SECRET EUROPEAN STUDIO
7-30 July: www.arthouse1.co.uk
Special opening with artists present Sun 17 July 1-3 pm
Tours of show with me: Fri 29 July 5-6 pm
ARTHOUSE1, 45 Grange Rd - Bermondsey
Special opening with artists present Sun 17 July 1-3 pm
Tours of show with me: Fri 29 July 5-6 pm
London’s art scene benefits from an international outlook,
much of which comes from the presence of European artists. Yet that’s doubly
threatened: first, by the troubling referendum outcome, which risks reducing
artists’ ease of access; and second by the increasing difficulty of finding
living and studio space in the capital – a problem, of course, for all artists.
‘Secret European Studio’ celebrates, somewhat mournfully, the current diversity
of the London art scene by focusing on what’s being made by artists who come
from EU countries, but live here. Carlos Noronha Feio (Portugal) makes
paintings which seek abstract equivalents for power structures, and also sets
the show’s soundscape as he reflects on what ‘Universism’ might be; Alzbeta Jaresova (Czech Republic) puts her
figures into tense psychological relationships with transparent yet
unfathomable versions of London’s infrastructure; Simona Brinkmann (Italy) uses metal and foam-padded leather to form
half-fetishistic, half-architectural objects which suggest shifting boundaries
between private and public; Willem Weismann (Netherlands) seems to mock
both dystopia in general and the putative death of painting in particular in
his colourful cartoon-tinged tableaux; Franco-German collective Troika bring
sublimity to trauma as they draw intricate webs of lightning, and run a smoke
bomb through a labyrinthine maze; and Nadege Meriau (France) lets snails and
mushrooms impose their own dark logics on her photographic underworld. The
works emerging from these Secret European Studios cohere in a darkly
intelligent overview of where we are now, with a focus on boundaries and borders – and we wouldn’t want to be without
them… The vote to leave is a serious
concern in that and other respects. Let’s hope we use our supposed increase in
freedom to make it easier for artists to find the space to tell us how they see
the Brexit world.
Carlos Noronha Feio - UK /
Portugal
ON LONDON AND EUROPE: I believe that nationhood, citizenship, race,
ethnicity, are all constructs designed to allow for a better division of the
peoples of the world into manageable assets. The EU is, for me, an interesting
experiment on transnationalism and its freedom of trade, and more importantly
the freedom to move and settle outside one’s place of birth with minimum
bureaucracy —is something that I cherish.
Blue plain pierced by striking red continuum (and a delicate apparition by a friend), 2016 |
Carlos Noronha Feio is a
multi-disciplinary artist known for film, performance, rugs and collage as well
as the three strands of his practice sampled here. The sound collage in the hallway combines construction and deconstruction, including a granite boulder being split, and the chanted letters of 'univerism', which doubt into the idea of
‘universism’. Just as, Feio has
reflected, he isn’t easily slotted into the category ‘Portuguese’, being
blonde, with an Angolan lineage, and with relatives throughout Europe, he
says that ‘universism is one word that says that nothing is unquestionable and
that everything can change’. Linked investigations of national stereotyping
feature in many of the objects collected by Feio as an adjunct to and
stimulator for his practice: here he selects musket bullets, a roman ring used
to make seals with a lion relief and a small propaganda token for the abolition of slavery with the sentence
‘am I not a man and a brother’ surrounding a praying black man. They in turn
face two paintings which seek abstract equivalents for the power structures
implicit in colonialist world views. The
first is one of a series using the photographic background of images
representing the different ‘native peoples’ inhabiting the Pacific Ocean area
during World War II - taken from a book instructing American servicemen what to look for, and so associating the images with the
US's nuclear testing programme. Here he layers abstract marks onto that ground and –
as is always sociologically critical – its framing. He talks of fighting to
stop the background from influencing the manner in which he paints the foreground
– and losing that fight. The second
painting is from a more recent series in which the abstract ‘response’ has
floated free of the context it was fighting against. We’re left with a rather
beautiful painting haunted by history at several removes.
Assemblage of found objects - Includes: 9 musket bullets, roman ring with embossed lion, abolition token. |
ON STUDIO LIFE: I constantly travel between three countries. I hold studios in Portugal and the UK, and would love to be able to establish a studio in Russia. Yet the different visas, the permissions to work, the overall feeling of transgression on another's space — something I have not felt in the EU — makes Moscow the most difficult of my 'homes’.
Alzbeta Jaresova – UK / Czech Republic
The mixing of ideas, talent and cultures is what has kept me and thousands of other artists here. Its diversity and openness spearheads progress in the artistic community.
Spatial Composition, 2016 |
Two traditions of architectural geometry and their psychological impacts feed into Alzbeta
Jaresova’s combinations of plan-like models with figures in drawings and paintings: on the one hand, the blocky pre-fab concrete building of the Soviet era housing in which she grew up, on the other the airy modernism of London’s expanding skyline. In both cases she explores the interface between impersonal and potentially depersonalising structures and the way in which individuals experience themselves within the resulting spaces. You might call the resulting tableaux an exploration of the phenomenology of habitation. The mock-ups combine an implicit critique of utopian thinking in the architectural realm with a parallel window onto social isolation in what Jaresova sees as ‘the aggressive technological era in which we live’. Here the drawn hands act in spaces topologically analogous to the models. Moreover, the precise delineation of bodily elements comes out of a technique which builds in its own constraints: Jaresova sets her drawings up on a very light grid, and limits her gestures, as if in her own equivalent of architectural construction, to horizontal and vertical lines.
