Thilo Heinzmann‌, Peter Peri‌, David Brian Smith‌, Fergal Stapleton‌, Catherine Story

Seated Man

Catherine Story
Peter Peri
David Brian Smith
Fergal Stapleton
Thilo Heinzmann

Each artist in the exhibition is, in some way or other, dealing with the persistence of the figure. The title suggests a subject. A sitter, the artist’s model perhaps? Someone who is taking time to contemplate and reflect. There is a sense of weight, of things slowed down, and the allusion of tradition.

Or (2010) is the latest in Fergal Stapleton’s occasional series of strange ‘history paintings’. In this series, the figure often has a spectral presence, at times hardly visible. Or is a large dark painting divided in its subject and riddled with gestalt crises: on one side, an obscure ceremonial encounter between an ape and a headless supplicant; on the other, a huge (or near to us?) coin bearing the profile of a startled monarch. The division is mediated by the qualities of the painted darkness of their shared background. The mood is fateful and unsteady. Or exemplifies one of Stapleton’s several ways of making art that allows him to reach towards areas of experience unavailable in any other way. It uses a range of pictorial methodologies to attempt to displace its relation to art or social histories in order to emphasise its own completion.

Mann aus dem Wasser Steigend (2006)- the title translates as Man from the Water Rising – is a triangular composition of just three objects – all coloured wooden blocks and each slightly worn. It comes from a body of works which all have austere compositions and play out similar games of highly reductive figuration. In ST (2007) (not in the exhibition but from this series), two small pieces of elliptical shaped glass (eyes) sit either side of a shell (nose) making a rudimentary face. Liegende (2006) is a judicious arrangement of a glass marble and three small blocks of wood. These are austere compositions, but they are humorous too, countering the weight of the art history with which they are in dialogue.

Heinze (2009) is a more physical work – its three dimensional – but is more elusive. It is made from casting a heinze, a wooden structure made from tree branches traditional in rural Germany, onto which mounds of hay are piled high and left to dry. Groups of these big hovering forms, dotted across fields and low lying hills, could be displaced Polynesian effigies. Heinzmann’s sculpture is just the skeletal structure, cast in resin and coloured with raw pigment, both within the resin and on its surface. Ethereal, glacial, and primitive, it stands with a kingly, enigmatic poise.

Reminiscent of Surrealist-influenced Modernist sculpture, Peter Peri’s Seated Man Sculpture 2 (2010) is from a recent and ongoing series of sculptures. Engineered in steel, they are replicas of precariously balanced assemblages, originally composed using objects from Peri’s home such as rolls of masking tape, cassette boxes, packaging cartons, chess sets, and calculators. While the circular head leads us to read this as a figure there is an emptying out and dispersal of the body into “pure” abstraction. This tension underlines Peri’s practice – a probing into the complexities of modern and proto-modern positions around abstraction and figuration.

This tension is continued in Peri’s painting ‘Reading at the Wall’ (2010). The title, which suggests a figure/figures reading or examining a surface, at first seems to sit uneasily with the paintings wholly abstract composition. However on closer examination a relationship begins to form. Here two angular bodies of colour appear to hover above a pitted surface of obscured markings, balanced in a state between intimacy and separation, comprehension and loss.

Catherine Story’s Player (2010) is from a new series of paintings. There is a sitter of sorts for this painting – a model – that Story has made. Typically Story paints it from different perspectives, and angles, fleshing out different aspects of it character. Noticeably only part of the canvas is covered. There is no background story. Just a moment of memory, a cloudy image. Story perceives her work through the lens of cinema – seeing it in terms of narrative and characters, scenes and locations, using the same artifice as film which allows for autobiography to hide among the props and also for privacy, somehow.

There is a freedom and inventiveness to David Smith’s practice which yields paintings rich with surprise. Though rooted in quite traditional pursuits of landscape and portrait painting, his paintings are neither familiar or expected. There is considerable painting over and what is being depicted changes radically through each state. Recently he constrained himself to relatively small canvasses, mostly of the same size and format, and the end results ranged from monochromes, to sensous patterned abstractions, to loose cartoonish figures finished with touches of gold leaf. Great Expectations (2010) reflects a return to larger canvases.

Though autobiographical in origin (Smith grew up on a farm and the subject of the shepherd is one that has appeared many times in his work) the theme of the isolated man is a universal one. Here the figure, somewhat downcast and melancholic, is situated in a beautifully luminous, pointillist landscape, one full of Van Gogh-esque jouissance.