Text by Ian Boutell for exhibition at Cottage of Modern Art, Brighton - Oct/Nov 2022
Portal 1 by Rupert Hartley is displayed the CoMA way, singly as per the inspiration of Mondrians single painting in Winifred Nicholsons Cumbrian cottage.
I’ve always liked the loose freshness of Rupert’s work. Liquid limpidity is an alliteration that fits perfectly. The grids are also loose and relaxed, edges soft, and usually colour muted and whitened.
Liking a work is one thing but why?
My first reason is that, at first sight, it is different to my own.
We have talked a couple of times about our works and processes. On the last occasion Rupert talked of using up the materials he already had on his Outro series of paintings. Many are currently en route to New York where he has been invited to show. I think it’s too early to say whether that series has ended but I know that he is doing a lot of work on unframed materials, all ground with minimal support.
Ground can have two meanings in the context of art and architecture.
One as foundation, the second as a way to exploit new ways of thinking, in this latter case “formlessness that the will must overcome” to quote from John Rajchman, the writer, philosopher, critic.
These ideas are in a text by John Rajchman (Constructions, MIT Press 1998) which he begins quoting from Heinrich Wolffin (ref 1886). Heinrich sees this struggle against formlessness as the origin of regularity, symmetry, proportion and harmony.
The outcomes not dissimilar to the oft quoted “ firmness , commodity, and delight” from Sir Henry Wotton of 1624, or further back to Vitruvius’s 1st BC De Architectura, but Wolffin importantly introduced the idea of a process towards this outcome. Nothing, or formlessness, to something.
But we know that that something is never the last thing, there is always more.
For me art is always most interesting when it operates in paradoxes, when it makes visual thoughts not things.
Here Rupert works in that seam, the colour fleshy a grid forming but not yet formed, indeed it may not complete that transformation and find a different course forever retaining, quoting Rajchman “The potential or forces in things to be shown or released.”
That’s so much more satisfying than a finality.
Ian Boutell
Text by Ian Boutell for exhibition at Cottage of Modern Art, Brighton - Feb 2021
Living with ‘Shore’ these past two weeks in CoMA and seeing some of the comments to the first post it is clear that abstract painting is not to everyone's taste.
This isn't a new discovery! How many times have I been asked ‘What is it?’
Whilst walking around Lewes I saw a fly-poster of text on newsprint which said, (see photo 2) ‘You understand nothing about art particularly modern art if you do not understand that imagination is value in itself.’
A different question to ask instead of ‘What is it?’ might be ‘What does it do?’
That question could be asked of any art of any epoch
However, in answer to my own question; it should test your imagination; it should make you think. Some of those thoughts may be of reminiscence, memories of people and places and past times and if it does that it is doing its job, but what if it leads to thoughts that you had not previously had and to things you have not seen before. That is the direction that I want art to take me.
This painting by Rupert Hartley is such a vehicle, it is travelling forward towards new ideas, but they are now the viewers imaginations; which in turn creates new thoughts; new ideas, connecting the future with the past
I knew exactly where the Rupert had seen these colours and Emma’s poem confirmed the location by its clues of blue plaques’ Melba, strings of pearls and waves. Waves to appreciative audiences; waves to the shore.
Coincidentally having earlier in the week found the flyposting on a Lewes wall, I came upon this W G Sebald extract from ‘The Rings of Saturn’ apposite for these Pandemic times. While this extract was referencing Southwold in Suffolk, the black veil in Ruperts Brighton based painting brought my imagination immediately back to the morbidity of our times.
‘As I sat there in Southwold overlooking the German Ocean, I sensed a quite clearly the earth's slow turning into the dark. The huntsmen are up in America, wrote Thomas Browne in the Garden of Cyrus and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. The shadow of the night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if leveled by the scythe of Saturn – an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.’[5]
Sebald, W.G. (1997). The Rings of Saturn. New Directions. pp. 78–79. ISBN 978-0811214131.
But just as quickly I realised that this was not what Ruperts painting was about. It's true that this is what our current covid times are, but reality had affected my original imaginings
The sun is not setting in this painting as it was in the Sebald extract, if indeed there is a sun at all in Ruperts painting, nor are its five yellows, the yellows of jaundice, sickness, sadness, of a pandemic scything across the globe. But this is what imagination can do, taking you on wild chariot rides prompted by just one clue.
