Michael Fullerton‌, Thilo Heinzmann‌, David Brian Smith‌, Catherine Story‌, Armando Andrade Tudela

Fruchtbaresland

Armando Andrade Tudela
Michael Fullerton
Thilo Heinzmann
David Brian Smith
Catherine Story

Thilo Heinzmann’s pigment painting Fruchtbares Land (2009) was, in some ways, the starting point of the show. Even though it appears to be wholly abstract, it was intended from its outset to be a landscape painting. The actions used in the application of the pigment are likes forces of nature – blown, poured, dropped, and flung – while the multiple hues of green and brown pigments are suggestive of fog, mist, moss, woodland, and the earth itself.

Often drawing on autobiographical incidents and memories, David Brian Smith’s paintings utilise personal as well as found photographs as source imagery, rooting them in the real, lived world. These landscape paintings, however, are far from realism. With their intense palettes, dramatic skies, folkloric subjects, and passages of pure dream-like invention, they radiate an almost spiritual quality.

For two years (2004-06) Catherine Story travelled around Europe painting landscapes en plein air. The locations chosen were typically generic beautiful vistas and the weather conditions extreme: Snowdonia (freezing), Breacon Beacons (damp heat), North Cornwall (sun, wind), Mount Etna (heat, wind), Central Italy (thunder). The paintings were an escape of sorts, to places with human absence, and yet somehow many of the forms in the paintings resemble parts of the human body; any sense of alienation is kept at bay by their tender beauty.

Fullerton’s painting Something That Originates Or Results From Something Else; Outcome; Issue (2011) takes the exhibition theme into sexual and political territory. The subject – Mary Palevsky – symbolises not only the attraction and sexual union of her scientist parents (who met while participating in the Manhattan project), but is the progeny of a seminal event – the creation of the atomic bomb – which ushered in the the nuclear age and a new political landscape.

The principle of the actions documented in Andrade Tudela’s photographs is quite simple – holding a stone as the first and most basic and austere sculptural gesture. It is also a kind of micro-ritual as well. There is of course an underlying twist. ‘If You Hold a Stone’ is a song written by Caetano Veloso for, allegedly, Lygia Clark. This was during the time Clark’s work was slowly shifting from the world of geometric engagement into the world of full psychic/physical engagement:

If you hold a stone, hold it in your hand
If you feel the weight, you never be late
To understand.