- Venue
- ARTHOUSE1
- Location
- London
Fleur des Champs: A Landscape Exhibition
Sean Fairman at ARTHOUSE1, Grange Road, Bermondsey SE1
Nov 8 to Nov 30: Fri to Sun 2pm to 6pm or by appointment
It is still possible to buy eel pie and liquor at Manze’s Pie and Mash Shop on Tower Bridge Road in Bermondsey, and the Bermondsey Square Antiques Market still opens at five a.m. every Friday, just as it has for many years, despite the rapid gentrification of the area since the development of the square in 2006. A new restaurant quarter has grown up along Bermondsey Street, whilst nestling in the middle of all this gastronomic delight sits the new White Cube Gallery, on the site of a former dairy. If the street itself boasts eighteen restaurants and bars the area as a whole, from Tower Bridge to Rotherhithe, enjoys the cultural benefits of a much larger number of galleries and art spaces. Newest among them is ARTHOUSE1.
ARTHOUSE1 at 45 Grange Road is a new venture by designer and ceramicist, Rebecca Fairman. Her unique gallery space of 700 square feet, with 29 metres of white wall hanging space and excellent natural light, occupies the top floor of her immaculately restored, early Victorian town house, an integral part of Bermondsey’s architectural history, associated as it was with the Bermondsey Mission Hospital, as well as featuring in Naomi Campbell’s reality TV show The Face, currently on Sky Living.
Her inaugural show, Fleur des Champs, features a series of new works by her artist brother, Sean Fairman. The gallery space might well have been designed with this exhibition in mind, so perfect is the match between the work and the space.
Described by the artist, unequivocally, as landscapes, the paintings are not landscapes in the conventional sense and transcend traditional categories by blurring the boundaries between the representational and the abstract. In an art historical context they might be seen as part of what the late writer and curator Robert Rosenblum called the “Northern Romantic Tradition”, one that stretched from Caspar David Friedrich, through J M W Turner, to the Abstract Expressionists, whose work, according to Rosenblum, was “predicated on the imagery of landscape”.
The exhibition was inspired by a journey to the mountains of North Wales, where the artist set out on a series of solitary walks around Snowdon and up to the jagged tops of Tryfan. Here he encountered the huge boulders of Adam and Eve that crown the summit like ancient megaliths. Seen as symbols of creation and deception and a temptation to the foolhardy to attempt the yawning “Leap of Faith” from one to the other, they became the focus for much of the work in this exhibition.
The landscapes are not easily read. Whilst full of elemental power and imagery, the works give few representational clues, though the pillars of Adam and Eve are often visible and the appearance of the letters A and E give opportunities for imaginative word play. The small A and E sculpture suggests lovers entwined: Adam and Eve, of course, or, perhaps, Abelard and (H)eloise?
Walking round the gallery space is to experience a mix of emotional responses to the work. Journeys to the mountains are themselves ambiguous. As the environmentalist Robert Macfarlane observed in his book Mountains of the Mind “Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves and half in love with oblivion”. Like mountains, the paintings have many moods. Earthscape, Leap of Faith and Fleur des Champs are lighter, both visually and emotionally, than some of the other works, optimistic, almost pastoral settings for the meadow flower of the exhibition’s title. Darker and more brooding, with a greater emotional and pictorial depth, are Tryfan, Stormscape and, the dominant work in the exhibition, Temptation. The essential ambiguity of the show is perhaps summed up by the contrast between Tryfan and Tryfan II, and Fleur des Champs and Fleur des Champs II where the second painting in the pairing seems to mark a challenging counterpoint to the first.
In as much as the work is about the landscape of the mountains, in both their beauty and their ruggedness, it is also about texture and materiality. The seductiveness of the surfaces is as important as the subject matter. The use of clay and tar and other organic materials, the limited palette reflecting the colours of a barren but inviting nature, the sculpted surface of the work, built up like rock strata in sedimentary layers, all contribute to the evocation of the geology of the mountains.
Whilst Fairman might well have been carrying Poucher’s Peaks, a practical guide to the Welsh mountains, in his rucksack, the exhibition owes rather more to books like William Dalrymple’s meditative journey From the Holy Mountain, in the way that it resonates with the sublime aesthetic of the remaining wild places of Britain. The exhibition is a paean to romantic love: love of nature and love in human relationships, both of which are represented by the heart of the work, the meadow flower of the exhibition’s title, found embedded in the work, a fragile element in a harsh environment.
John Wilkes, Independent writer on the arts