Music and food. More clues from Emma’s poem.
Nellie Melba, the Australian opera singer stayed in Brighton in Edwardian flats now near neighbours to Marrocco’s the ice-cream parlour and restaurant. When we first came to Brighton, we frequently had ice-cream there, but don’t recall ever having a Peach Melba, the dessert that Auguste Escoffier created in Paris in honour of Nellie Melba.
Sussex’s more recent dessert success, also yellowish is Banoffee Pie from a few miles away at Jevington, but this is a distraction, imagination wandering again.
Yellow. These yellows are not sombre, it was the dark veil that initially set in train those earlier thoughts.
Kassia St Clair in her excellent ‘The Secret Lives OF Colour’ writes of yellows sinfulness, of the brightest yellows being sources of contamination, for indeed two early yellows, orpiment and gamboge were highly poisonous. Despite this toxicity these were sometimes used medicinally in very small doses. Of ‘The Yellow Book’, (1894), famous for the work of Aubrey Beardsley, another Brighton artist, a contemporary journalist wrote ‘it was newness in excelsis; novelty naked and unashamed . . . yellow became the colour of the hour’.
Oscar Wilde, who had argued with Beardsley, thought that ‘The Yellow Book’ was not yellow enough!
There are five yellow tones in ‘Shore’. Are they yellow enough? In the sense of sin and controversy maybe not; the tones are muted by white which changes their power. There is a homeopathic medicine metaphor. The poisonous highly toxic Orpiment yellow, or similar, is moderated to something useful, health-restorative, beneficent.
Dame Nellie Melba may not have been as ‘yellow’ as Wilde or Beardsley, but the appreciation and waves of audiences, now echoing daily on the shingle beach are precisely the warm yellows of this painting.
Ian Boutell
28 February 2021
The armchair on the beach
Text by James Bohm for exhibition:
On some faraway beach at The Back Room Gallery, Copeland Park, Peckham 2021
As Matisse once remarked, there was not one of his paintings he would not redo differently if given the chance, 'but the destination remains the same'. In other words, all his paintings wish to travel to the same place, but by the sounds of it, never fully arrive at their destination, always coming short, for if one painting had arrived, would he have ever painted again? Or to read it slightly differently, if each painting does arrive at its destination, is this enough? Why would he keep going if this destination did not fail in some way to live up to expectations?
But what of this destination itself? Can we name it? Or give it an image?
Matisse writes what famously becomes a much quoted, often derided metaphor for painting: the good armchair. Providing much needed relaxation from physical fatigue, so his paintings have ambitions of working analogously for the businessman. The armchair as paintings destination.
But we have the issue of what kind of experience is to be had at this destination. What are Matisse's demands for this? Merely a comfort zone? If the armchair works on the body, this body is held, suspended and given over to the optical domain, which provokes the problem of the nature of this visual pleasure for Matisse’s businessman. What does it offer him? We know it works to de-stress the mind, its harmony and balance a resolution of conflict; a restitution of the spectator through line, shape and colour. But this comfort zone, is it a tranquilized fog that descends upon space and time, smothering the contradictions of high-capitalist modernity into an undifferentiated screen of relaxation, or what later gets the term 'visual muzak'?; or is it an intensification of beauty, colour, relation; where life is affirmed as a multitude of forces coming together, in becoming, before form is instrumentalised, rationalised and given a name, an identity, a science?
The former holds the promise of least disturbance, as David Byrne sang, 'the band in Heaven play my favourite song, play it once again, play it all night long'. A promise of a 'place where nothing ever happens'. The latter holds the promise of maximal activity of the senses, a heightening of energy rather than sedation.
The faraway beach holds these two sides of the same destination also. Maybe it's both a Robinsonade and a packaged holiday. Perhaps the paintings evoke both destinations yet disclose neither; the destination ever present but always deferred. We could see each painting as a new attempt to depart somewhere. Each painting sent off like a cardboard boat towards its destination, each articulating a new question or proposition: its marks, its directions, its means of travel, its indecisions, its bad decisions becoming good, it's good decisions leading into cul-de-sacs. Each speculating on what their destination will be. Conversely maybe the successful ones – the ones that make it – the ones that don't litter the studio floor are the ones that have come back from somewhere, with stories to tell, insights to be had, weather beaten from all the effort or glowing from not doing too much, and like returning from some beyond place, 'sounds great an' all but you really had to have been there to understand right?' All we have left is an image, a painting, that can always be redone: the destination the same but always off the map.
