Neither/nor

Ayliffe, M; Cleary, C; Fletcher, BA; Harris, S; Payne, A

Abstract

The artists featured in Neither/Nor explore painting as an experimental site in which the traditional criteria by which painting has come to be defined have all but been expunged. Painting that is neither/nor. The artists re-examine the philosophical and theoretical underpinning of painting, drawing upon gender, otherness and inter-disciplinarity, as they attempt to rethink and redefine the task of painting.

In the late 19th century Maurice Denis asked that we ‘Remember that a picture before being a war horse or a nude woman or an anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order’. This famous dictum presaged modernism’s assault on pictorial form. If we take on Denis’s definition we can declare that a painting can be said to consist of pigment and binder, ground and support, affixed to the wall. A painting is in short an object, and that its most characteristic features are its frontality and its capacity to be apprehended in an instant. One might also argue that it is in the labour, craft and devotion to pushing around this fluid viscous substance and its power to transform marks and daubs into pictorial representations that constitute a practice. However, here is the crux. Painting is a practice. It has a history. It is mediated by a discourse. It has become idiomatic and it no longer demands that the manipulation of pigment and binder be its defining characteristic.

Maggie Ayliffe’s paintings explore the production, space and narrative of abstraction as a gendered site subject to subversion by the feminine. She employs collaged digital photographs and contiguous impasto paint swatches. Caroline Cleary’s work presents painting as a more fluid and dynamic spatial construct in film animations of gestural mark making configurations. Both Ayliffe and Cleary seek to test our ability to make sense and classify the resulting mutations of space and form in an attempt to map the ‘other’.

Brendan Fletcher creates mass produced, industrially fabricated, abstract vacuum formed plastic icons. The mythic touch of the painter is erased in the industrial process and yet the form and visual dynamic of the work resonates as a religious icon. Simon Harris paints layer upon layer of pigment and binder, every bit the archetypal painter, and yet his labour and methods aim also to erase any trace of the artists brush and deny the viewer any access to a simple authorial presence. Alistair Payne’s dematerialised 'paintings' and installations challenge the very definition of a painting practice. Hardware products, water pumps and pipes are configured to create 3D drawings in space, the speed and rhythm of the line is animated by the pulsating brightly coloured fluid through the pipes. Fletcher provides us with a commodified icon, Harris’s reflective surfaces reveal our own search for the painterly moment and Payne undermines the fixity and conviction of the authorial, gestural mark.

Citation

Ayliffe, M., Cleary, C., Fletcher, B., Harris, S., & Payne, A. Neither/nor. 15 September 2010 - 30 September 2010. (Unpublished)

• Exhibition Performance Type: Exhibition
• Start Date: Sep 15, 2010
• End Date: Sep 30, 2010
• Deposit Date: Dec 9, 2010
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 9, 2010
• Additional Information: Number of Pieces : 0