Tag: color

Alice Peillon

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Alice Peillon – Untitled Collage, mixed media, © 2018. Image courtesy of the artist

If we think of collage as a language of disparate, often delicate elements coming together in taut and balanced interactions, then Alice Peillon has achieved over time no small degree of mastery of its vocabulary and grammar. And if we can agree that a language at its most effective can express both the banal and the profound in a single breath, then we can see evidence in Alice’s work of the artist making the same demands of her medium; collage.

Whilst not precisely minimal, Alice’s collages do manage to express a certain expansiveness which hints at things unsaid within the measurements of the surface. This sense of a sparsely occupied space is all the more surprising on such a small scale. Alice’s experience as a painter contributes to the life of these works. Where paint or ink has been applied in her collages it is like the hint of a larger gesture – one which we can imagine continuing beyond the edges of the artwork. Painted marks are so reduced in these works that, where they appear, brushstrokes could be thought of as potential rather than fully formed. Pigment holds a subtle but powerful presence over these delicate surfaces, like the implied consequence of an unrealized act.

Through her unhurried experiments with paper, ink, fragments of photographic images, and painted gestures Alice is adding to the depth of findings by other exponents of the medium, artists such as Anne Ryan and Lyubov Popova.

This text was produced for the artist’s website – www.alicepeillon.com

Alice’s work is currently on show at Winns Gallery, London – artrabbit.com-winnsgallery

200 words #23 / Channing Hansen

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Channing Hansen, 9-Manifold, 2017, 42 x 48 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and Marc Selwyn Fine Art. (see below for full list of materials used to create 9-Manifold)

The idea of a painting as something akin to a weave is one which facilitates several convenient associations. Apart from the literal weave of canvas, there is the interplay between layers, the superimposition of glazes, an infinity of textures and tonalities, and an equally unlimited scope for the arrangement of marks and painted motifs, arrangements often made stronger through varying degrees of separation than proximity. And this is to say nothing of illusory depth.

Channing Hansen arrived at his current preoccupation with knitting and weaving via an involvement in latter-day Fluxus and an interest in physics, fluid dynamics, and surgery theory. Employing a profound knowledge of fibres such as wool, alpaca, silk, and mohair, and an almost scientific dedication to sourcing and recording the provenance of the material he uses, Hansen creates irresistible, painterly weaves which he mounts on wooden stretchers. There are occasional gaps in the weave, and collisions of colour which may appear random, abstract. Hansen’s weaves however are largely determined by pre-applied computer algorithms, which dictate colour choice, pattern, and stitch.

George Maciunas would doubtless approve of this artist’s approach to the creative process – “Like a mathematical solution such a composition contains: beauty in the method alone.”*

*Taken from a Fluxus manifesto written by George Maciunas for the concert ‘Après John Cage’, Wiesbaden, 1962.

Channing Hansen / Fluid Dynamics at Marc Selwyn Fine Art

(Materials used in 9-Manifold: Bluefaced Leicester, California Variegated Mutant (Hattie), California Variegated Mutant (Hope), California Variegated Mutant (Petra), California Variegated Mutant (Pine), Dorset Horn, Exmoor Blueface, Romedale (January), Romedale (Patty), Romney (Martin), Romney (McKenna), Romney (Nevaeh), Romney (Noble), Romney (O’Connor), Romney (Osiris), Romney (Princess), and Shetland (Freya) fibers; silk noils, and Tussah silk fibers; gold, holographic polymers, pearl dust, and photoluminescent recycled polyester; banana cellulose, bamboo, bamboo carbon fiber, rose cellulose , SeaCell , legume cellulose, and Sequoioideae Redwood)

Ryan Sullivan @ Sadie Coles HQ, Davies St. London, April 26 – June 04, 2016.

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Installation view, Ryan Sullivan, ~ / – ,Sadie Coles HQ, London, 26 April – 04 June 2016

Copyright the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

In the late 1990s, in the painting department of the art college I was studying at in Dublin, there was a small group of painters for whom a kind of process painting was the most logical way forward. It was a time when we were being urged from some corners to abandon painting altogether, at least temporarily, and to ‘interrogate’ our preconceptions or to ‘collapse’ our assumptions of what painting could do. It was the language of wartime and it made the task of thinking about art and reflecting on one’s work sound more like a national emergency. To throw ourselves into the unselfconscious application of the medium allowed us to switch off from the agony of second guessing.  

One way of looking at process art tells us that chance results, obtained through the application of a medium within a set of pre-decided material and procedural parameters, are themselves the aims of the artwork. The medium, and the way it responds to a variety of physical, temporal and chemical stages of intervention, is the message. On paper this definition of process in painting reads just like any kind of painting one cares to imagine. In the Renaissance workshop there were arguably far more complex processes being carried out at every stage of an artwork’s production than can be seen in the contemporary artists’ pouring from a pot or squeezing from a tube. So it could be that the term process painting is a misnomer.

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Installation view, Ryan Sullivan, ~ / – ,Sadie Coles HQ, London, 26 April – 04 June 2016

Copyright the artist, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

In virtually all process art, from the pouring and staining technique of Morris Louis to the fluid choreography of Bernard Frizes’ patterns, there is a single or at most a small number of very evident stages involving the application of the medium, which give the work its most apparent characteristics. We could call this a signature conceit. In process painting the conceit on which the work rests is most often presented on a large scale if it is not to risk appearing finicky, like a detail from a larger image. This signature, or the result of the processes involved in making the work, are so evident that each successive viewer asks themselves the same single question; How is it done? Continue reading “Ryan Sullivan @ Sadie Coles HQ, Davies St. London, April 26 – June 04, 2016.”

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