Untitled - Damien Meade

FROM
LON
DON

FROM
LON
DON

Nueva pintura desde Londres
Phillip Allen
Marianne Basualdo
Lawrence Corby
Milena Dragicevic
Paul Housley
Damien Meade
Tim Stoner
Galería Art Nueve
Murcia

A Mil Millas de Casa
Desde Londres es un puzzle de piezas deslizantes de una exposición. Por mucho que uno
intente colocar sus elementos en algo que asemeje un orden a través de alguna cla se de
heurística presidente, una o dos obras o uno o dos artistas no terminan de encajar. En
el arte, si no en un rompecabezas, eso es una virtud, la exposición nos llega no con una
tesis, sino con una red de rutas de interpretación parciales. Empezamos de forma
sencilla, por ejemplo, y digamos que los siete artistas aquí presentes entablan el amplio
tema de la figuración y, más concretamente, lo que significa pintar una figura humana.
Eso es verdad en el caso de cinco de los siete, y se trata de una historia que podemos
empezar a contar; una historia, quizás, sobre cómo la pintura ahora podría tener un
doble propósito, atrayéndonos sólo para ahuyentarnos de nuevo.
Así, pues, podríamos suponer que los retratos de bustos fríos y pesados de Damien
Meade, con sus rostros desviados con recelo e inalcanzables (ya que no se puede dar
una vuelta alrededor de un cuadro, de ahí su irónica ingeniosidad), están basados en
modelos escultóricos. Aunque también podríamos preguntarnos si el modelo realmente
existe, y si una persona de verdad haya posado para ello, y así se nos abre un mise en
abîme de auténtico ensimismamiento. Podemos ver una fuerza vital brillando
eléctricamente a través de los suaves velos de pintura de Marianne Basualdo, y reconocer
que la ominosa y distante figura de respiración ligera que percibimos, sólo ha sido
construida por ella en parte, el resto nos lo proporciona nuestra imaginación activa.
Podemos apreciar que Milena Dragicevic aproxima las sintaxis de la abstracción y de la
figuración para proponer el “yo” como un enigma totalmente introvertido e intraducible.
Estos son cuadros que consideran al retrato como una repeladura al mínimo, como un
diálogo con un espectador que, o bien ha de entregar algo de sí mismo al servicio de la
consumación, o bien reconocer que el arte no es una forma de revelar verdades íntimas
de un individuo, sino una meditación sobre el diálogo entre el artista y el espectador.
Pero podríamos comenzar de nuevo con Dragicevic y seguir otro camino: hacia la
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pintura como un punto donde la abstracción y la narrativa inferida se entrelazan
fructíferamente, de nuevo con la ayuda casi involuntaria del espectador. Por ejemplo,
¿dónde está el espacio que Phillip Allen ha cartografiado en sus cuadros durante la última
década? Parece topográfico, aunque podría ser fácilmente interiorizado: tiene
profundidad de campo y dimensión (e incluso, según parece, clima y luz que proyecta
sombra). Pero hay suficiente empaste rugoso y formalismo para recordarnos que Allen
hace de arquitecto de este mundo en vez de retratarlo, y las preguntas que genera (como
un título como Franca Repetición /Blunt Repetition podría inferir) son de cómo y por qué
uno comienza y continúa como pintor. Lawrence Corby, al enlazar un par de desinflados,
testiculares globos de colores a la base de una abstracción titulada Pequeña Victoria, abre
la no-figuración a la narración melancólica, casi burlona, mientras uno se pregunta qué
es lo que pueda codificar el cuadro y cómo puede relacionarse con la mezcla de
triunfalismo y decepción del título.
O se podría ver a Corby como la apertura de un diálogo con la historia de la
abstracción, y ver esta exposición desde la óptica de una conversación con modelos
ineludibles, la pintura-como-problema: con, por otra parte, la historia del retrato como
un foco sobre la identidad individual, como cuando Paul Housley forcejea
enérgicamente, ambivalentemente, con el peso de la pintura de antaño en obras como
Retrato con Ojos de Mármol, con sus distorsiones modernistas, su tópica vellosidad
bohemia (y, según parece, una camiseta de rayas Picassoesca), y su factura expresionista.
Los cuadros de Housley, a pesar de su aparente holgura, son tonalmente híper-precisos
en su evocación de una ansiedad contemporánea estratificada por encima de otras tantas
históricas. También indaga en el ‘qué podríamos hacer con el pasado’ Meade, cuyos
