On entering the Centre for Recent Drawing's intimate space, I was pleasantly
stunned by Mia Pearlmanıs Eye - a giant swirl of cut and inked paper, lit
from below, casting shadows, as it expanded onto the ceiling and walls. This
work had instant appeal with an energy akin to Pop Art, in particular
Lichtensteinıs Wham. Along side responding to Pearlmanıs site-specific
installation, were Gareth Bell-Jones's arduous but carefully cut drawings.
Both artists employ the knife as their drawing tool: the drag of the blade
through paper to generate a negative space. Like conventional drawing, where
the mark activates the ground, the cut also activates the ground and has a
direct relationship to the remaining white paper. The empty cut areas, in
both Pearlman and Bell-Jonesıs work, allowed us to see the white walls of
the gallery behind it and the paper of the drawing cast a traceless shadow
on to the walls, creating a sort of negative double of the physical drawing
but appearing in shadow. Bell-Jonesıs drawings reflect bright and luminous
colour present on the reverse of the front facing white ground, producing
colour that is not overt but glowing from behind the white surface and
emphasising the edge of each hand cut hole. The visibility of the wall
behind and the shadows, are aspects of both artistsı works. Their drawings
are not discrete objects, but pieces that use and engage with the nature of
their location. This is in contrast to the famous cut artistı Lucio Fontana
who, in his pierced and slashed paintings, covered the back of his canvases
with black cloth so that the negative space was intangible, inaccessible and
not part of the gallery space: almost other worldly.
The diagrammatic, or map like references in Bell-Jonesıs work involve the
representation of a different scale of space, a scale that is consistent
within each work but could be microscopic or geographic. In Pearlmanıs Eye
it represents the eye of a storm, relocating us again to something outside
the works immediate context. This work reminds me of Da Vinciıs Deluge,
1517, where there is also a circulating energy of lines.
I especially liked the contrast between Bell-Jonesıs Diagram and Pearlmanıs
Eye in the central space. In Diagram, Bell-Jones had cut out all the empty
space between the lines of the linking network diagram and then reversed it
Leaving a delicate white net with its double in grey, its shadow cast behind
it on the wall. In Diagram, traces of the original colour of the diagram are
slightly apparent along the edges of the delicate cuts. With his systematic
work any mistake ruins the final outcome, where as Pearlmanıs organic
explosive work contains our fallible gesture.
This exhibition is a considered and visually exciting investigation into
drawing as a negative act of mark making, the removal of the ground as
apposed to the mark resting on it. It is well worth seeing, but after seeing
the stunning Eye by Pearlman take time to look carefully at the drawings in
response by Bell-Jones, which are just as stimulating but not as
instantaneous.
Centre for Recent Drawing, 2-4 Highbury Station Road, London, N1 1SB
10 April - 2 May 2008
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