Fergal Stapleton

At first glance the large gilt works in dOr seem unduly decadent. Sleek, luminous, radiant. Gold! Yet we shouldn’t abandon ourselves too quickly to their allure, or fall too easily for any narrative concerning the sublime. Yes, this is gold leaf, genuine gold, but it’s the thinnest kind. And it’s rippled, creased, and clearly applied in a manner unconcerned with traditional notions of perfection. These works do bear the familiar Minimalist traits of the grid and repetitive materiality, but the small flaws and unmistakable traces of the artist’s hand places them in a territory more aligned with the Taoist transcendences of Agnes Martin. They are meditative, and one imagines the way they were made was meditative too, but the bathetic punctuation of the shimmering surface by the numerous, small, dull, round-headed screws keeps them grounded in the physical here and now rather than a metaphysical state.

The sculpture dOr 1  (2010) continues on from Stapleton’s And a Door Opened (2007-8) series. Larger in scale and sparser than its predecessors, dOr 1 has a somber, almost repressive, solidity. The objects displayed within are only partially illuminated by the incandescence from a sole red light bulb. Drawn in to finding what is there, peering into the gloom, trying to make sense of the contents we want to see something meaningful, yet the more we look the less our coordinates in the known material world guide us. We are left with something entirely of the artist’s own making. It’s a very particular kind of cosmology and aesthetic. One that is concerned with a space on the edge of shadows: the barely here and the just enough present.

Fergal Stapleton studied at Middlesex Polytechnic and graduated from the MA Programme at Goldsmiths College, London in 1993. He lives and works in London.