bustos patinados no parecen estar completamente situados en el momento actual pero
se hacen presentes cuando se los lee al sesgo; y las orquestaciones de figuras de Tim
Stoner. Los bailarines semiregimentados de Stoner caminan al filo de la significación;
la actividad es relajada pero a la vez al paso, de una manera que sugiere un profundo
amor por el orden por parte del ser humano, una afición por entrar en vereda, algo que
históricamente ha tenido todo tipo de nefastas implicaciones socio-políticas.
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Así pues, las asambleas giratorias de Stoner se sientan en una especie de
no-tiempo que les permite describir un momento pasado y otro potencialmente
presente al mismo tiempo, y esta especie de doble temporalidad caracteriza también a
gran parte de Desde Londres, que en repetidas ocasiones supone que lo que se pinta ahora
está en conversación con algo hecho anteriormente. Corby puede designar una
estructura gráfica, tipo flecha, como Paisaje de Invierno, y a nosotros se nos permite vagar
por el espacio entre el título y la imagen, probando la validez de las emociones inferidas.
Basualdo puede encuadrar al límite los desdibujados rostros frontales y nosotros
pensamos en determinados tipos de retrato fotográfico: en fotos carné. Allen coloca
sus paisajes fatasmales frente a los reales; Housley tiene una historia de arte más amplia
sobre sus hombros a sabiendas pandeantes...
Estos artistas - o al menos sus obras - se encuentran típicamente a mil millas de casa.
La pintura también está muy lejos de sus inicios; y para los artistas vivos no es fácil
desprenderse del punto de partida y de las etapas intermedias. Así que cada una de estas
imágenes se introduce dentro de un flujo de imágenes mucho más amplio y, cuando lo
hacen, es principalmente cuando sus historias - o su afanosa mudez - se sueltan. Y si eso
es cierto de su interacción con las imágenes que no están aquí, lo es también en Murcia,
con los que sí están: y es por eso que esta exposición está atravesada por conductos,
por trayectorias discursivas. Estos cuadros son objetos inestables, con goteras,
empujados hacia el gregarismo, haciéndose sitio o susurrándose por las paredes,
esperando nuestra versión, esperando a los demás y a nuestros recuerdos de los
inmensos archivos del arte. Se han encontrado en tierras extranjeras y son todos - en
un sentido u otro - de Londres. Es natural que convivan: si no para siempre, al menos
por el momento.
Martin Herbert
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A Thousand Miles from Home
From London is a sliding-tile game of an exhibition. However determinedly one might
arrange its aspects into some semblance of order, via some kind of presiding heuristic,
one or two works or one or two artists won’t fit. In art if not in puzzle-play, this is a
virtue; the show arrives not with a thesis but a network of partial interpretative routes.
For example, let’s start simply and say that these seven artists engage the broad issue of
figuration, and more precisely what it means to paint a human figure. That holds good
for five of the seven, and it’s a story we can begin to tell; a story, perhaps, about how
painting might now be double-purposed, drawing us in only to push us away.
So we might assume that Damien Meade’s paintings of cool and heavy portrait busts,
their faces turned askance and unreachable (because you can’t walk around a painting;
that’s their wry conceit), are based on sculpted models. Though we might also wonder
if the model really exists, and if a real person modelled for it, and so a mise en abîme of
authentic selfhood opens up. We may see a life force glinting electrically through the
soft veils of Marianne Basualdo’s paint, and recognise that the lightly breathing, distantly
ominous figure we perceive there has only partly been built by her, the rest being
supplied by our active imaginations. We can appreciate that Milena Dragicevic is angling
together the syntaxes of abstraction and figuration to posit selfhood as an untranslatable,
utterly inward-facing enigma. These are paintings that consider portraiture as paring
back, as a dialogue with a viewer who must either deliver up something of themselves
in the services of completion, or recognise that the art is not a way of revealing inner
truths about an individual but a meditation on the dialogue between artist and viewer.
