Painting: Pulled, Stretched, Revealed

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‘Painting: Pulled, Stretched, Revealed’ presents three artists who push beyond the traditional limits of painting by manipulating the canvas, delving beyond the image and exploring the processes of the medium. Alexis Harding’s technique of pulling different chemical compositions of paint across each other emphasizes the physicality of paint. Abandoning the reliance on image, Jan Maarten Voskuil stretches and contorts the canvas through uniquely constructed configurations creating works that undermine the supposed perfection of geometric abstraction. Simon Callery reveals the internal body of the canvas to create experiential paintings that invite the viewer to actively explore all dimensions of the work. Following generations of artists before them, from those who drew attention to the materiality of two dimensional work to those who went beyond the conventional limits of painting, the three artists exhibiting at Sumarria Lunn Gallery investigate painting as a process, its guises and paint itself as a substance.

Sumarria Lunn Gallery

36 South Molton Lane

Mayfair 

London W1K 5AB

The exhibition runs from 25 October to 23 November.

Alexis Harding

Alexis Harding creates emotive abstract compositions by pouring household gloss paint onto a canvas previously covered with oil paint. The pouring action is speedy and spontaneous as he guides the movement of the gloss paint. The drying process takes several months, resulting in unpredictable compositions dictated by gravity and the chemical reactions of the paint. This allows for a period of instability in which a skin forms and the top layer is free to slide across the layer below. Harding is able to manipulate these movements through tilting, shaking, even physically grabbing at the work before the paint is fully dry. The comparison emerges of the artist as a director in the cinematic sense. “In the studio I go to enormous lengths to animate the movement of a painting and stop this movement, freeze it at a specific moment in relation to the idea of each piece, make it static within an implied continued movement.” The surface of the finished work appears to sag, drip, crumple and rupture; viscous movement is caught in perpetual suspension. The wrinkles and sagging patches that form on the canvases explicitly reference bodies and the processes they undergo with the passage of time. In some cases, the skin of the painting falls entirely off the support and spills onto the floor. In these site-specific installations which are as much about time and movement as abstraction, paint becomes sculptural and defies the limits of its medium.

Simon Callery

Simon Callery creates large scale paintings informed by contact with archaeological sites around the Thames estuary which consist of circular shaped canvases cut open to reveal the interior body of the work. These are not literal mappings of trenches, pits and boundaries, but works which seek to produce a physical experience equivalent to that undergone on site. ‘I understand the excavation site as an entirely sculptural environment’. The paintings are pared down to their simplest form and contain only wood, fabric and earth-based pigments of greens, reds, rusts and  crimsons which are produced through a process of the repeated staining and washing of the canvas. Callery wants viewers to explore the inner workings of his paintings, to look inside and behind them in order to create a multi-dimensional experience. He says:

There are all kinds of ways in which paintings are presented that I sometimes find much more interesting than what is actually depicted on the front surface. For example, there is no reason why painting cannot express physicality as its prime means of communicating rather than the image. There are different ways of responding to painting. It has never been just about picture making.

Jan Maarten Voskuil

Jan Marteen Voskuil’s ‘paintings’ are about everything that a painting usually is not: sculpture, design, architecture and installation. Constructing his own stretcher frames, he manipulates the wood into organic curves and geometric shapes, before stretching linen over the forms. His uniquely constructed configurations expand, quite literally, the grounds of what can count as a painting, while the curved surfaces of his works confound any stable distinction between two and three dimensions. ‘As a naturalistic painter many years ago I used to state that I wanted to prove the world was flat instead of round. Now I state that painting is round instead of flat and of course nobody agrees.’ These minimalist canvases emphasize the formal aspects of colour, size and deformation, whilst embodying dynamism and sensuality.