Gooden Gallery

DISPUTATIO / Richard Clegg, Dan Coombs, Chantal Joffe, Peter Ashton Jones, Darren Murray, Neal Tait and Covadonga Valdes

at GOODEN GALLERY

MAY 6th – 29th 2011
 

Disputatio presents seven contemporary painters working with particular modes. The essential aim is to allow the diversity of each mode to flourish, but also facilitate dialogue ‘between’ the works, providing additional sources of influence and cross reference; an interplay that refracts and rebounds meaning around the room.

Richard Clegg often incorporates text and or signs and symbols within his work. Whilst retaining textual articulation and meaning, the use of text also provides conspicuous visual weight. The inclusion of perspex and mirror throws up additional ‘transactions’ within the work that challenge ideas of the illusory and the real in painting.

The nude is intrinsic to Dan Coombs’ compositions. At times detached, but oddly present, his use of the figure can be allied to the emotional ‘temperature’ that might be experienced viewing a still-life painting. ‘Aphrodite’, 2011 is no exception; the figures are positioned, almost classified into their own space, to offer a sense of order and arrangement that serves both formal and personal allegorical purposes: an oddness of pictorial management that gives the painting an unusual sense of hyper-reality.

Chantal Joffe’s pieces 'Victoria' and 'Scarlett' come from a series of recent works that present singular images of women. Substance and significance is arrived at through the presentation of hypothetically constructed ‘personas’ rather than real portraits. Created via admired role models and through the manipulation of scale, posture and brushwork, the paintings imply discomfiting psychological states.

Peter Ashton Jones includes 'The Dartboard', 2011- a work from a recently finished series of thirteen paintings influenced by William James’ Pragmatism: “Thirteen has long been the favourite number for anyone wishing to represent uncontainability and irreducible plurality” Bart Eeckhout.

Darren Murray’s paintings exploit nature and natural phenomena. Images are often appropriated from The National Geographic, however shifts and contrasts of detailed realism and the use of a very personal, stylised visual language, make the paintings less about nature and more about the wrestle between painting and the image.

Restrained narratives and withheld psychologies permeate the experience of viewing Neal Tait’s paintings - until, that is, a moment of ‘definition’ becomes apparent; a negotiable moment, where an alignment of ‘intention’ (in the making) and ‘reception’ (in the reading) make themselves compatible.

Covadonga Valdes renders nature with a diligence for detail that infers ritual in painting. Her meticulous supervision of cumulus foliage (and in this case water as well) to create uninhabited spaces that strain with solitude, is surely what led Geraint Evans to note the artist’s reference to the importance of ‘engaging with the tension between presence and absence’ (Turps Banana, Issue Four)

For more info see: http://www.goodengallery.com/exhibitions/11_DISPUTATIO/