But then we might recommence with Dragicevic and follow another course: towards
painting as a point where abstraction and inferred narrative braid fruitfully together,
again with the viewer’s near-involuntary assistance. Where is the space, for example,
that Phillip Allen has been mapping in his paintings over the past decade? It feels
topographic, though it could easily be interiorised: it has depth and dimension (and
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even, it appears, weather and shadow-casting light). But there is enough gnarly impasto
and formalism here to remind one that Allen is architecting this world rather than
rendering it, and the questions it engenders (as a title like Blunt Repetition might infer)
are ones of how and why, as a painter, one begins and continues. Lawrence Corby, in
stringing a pair of deflated, testicular, colour-coded balloons to the base of an abstraction
entitled Small victory, opens up nonfiguration to melancholic, near-teasing
storytelling, as one wonders what the painting might encode and how it might relate
to the title’s mix of triumphalism and letdown.
Or one might see Corby as opening a dialogue with the history of abstraction, and view
this show through the optic of a conversation with inescapable models, painting-asproblem:
with, elsewhere, the history of portraiture as a spotlight on selfhood, as when
Paul Housley strenuously, ambivalently grapples the weight of past painting in works
like Marble Eyed Portrait, with its modernist distortions, cliché-boho hirsuteness (and, it
seems, Picassoesque striped top), and expressionist facture. Housley’s paintings, for all
their apparent looseness, are tonally hyper-precise in their evocations of a contemporary
anxiety layered on top of historical ones. What we might do with the past, again, is
assayed by Meade, whose patinated busts don’t feel quite situated in the present moment
but are made present by being read slantwise; and by Tim Stoner’s orchestrations of
figures. Stoner’s semi-regimented dancers walk a knife-edge of signification, the activity
is at once leisured and lockstep in a manner that suggests a deep love of order in the
human organism, a fondness for falling into line that has historically had all kinds of
nefarious socio-political implications.
Accordingly, Stoner’s twirling assemblies sit in a kind of non-time that allows them to
figure a gone moment and a potentially present one simultaneously, and this kind of
doubled temporality, too, characterises much of From London, which repeatedly assumes
that whatever is painted now is in conversation with something made earlier. Corby
can designate a graphic, arrowlike structure as a Winter Landscape and we get to wander
in the gap between title and image, testing the validity of the inferred affect. Basualdo
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can crop in tightly on slurred, frontal faces and we think of particular types of
photographic portraits: of mugshots. Allen posits his phantasmic landscapes against real
ones; Housley has a larger history of art on his knowingly buckling shoulders...
These artists - or their works, at least - are typically a thousand miles from home.
Painting too is a long way down the road from where it began; and living practitioners
can’t easily discard its starting point and interim stages. So each of these images inserts
itself into a wider image-flow, and it is primarily when they do that their stories - or
their sedulous muteness - are loosed. And if that’s true of their interaction with images
that are not here, so it is in Murcia, with those that are: which is why this show is
crisscrossed with conduits, discursive trajectories. These paintings are unstable, leaky
things, nudged into gregariousness, jostling or whispering across the walls; waiting for
our take, waiting on each other and our memories of the vast archives of art. They’ve
found themselves on foreign shores, and they’re all - in one sense or another - from
London. Naturally they’re going to be convivial: if not forever, then at least for the
moment.
Martin Herbert
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Phillip Allen
Unocomposeó, 2011
Oil on wood
61 x 51 cm
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Phillip Allen
Blunt Repetition (Capital P Version), 2011
Oil on board
64 x 54 cm
16

