New Viewings #27

Ian Whittlesea’s work is driven by a renegotiation of modernist and esoteric histories, especially those which propose possibilities of embodied transformation.

From devoting five years to become a black belt in judo in order to better understand Yves Klein’s practice to exploring the Mazdaznan breathing and movement exercises that Johannes Itten taught at the Bauhaus.

Two paintings from the ‘White Cloud Forming’ series might seem as material enactments of such disciplines, almost to the point of the paintings’ disappearance into the white of their own making.

In 2017-18, Caitlin Yardley undertook a research project in the house Alvar Aalto designed for French gallerist, Louis Carré.

Painstakingly researching eighteen paintings which formed one installation amidst a constant flow of paintings in and out of the house (in a particularly well-documented moment in 1962), she remade her own versions of the works according to the scale of the originals and installed them back where the ‘originals’ once had been located.

Caitlin’s versions involved sewing quilts pieced out of non-reflective, black goat leather. She calls them ‘quilts’, but here they function in painting’s absence:

“I think it is really important that I’m not making new paintings within the frame of works in the original collection. I’m more interested in acknowledging them as objects in the world; objects with a specific material surface.”

Marcus Cope’s paintings begin with memories or images of memories (which aren’t the same thing), preserved and detached through photographs or stories, and reworked at some remove from the original source or location.

As if a singular, often uneventful, encounter needed to be worked out through painting. And sometimes that working out can’t help repeating, transposing, as motif from one painting or context to another.

But there’s much more at work in the making of the painting itself. Layers of making send the image further away from the viewer, or pull it forward. Where are you looking? What do you need to unsee in order to gain an image? What materially obstructs or enhances your view? At some level there’s a push pull between figuration and abstraction always at work, within explicitly, albeit ambiguous, narrative paintings.

If sensuality forms a large part of the subject matter explored in Susie Green’s work, so the mediums in which she works reflect a sensual relationship to materials. Highly liquid paints are absorbed into the surface an erotics of making, for example, where the making is as seductive as the iconography explored.

Subject matter and handling become one. And in turn the imagery can be turned into repeated forms, motifs or patterns. This process of reworking takes the image away from source material, while retaining the charge of that point of origin.