Position XX, 2015 |
Since moving here to study in 2011, Peckham has become an important part of my identity as a London-based artist, and I am part of a larger artistic community, which has seen my work develop. I’m in the Bussey Building, originally a Victorian sporting goods factory, which was built to allow for maximum natural light and has a bustling nature which seems ingrown.
Simona Brinkmann – UK / Italy
Installation view with Bridges Become Doors (2012-2016) |
Simona Brinkmann is a sculptor
whose work deals with power structures. She addresses spatial borders and
boundaries, and politics of movement control and enclosure in ways which can be
seen to relate to issues involved in free movement between nations. Perhaps
constraint is intrinsic to the logic of all architecture. Brinkmann goes so far
as to suggest that the built environment 'often seems to articulate an inherent
violence', and that 'one could talk about a fundamental power relation that is
at play in its very nature'. The work selected
here fuses the languages of architecture with that of fetishisation, suggesting a parallel between
the way built environments control the body through material processes of
exclusion/inclusion and how master/servant relations can operate to similar or
related ends. This feeds into a sleek aesthetic which puts the tropes of
minimalism slightly out of whack by potentially sexualising them and building in
contrasts of hard and soft, erect and fallen, shiny and matt. The barrier-like
sculpture ‘Checkpoint’ features foam-padded leather; the floor-bound ‘Bridges
Become Doors’ uses steel and graphite paste, but quite apart from being spread across the floor, looks too fragile to serve as a fence.
All of which can be read across to the classic philosophical
question: if we don’t want anarchy, how many restrictions should we accept?
checkpoint, 2016 |
At a time when neoliberalism is hell-bent on exterminating any sort of
activity whose primary logic is not to generate a profit, it is crucial to hold
on to these sorts of spaces… particularly in London, where art and artists
are gradually being stamped out. So to stand our ground on studio provision
means resisting the gradual extinction of creativity for creativity’s
sake. It becomes a very urgent thing.
Willem Weismann – UK /
Netherlands
In London you can meet anyone from anywhere. Everyone brings something unique, and it creates a sort of equal footing in my mind as no one is completely at home. It greatly relativises your own viewpoint as you engage with different perspectives from all over the world.
In London you can meet anyone from anywhere. Everyone brings something unique, and it creates a sort of equal footing in my mind as no one is completely at home. It greatly relativises your own viewpoint as you engage with different perspectives from all over the world.
Leftover geometry, 2013 |
Convention, 2014 |
I like being in London for its unceasing activity and hecticness. The relentless flow of everything coming at you is both nauseating and exhilarating and this is an important subject of my work.
Troika – UK / France / Germany
Troika (Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer
and Sebastien Noel) occupies a railway arch near Hoxton which is effectively a
laboratory, for the collective operates at the interface of art and science,
often through large scale installations. Cartography
of Control is made by what they have
called 'invisible lightning': the application of 15,000 volts of
electrical charge to burn irregular and unpredictable bronchial patterns
into wet paper as the current tries out various paths of least resistance. The series
Alternate Pasts results from setting
off one or more coloured smoke bombs in a labyrinthic wooden structure (which
is also displayed here). The structure is removed and only made visible on the
paper by ghostly traces of soot, so that in Troika’s words we see ‘two
colours/textures, two timelines that occupy the same narrow space and remind us
of an architecture of sorts that is only defined by the way it is used over
time, by the sum of all events that have taken place in it’. Both works
illustrate a constant loop between control and the inherently uncontrollable,
typical of the synthesis of apparent opposites in Troika’s work: a
demonstration of how to bring differences together such as, the Brexit vote showed,
was sadly lost on the majority of the British people.
Conny Freyer making the smoke bomb piece |
Our work
involves an active cooperation between many different people that work with us
in and outside of the studio, thus needs a space to make this happen. We
believe in the importance of the studio, not just as a functional space for
making our work but also as a site for exchange and dialogue.
Nadege Meriau – UK /
France
As an artist in London there is a feeling of being at the forefront of
what is happening in the art world and in other realms too. I often get ideas
while travelling on the tube. There is something liberating and inspiring about
moving anonymously amongst a sea of people who come from all over the
world.
Petite Mort, 2016 - lightbox |
Nadege Meriau spins a varied practice from a photographic
core which frequently sees new systems emerge from the conjunction of natural
and human, as in many works touching on the world of the bee. The lightboxes of
Petites Morts and the small Daguerreotype-like prints on metal of The Fall stem
from an ongoing collaboration with snails and mushrooms. The Fall show the constellation-like results - made in around twenty minutes, snails being 'fast' according to Meriau, of placing them on a flatbed scanner. She also gathers
mushrooms from her local woods, positions them face down – led by aesthetic instinct, not scientific
investigation – and then leaves the fungi to do their work overnight through touch,
movement and the release of oxygen. Their intimate encounters with the
photographic device climax as they propel their reproductive spores.
The ‘little deaths’ so recorded do indeed have a ghostly air as well as evoking
the contrasting mysteries of sexual attraction and asexual reproduction. We
might also be reminded of the chance processes introduced into many approaches
to abstract painting, and of the frequency with which Deleuze and Guattari’s
notion of ‘the rhizome’ is invoked in explaining contemporary art.
The Fall II, 2015 |
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