BORDERLINE ( beyond a rational aesthetic) Curated by Laurence Noga
The Artists in conversation with the Curator Laurence Noga:
21st February – 22nd March 2015
Jake Clark, Katrina Blannin, Tim Renshaw, John Crossley, David J Batchelor, Sophia Starling, Laurence Noga, Alexis Harding, Paul Verheul.
The artists in this show explore borderlines through a geometry of boundaries. They ask questions about their comfort zones and question the in between through an expanded notion of painting. That expanded notion often takes an intuitive or anti intuitive position between two conditions, which impacts on the density of surface facture, and allows judgement in breaking of a system. There is a deliberate provocation through flatness uneasily composing itself with what it sits upon, or a mechanistic strategy that is hard won, testing viscosity and matter through protracted physical engagement. The atmosphere and specificity of colour, realign the reading of the works, asking questions of the site as a model for the in between, shifting the idea into material form, asking transformative questions of space and place. Harding, Starling, and Verheul approach their work in a very physical manner testing the behavior of the paint, manipulating a fusion of the material world with the plastic, emphasizing visual hierarchies and allowing the possibility of a physical extension of the works structure. Blannin, Renshaw and Noga test the relationship between the geometry of architectural spaces and the subjective experience of these structures. Applying a carefully modulated approach, they employ an urbanized geometry, like a cartographical assemblage of signs that gradually shift towards a more systematic internal logic or unexpected disturbance. Phenomenological and structural Implications are combined with elements of secrecy and code in the work of Clark, Batchelor and Crossley. Pushing the element of deciphering further through the density of colour relationships, allowing a metaphysical interpretation, allowing a slippage between the image and the space.
Born in London, Laurence Noga graduated from (Byam Shaw) Central Saint Martins; University of the Arts London in 1991, receiving the Post Graduate Award of Merit for Painting. Optically, both the collages and the paintings in Noga’s work operate from a long-term interest in in-between space – physical/chromatic, often subverted by intuitive or anti-intuitive approaches as a strategy, drawing the audience into peripheral world of imperfect geometries. He is a Painter, Curator, and Writer. He curated ‘Intuition anti Intuition’ at The lion and Lamb Gallery London , and Beyond the Shadow at APT Gallery London 2012. Currently he writes for Saturartion Point.org. He has exhibited widely in London, Paris, Netherlands. Recent exhibitions include ; Colour and Otherness Grace Teshima Gallery Paris, GB/Switch/NL – APT at Pulchri Studio,Den Haag,The Netherlands 2014 , That’s Not What – Hide Gallery, Leathermarket London SE1, 2013 Crash – Charlie Dutton Gallery London WC1, Sluice Art Fair Hoxton 2013, Approaching the In-Between, Laurence Noga/Nancy Cogswell , Eleven Spitafields London 2011.