C108
Review
Southampton:
New British Painting at John Hansard
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Diann
Bauer: Meijius, 2004; photo Steve Shrimpton;
courtesy John Hansard Gallery
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According to the catalogue, the title
New British Painting is "tongue in cheek," astutely
dodging the audacious task of a survey show and confessing
that while all the artists featured have studied and currently
work in London only three of the ten are actually British.
What links the artists featured in Part II of the exhibition
more strongly than location or medium is the sampling
and reinterpretation of cultural imagery often derived
from digital and graphic sources.
Dianne Bauer's epic drawing Meijius,
commissioned for the curved wall of the gallery, is cinematic
in scale and is clearly influenced by action-film and
comic-book aesthetics. Its Manga-like figures are suspended
in fractured, weightless action across a futuristic urban
landscape, their movements a distillation of anime traditions
removed from the constraints of a definite narrative.
Andrea Medjesi-Jones also utilises
cartoon imagery in her paintings, creating environments
reminiscent of 1950s Warner Brothers backdrops; here,
however, the future is full of aspiration, coloured in
baby blue and mint green. Through these settings objects
float, like half-remembered science lessons; gobstopper
atoms, cocktail-stick sputniks and boomerang platelets.
Like the half mouse-hole half black-hole entities which
feature in background, these environments reference both
the minute and the infinite.
Miho Sato's small paintings are more
gestural than other work on display; they seemed to be
quickly made, born out of a personal response to images
drawn from postcards, magazines and again animation. Usually
taking the form of a classical portrait, Sato reworks
her source to remove all facial detail, leaving a kind
of essence or shadow stranded in an undefined space. Most
endearing is Moomin 1; reduced to a practically
abstract shape, only the two pointed ears remain as indicators
of a small friendly animal.
Juan Boliver is boldly irreverent
in his subversion of modernist geometric tradition. Using
the vocabulary of serious abstract painting, what he creates
are monster-sized silly faces. Its funny, definitely,
but the paintings aren't individually interesting enough
once you've got the joke. Boliver works his images to
completion on a computer then simulates the flat graphics
in paint. This complex relationship between computer graphics
and hand-rendered paint is further explored by Pearl Hsiung.
Mimicking by hand the computer-graphic tools originally
conceived to create the hand-drawn look, Hsiung's paintings
have a glossy nastiness which references the image-saturated
streets of Los Angeles.
Rosemary Shirley is an artist
based in Winchester and is Coordinator of ARC: Aspex Artists
Resource Centre in Portsmouth.
New British Painting Part II,
John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, February - April 2004
