A LITTLE CLOSER
‘A Little Closer’ brings together a variety of artists working in painting and sculpture. These artists demonstrate the vitality of current practice in a thread that takes us to Paul Klee’s project and his epitaph: “slightly closer to the heart of creation than usual. But not nearly close enough”. The works in this exhibition are infused with visual invention, a sense of the importance of human action and creation, a joy in seeing, and a delight with that which is felt on the edge of seeing.
Bridget Riley noted the impact Klee had on British artists of the 1950s and 1960s, and this influence endures in values imparted to a current generation of contemporary artists, living as we do in the sway of those previous generations. In an article marking the impact of Klee, Riley remarked that “Klee is unique in that he demonstrated more fully that the elements of painting are not just means to an end, but have distinct characteristics of their own”. Klee’s analysis of the pictorial field allowed an flowering of possibilities in artistic production. Riley recounts regarding Klee’s thought:
“Long before a line is expressive, it works in specifically plastic ways, taking direction, dividing up areas, delineating or circumscribing forms, and so on ... very importantly, forms do not act as substitutes for bodies in physical space but are spatial agents in the picture plane”.
Klee also gestured toward the ineffable and his part in a chain of being –
his acts of creation were an embodiment of creation as such; as part of the all-thing. This exhibition is a call and response to Klee’s clear identification of an important part of artistic practice that is not often articulated in contemporary comment. Beyond strategies, ironies and positions, there is
a part of contemporary practice that endures, not as a legacy specifically of Klee’s, but as a primary part of the engagement of artists with their work. This is a gesture to a world not where we act out, but act. As Klee says in his 1918 diaries, “Art imitates creation. And neither did God especially bother
about current contingencies”.
This activity to found on the surface of the painting - part topography, part raw visuality, scratchy or dribbly but incantatory - can be found scattered across painting’s history, luminous and numinous, in a constellation that includes Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas, the garden paintings of Monet, the late work of Turner, the work of Ernst, Artaud, Viera da Silva, and more recently ascendant stars such as Makinti Napanangka, Mark Bradford and Jadé Fadojutumi.
This exhibition includes work that takes us to creation – poetic worlds, incantations, subtle observances, translations of experience, but above all
to a way of working that is close to the act of making. This way of working fumbles through the material, risking success and failure with the turn of a brush, or the reassurance or betrayal of a line. Invention is at the heart of this activity; the wonder of a new world emerging, different from that which has gone before.
There are mysteries here: the emotional impact of pigment or the novel form, the here and now and the everywhere, the appeal to the beyond. These works also speak of the possibility of immanence – that which
dwells in and remains in the work; of another being amongst beings. Material presence and play is important to this process – the mysteries of paint as experience, powerful for the viewer as much as the painter. The inventiveness and poetics of the work here draws the viewer in, to look closer, ponder, wonder, reflect, meditate. Here there are worlds within worlds, every room an everywhere. Klee allows us, (again from his 1918 diaries) in this emphasis on the generative possibilities of the creative act, to be able “to dissolve into the whole of creation”.
~ Andrew Hewish
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