Marianne Basualdo
Machote, 2011
Oil on linen
28 x 22 cm
18

Marianne Basualdo
Sedna, 2011
Oil on linen
35 x 27 cm
20

Lawrence Corby
Untitled (winter landscape), 2010
Oil & acrylic on paper on canvas
65 x 85 cm
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Lawrence Corby
Small victory, 2009
Oil & acrylic on paper on canvas
50 x 40 cm
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Milena Dragicevic
Supplicant 888, 2011
Oil and clear gesso on linen
61 x 51 cm
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Milena Dragicevic
Supplicant 0404, 2011
Oil on linen
61 x 51 cm
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Paul Housley
Portrait in Red, 2011
Mixed media (ink and acrylic) on paper
38 x 29 cm unframed
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Paul Housley
Marble Eyed Portrait, 2011
Mixed media (ink and acrylic) on paper
43 x 30 cm unframed
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Damien Meade
Piri, 2011
Oil on linen on board
64.5 x 49 cm
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Damien Meade
Trail of Dead, 2011
Oil on linen on board
66.5 x 49.2 cm
36

Tim Stoner
Spinners, 2011
oil on linen
57 x 74.5 cm
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Tim Stoner
Petit Bourgeois, 2011
oil on linen
55 x 77 cm
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Phillip Allen (b. 1967, London) studied at Kingston University, London (BA Fine Art, 1990)
and The Royal College of Art, London (MA Painting, 1992). Selected solo exhibitions include
Capital P, The Approach, London (2011); …the urgent hang around, Bernier/Eliades Gallery,
Athens, Greece (2010); Paintings & Drawings, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, Belgium (2007); Milton
Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK (2006) and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island
City, New York, USA (2003). Group shows include Kaleidoscopic Revolver, The Total Museum,
Seoul, Korea; Hanjiyun Contemporary Space, Beijing, China (2009); British Art Show 6, BALTIC
Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; venues in Manchester, Nottingham, Bristol, UK
(2005, touring exhibition organised by the Hayward Gallery) and Dirty Pictures, The Approach,
London, UK (2003). He lives and works in London.
Marianne Basualdo (b. 1971, Jyväskylä, Finland) lives and works in London and Málaga. She
studied at the Kent Institute of Art and Design (1995), and at Camberwell College of Arts (1998)
in London. Exhibitions include Her House, Her House Gallery, London (2008); Yellow Freight,
Fold Gallery, London (2008); the British School at Rome (2001) and The Spirit of June, Henry
Peacock Gallery, London (1999).
Lawrence Corby (b. 1970, Nottingham, UK) studied at Central St. Martins School of Art &
Design (1992) and The Royal College of Art (1995), London. He held his first Solo show In Love
with Europe with David Risley at The Zwemmer Gallery in 2001. Further solo exhibitions include
Pictures of Things at Whitechapel Project Space (2008) and at Tannery Arts/Drawing Room,
London (2009). He was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing prize in 2003, and was included
in The Whitechapel Gallery's East End Academy in 2004. Recent shows include Between Tender
Frames (curated by Paul Housley), Peter Bergman Gallery, Stockholm (2010). He lives and works
in London.
Milena Dragicevic (b. 1965, Knin, Former Yugoslavia) studied at York University, Totonto (BA
Fine Arts, 1988) and The Royal College of Art, London (MA Painting, 1992). Selected solo
shows include Erections for Transatlantica, Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna (2011); Coloured Threads
in Door Knobs, Pump House Gallery, London (2008); Of Ants, Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna
(2008); The Supplicants, Galerie Vera Munro, Hamburg (2006) and Falsifikacija, Ibid Projects,
London (2005). Group shows include British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet, Hayward Gallery,
London (2010-2011, touring to Glasgow and Plymouth); Another Face: Works from the Arts Council
Collection, Hatton Gallery, UK (2010) and Very Abstract and Hyper Figurative (curated by Jens
Hoffmann), Thomas Dane Gallery, London (2007). She lives and works in London.
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Paul Housley (b.1964, Stalybridge, UK) studied at Sheffield City Polytechnic (BA Fine Art,
