the end, of the day. I think that’s
how it has to be seen. Also you mention that it isn’t
utopian and it’s true. I don’t have grand ideas
as to what human communications should be or where they should
go, but there is a certain aspiration there and I’m not
going to move away from that. I guess if anything, it’s
the aspiration that becomes the work.
BB: This might also, a little bit, be the
aspiration of pattern-making would you say? You know in the
way that pattern and decoration is often talked about in terms
of its being a universal language and there does seem to be
that joy or celebration of the decorative in your work as well.
AMJ: Yes I like to play on that in the work
also – particularly when it comes to colours. I like to
see what the best effect that can be used is; to see how –
in the shapes and the elements that fit together – they
can be described in colour really. So I guess that there is
something repetitive, but very much present in the work and
something I enjoy.
BB: Of course, we’ve already talked
about the 50s and 60s, but we could run into the 70s too and
say that there’s something of that era there too –
those acid greens are very 70s – the colour of psychedelic
prints in clothing for example?
AMJ: You could ask ‘Has there ever been
a colour that hasn’t been presented in a painting or in
the world? There are certainly colours that we can’t see.
Again just a kind of food for thought. You always try to come
up with some colour combinations which either will have a certain
language that’s already been used or something slightly
more idiosyncratic. I see it as a kind of play – something
I like to explore that I like to find. It’d be fantastic
to think of a colour combination that has a life of its own.
BB: Is there such a thing as a pure visual
language?
AMJ: On no, no absolutely not.
BB: Of course, that was one of the question
that dogged the tradition of painting for a long time –
particularly in the 60s and early 70s …whether or not
there was a purely visual experience. But this does seem now
to be something that has been thrown overboard now. Though again,
at the talk at the John Hansard Gallery last night ( with Gerard
Hemsworth and Andrew Renton), there was some talk about the
physical effect – the sensation of colours bouncing off
the retina. But its interesting to hear you make a strong statement
that there definitely isn’t a purely visual language.
AMJ: I personally don’t believe in anything
that associated with pure vision. Even blinking, if you think
about it, is vision interrupted. To associate the work with
something that static, goes against my understanding of it.
And, going back to what I said earlier, some things are accomplished
with the mind. We create memory and that is possibly why I think
that that sensation (and you’re very right to used that
word) is something that is a combination of the world of the
outside and the inside – rather than just a product.
BB: Could you call this a kind of memory of
the future…or a memory of an idea of the future?
AMJ: That’s a fantastic way of putting
it. I find personally that when we start to think about memory,
any kind of event or memory you might have had and when you
try to recapture it, it’s so different. The way it happens
is so different from the way you remember it. The way you think
of it happening is through sensation – through the way
that you feel and think, and the space that you work within
which encapsulates that memory rather than what really takes
place, which is always questionable.
BB: David Hockney talks about the difference
between being in the presence of the painting itself and seeing
a reproductions of painting. He says that while a little bit
of the magic rubs off say in a postcard representation of the
painting, that not all of it does. This seems to be a nice way
to think about the difference between painting and reproductions
of painting. But how do you feel about that…having drawn
so much as you have, on reproductive technologies before returning
to a medium which is associated with, I suppose, a sense of
originality…or the experience of painting as being a kind
of ‘original’ experience (if not of its having its
origin in originality)? How do you feel for example about seeing
your own work reproduced?
AMJ: Do you mean reproduced by itself on canvas
or…?
BB: Either. Perhaps you could talk about that
and then say something about reproduction of the work for example
in exhibition catalogues etc. For you, what does the shift between
original and reproduction imply?
AMJ: I think this is a very good word –
‘origin’ – that can be interpreted in many
different ways. Elements from different origins become altogether
different when taken in different combinations. They become
a different ‘original’ altogether. I think it’s
a very good thing that these elements can shift, stretch, take
on different meanings in a different language. But when it comes
to reproduction of paintings into photos etc,I think Hockney
is very right – they are completely different experiences.
Painting is an object as opposed to a flat representation, but
we have to deal with it I guess. The good thing is that the
flat image is always represented with thoughts and language
which comes with it. Whereas in the painting, it is the ‘visual
language’ which is strongest.
BB: I want to talk a little about the friendliness
of the work. Could you tell me why you have moved from making
images which are very unfriendly to ones which are friendly.
What’s that shift all about?
AMJ: Very good question. That was part of
the working process for me. There are certain realisations that
you make about the work and about the world you live in. It’s
so saturated with violence and negativity. But I don’t
think this ought to allow us to just copy that violence back
into the work. I felt a few years back that what should have
may be been a negative projection of an image had gone full
circle into its ‘positive’ or friendlier version.
BB: Do you think that this is something that
painting is almost uniquely placed to do? Younger painters seem
to be talking in very optimistic terms about this particular
moment of painting. It’s almost as if they see in painting,
an opportunity for people to experience some form of uplift.
AMJ: Absolutely. Uplift is a very nice word
for it, in that it speaks of a reinforcement of something that
is very dear and nice. And why not? Why does everything always
have to be so gloomy and dark? But there are aspects of my work
that go towards the darker side too. So I think it’s the
balance between the two – it’s a combination.
BB: And in terms of the ‘positive’
and the ‘negative’, (beyond the friendly and the
unfriendly), these are literally there in the work too, that
is, there are positive and negative spaces depicted such that
it does seem that that psychological context has a kind of literal
working out on the plane of the picture.
AMJ: Yes they offset each other. I think that’s
very much true. As I said, the balancing of experiences, visions
and perceptions in my mind, this is something I’d like
to move more towards. Because this is yet another kind of space
that opens up, yet another layer that can be looked at and interpreted.
BB: Thank you very much indeed Andrea.