And maybe this is the best place not to be. That the last thing we'd want is to actually to arrive at the destination. Who would want to live in a permanent packaged holiday? Or be stranded on a desert Island? Or sit in an armchair for eternity?
An accompanying text by James Bohm for exhibition:
Near misses at Studio 50 Hove, 2019
Is there any reason for each painting to be what it is and not something else? In the process of their construction can we walk through step by step to find their reason as to why they're this and not that, or why they had to be this way and not that? And if we can't find a reason then what's preventing us from reasoning the case that it could've been – or even worse – should've been something else? The could is in the realm of possibility; the should is in the realm of necessity. But there is also another realm of reason that lurks never too far away, or is always too close for comfort: the arbitrary. The point at which the could and the should collapse into nothing at all; the could and the should have no purchase on the arbitrary, as there's no ladder, no root and branch, no progress, no sense!
It's obvious then why the arbitrary has been both embraced and rejected by artists in the history of abstraction, both as impossible ideal and the sign of failure. Somewhere in between sits the abstract artwork, working as an artwork in that it has to justify itself as it peers into the abyss of the arbitrary or its arbitrariness. Some say abstract painting seems to work best when it finds itself finding itself; that it seems to possess it's own cognition, or epistemic moment. But what it finds remains elusive: whether it finds something but can't say what it is; or what's found turns out to be nothing at all, just paint on canvas.
This search has been the task of critics of Abstract painting since it’s beginning. Many reasons have been given for its raison d'etre, some persuasive, some damning, some utopian, some disenchanted, each one stalling at the point of final judgement, a truth to end all others, a final representation that nails it, an ultimate reason or register of success and failure until eventually hands are thrown up in the air to concede that that’s its very condition. We can't find a reason! This aporia at the heart of abstraction is probably why abstract painting continues to be painted, continually falling short of its target; this is one side of a near miss.
The other side of a near miss is the lucky escape. And what would be the consequences of this kind of miss? What would we be looking at if it truly did miss? We probably wouldn't even notice it, perhaps left in the corner of the studio. It would be another painting that doesn’t work; into the abyss of no meaning; and what's worse its status couldn't even be recovered ironically, or socio-historically even. Like Dostoevsky's Underground Man who attempts to pick a fight with an Officer but is simply ignored and brushed aside, laments the fact that he was not even worthy of being punched in the face as the Officer had done to others. A miserable fate indeed, not even worthy of failure! Of conferring any meaning whatsoever this dreaded substratum of indifference lurks in the shadows of all our acts, that they might ultimately have no effect or purpose. This is the realm of the contingent universe, where paint, no matter how finely applied is merely the distribution of matter. But this brings another impossibility for we are irreducibly meaningful. Even the nothing has meaning of some sorts, hence the dread.
The flip side to this dread is also the immanent freedom of all our acts; no ultimate laws which can determine our decisions. The location of the latter is less underground than forever present and ahead of us, of every decision we make is a step into this contingent universe, harbouring infinite possibilities waiting to be actualised. But let's not get carried away. These paintings aren't existential creations ex nihilo; we're in the contracted field of painting, where every move is already loaded with meaning and history. It's no wonder then that their starting point is in a basic geometry, a shape, or a structure, warding off the messy and formless, until a step forward is taken and a decision has to be made.
What maybe these paintings bring to the surface in their actualisation are the histories of these decisions, from both the near and distant past of their construction: their doings and undoing’s, edits and over paints; until we get a build up of visual static, of the incidental; the unintentional moments carrying an equal force and converging with the intentional moments. That what we are looking at is this and not something else goes to the heart of their precarity as contingent objects. An order of abstraction that neither the artist nor spectator is the centre of. They couldn't be anything else yet they didn't have to be this way. They resist pointing to a process that could go on ad infinitum and yet they're not confident statements of their finality, sitting as they do way too closely to the shadowy abyss of the arbitrary. I'd like to think these paintings are more conditioned by the present/future than the underground, though maybe not. Neither can be entirely divorced from each other. As Laurie Anderson notes walking is also falling at the same time.