C108
Review
London: Extended
Painting at Victoria Miro
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Adriana
Varejão: Tongue with flower pattern,
1998, oil on canvas and polyurethane, 201 x 170
x 68 cm; courtesy the artist / Victoria Miro Gallery
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Grayson Perry: God the father,
2003, glazed ceramic, 51.5 x 36 cm; ; courtesy
the artist / Victoria Miro Gallery
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Hiroko
Nakao: Untitled, 2003, mixed media, 150 x 150 cm;
courtesy the artist / Victoria Miro Gallery
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According to its press release, the
premise of this exhibition was to "extend the possibilities
of painting beyond the canvas." Although the strategy
of foregrounding painting's material register was one
particularly dominant modernist axiom, most, if not all
of the works in the exhibition somehow manage to avoid
the reductivism implicit within such a strategy. To this
end, the exhibition, in a very loose sense, can be read
as a series of trajectories that all somehow employ this
assertion as a critical point of departure.
In the case of both Adriana Varejão
and Hiroko Nakao this is through a reading of painting
as an analogue for the human body. In Varejão's Tongue
with flower pattern, the flayed middle section
folds out of the painting and literally spills onto the
gallery floor. However, with its crude mixture of polyurethane
and oil paint, its viscerality seems more in keeping with
a low-budget slasher movie. This unfortunately has the
tendency to bracket out a more nuanced reading of collective
or indeed personal trauma.
Conversely, although with Untitled
by Hiroko Nakao one's immediate response is to read
the exposed section of stretcher frame as some sort of
skeleton, unlike Varejão, Nakao's work addresses the possible
use, as much as the misuse of painting's material condition.
Painting's infrastructure in this context is understood
in terms of its potential to be adorned, and her elaborate
dressing of the stretcher, replete with lace flowers and
cascading threads, questions the tendency to translate
the 'decorative' in relation to painting only within a
pejorative sense.
Whilst both Varejão's and Nakao's
pieces give salience to the potentiality of painting as
a medium, Grayson Perry's glazed ceramic pot, God the
father, seems curiously aloof from the enterprise
as a whole. Although Perry's now-familiar tableaux of
domestic violence is technically very beautiful, any dialogue
with painting appears forced, if not entirely absent.
In contrast, Jacco Olivier's Sign,
a 46-second animation, borrows its impetus from a basic
set of convictions that fall firmly within painting's
traditional horizon. Projected onto the gallery wall at
knee-level, this painterly film manages to encompass a
number of concerns that figure what one might call the
grammar of painting. The superimposition of mark and colour,
the viscosity of paint and the activity's unique relationship
to time all become recast and as such present a conception
of painting that still somehow manages to exceed itself.
Craig Staff is an artist and
writer based in Northamptonshire.
Extended Painting,
Victoria Miro, London, January / February 2004
