- Venue
- ARTHOUSE1
- Starts
- Friday, May 1, 2015
- Ends
- Saturday, May 30, 2015
- Address
- 45 Grange Road Bermondsey SE1 3BH
- Location
- London
- Organiser
- ARTHOUSE1
In an age of rapidly consumed data and images, painting as an art retains special powers and privileges; those of careful construction, patient organisation, and extended duration. O-N-T-O-L-O-G-Y presents three painters whose work looks away from the image-world, even from the idea of ‘image’ itself, to the persistence of painting in its fundamental constitution as object, which is to say an articulate and evolved arrangement of densities, rhythms and forms made for the purpose of being presented to a viewer. In this, the work comes close to the ambitions of those Cubists who believed that painting and constructed object-hood were one and the same. The result is a category of art in which, as Sartre more recently suggested, many agencies play an essential part. It is the joint effort of an artist and a viewer, he said, “which brings upon the scene that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. There is no art except for and by others.”
The three painters of O-N-T-O-L-O-G-Y use the room-spaces of ArtHouse1 for this visually stimulating show. Celia Cook makes further steps in her elaboration of rotating, dynamic forms that tumble and collide within the primitive force-field of the canvas. Vanessa Jackson, well-known in London and internationally for her small-to-mural size paintings, displays connecting forms that rhyme and dance between the edges of generally upright formats. Brandon Taylor contrives patterns and densities that evoke the self-organising but generally inscrutable processes of nature, those we sense are there but can seldom account for in language.