1986) and The Royal College of Art, London (MA Painting, 1995). Recent solo shows include
A Yellow Bird at Night, Peter Bergman, Stockholm (2011), A Maid for Paint at Poppy Sebire, London
(2011), Akinci, Amsterdam (2010); Orders from Chaos, Peter Bergman, Stockholm (2009);
Some Have Eyes, Wilkinson Gallery, London (2008) and Heavy Easel, Norwich Gallery, Norwich
(2006). Recent group shows include Keep Floors and Passage Clear, White Columns, New York
(2011); Dark Nature, Poppy Sebire, London (2010); She Awoke With a Jerk, Andrea Rosen Gallery,
New York (2010) and Repetition: Paintwork3, Galerie Borchardt, Hamburg (2009). In 2007-8 he
completed a residency at London Print Studio and in 2004-5 he was artist in residence at Durham
Cathedral. He lives and works in London.
Damien Meade (b. 1969, Limerick, Ireland) studied at DIT Dublin (BA Fine Art, 1991) and
Chelsea College of Art, London (MA Painting, 1993). Selected shows include The Perfect Crime
(curated by Phillip Allen and Dan Coombs), Gallery 4a, Malvern, UK (2011); SV10 (selected
by Jennifer Higgie and Rebecca Warren) at Studio Voltaire, London (2010); Be-Head at Andipa
Gallery, London (2010); The House of Fairy Tales, Millennium Gallery, St. Ives (2010); Supernatural
(curated by Dan Hays) at Charlie Dutton Gallery, (2010) and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (1995). In
1994-95 he was Artist in Residence By-Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge University (in
association with Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge). He lives and works in London.
Tim Stoner (b. 1970, London) studied at Norwich School of Art (BA Fine Art, 1992), The
Royal College of Art (MA Painting, 1994), The Rijksakademie, Amsterdam (1997-98) and was
resident at The British School at Rome (2001). His solo shows include Alison Jacques Gallery,
London (2007); The Approach, London (2000 & 2002); Junge Kunst, Wolfsburg DE (2003) and
The Stedilijk Museum Bureau, Amsterdam (2002). Group shows include Der Menschen Klee,
Kunst Im Tunnel, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2011); 25 Years of the Deutsch Bank Collection, The Berliner
Guggenheim (2005); Nation, Frankfurter Kunstverein (2003); Britannia Works, Tounta Art Centre,
Athens (2004); Rijksakademie, Victoria Miro Gallery, London (2003) and Exploring Landscape,
Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York (2003). In 2001 he was the first prize winner of Beck's Futures
2 at the ICA, London, which toured the UK. He lives and works in London and Andalucia.
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Martin Herbert is a writer and critic based in Tiunbridge Wells, Kent, UK. He writes regularly
for magazines including Artforum, Frieze and Art Monthly, and has contributed catalogue essays
for institutions including MoMA, New York, Tate Britain, and the Hayward Gallery, London.
He is associate editor at ArtReview, and a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art, London.
His monograph on Mark Wallinger was published in 2011 by Thames & Hudson.
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Agradecimientos/ Acknowledgements
Ana Genovés
Richard Meade
The Approach Gallery, London
Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna
Poppy Sebire Gallery, London
Edita / Editor
Art Nueve
Comisario / Curator
Damien Meade
Textos / Text
Martin Herbert
Tradución / Translation
Alison Tharby
Impresión / Printer
Jiménez Godoy
All images copyright © the artists 2011
Text copyright © Martin Herbert 2011
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Phillip Allen
Born 1967 in London
Lives and works in London
Education
1990–1992
MA Fine Art, Royal College of Art, London
1987–1990
BA Fine Art, Kingston University, London
Solo Exhibitions
2011
Capital P,The Approach, London, UK
2010
…the urgent hang around, Bernier/Eliades Gallery,Athens, Greece
2009
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
2008
Sloppy Cuts No Ice,The Approach W1, London
2007
Paintings & Drawings, Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
2006
Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes
2005
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
One Man Show, Xavier Hufkens,ART Brussels
2004
The Approach, London
2003
Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
Phillip Allen: Recent Paintings, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, LongIsland City, New
York

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FROM LONDON