Fergal Stapleton

A volume of silence. It’s funny, a sculpture that makes you think of sound, or maybe the absence of it. How many sculptures do you come across that make a noise? Synaesthesia may be overrated, but what happens when perception malfunctions, or starts to play games with itself? Objects look like objects by not being vague, by not fading into the background: a sharp edge, a vivid colour, a busy texture, a bright reflection. They look strong so you pay attention to them by looking at them. Looking drowns out the listening.

Sure, there are other objects that want to fade into the background, want to not look like much, to be ordinary, like everything else, humdrum, and not really art. But 2moro (II) doesn’t do this either. It’s a sculpture – what else could it be? It doesn’t play records, and you can’t put your coffee cup on it. What it does is – it fades things out. Fades looking at things out. Fades looking out.

With 2moro (II), things are on the verge. Here’s two disks of acrylic, deep red, so deep, as they layer up, that the red turns into black, light waves stripped away. In the gloom, sandwiched between the two, a pin-light LED tries to push a little energy out into its surroundings. Like looking at the signal of a bioluminescent fish, at a distance, below you, near the ocean floor. Twilight.

Things on the verge of being something else. ‘Liminal’. So the disks rest on three planes of MDF, glued together, like half-remembered De Stijl. Cantilevered, the table-top hangs in air; gravity sort-of-just-about present. Faded grey-blue, pale custard yellow: a so-so paintjob, abandoned just at the moment when a bit more work might have produced a smarter finish, but here postponed, always on its way but never arriving.

And on top of the red disks, a crumpled five-pound note; between them a banded wad of similar fivers. Or rather, blurry approximations, drawn by hand with Conté crayon, a hazy tangle of blue and green scratches on worn-out paper. It could be, of course, that these are good drawings of faded banknotes, rather than sketchy drawings of brand new ones, and if so, then we’re back in the moment where things shape-shift, lose definition, become indistinct, and which is the paradox of 2moro (II) – the experience of a material thing shaped to provoke our recognition of transient perception and transient materiality. An object in full view that invokes the moment at which light fades and objects disappear. An object made of real stuff in the present that makes tangible the disintegration of matter in the future. An object that inverts the strange, virtual existence of monetary value.

Maybe that’s the money shot. Money is, after all, just an object. But it’s a special object, which contains every other object in the world inside it. Destroy money, and where does its value go? In 2moro (II), that value is just starting to fade. Back into what is possible. Back into what has yet to take shape, and which we look for, like listening hard into silence.

— JJ Charlesworth
January 2014

Fergal Stapleton (b. 1961) studied at Middlesex Polytechnic and graduated from the MA Programme at Goldsmiths College, London in 1993. He lives and works in London. This is his fifth solo exhibition at the gallery.