list.co.uk/festival Festival Visual Art
REVIEW IRAN DO ESPIRITO SANTO Disarming and affecting collection of accomplished works ●●●●●
Internationally acclaimed Brazilian artist Espírito Santo here presents visual puns in the form of beautiful mirrored and crystal sculptures, and a wall painting that alternately produces an instinctive and immersive effect. This is a formula that not only plays with ideas of commodification but also toys with our conception of visual and physical experience. Espírito Santo is an artist known for his singular interpretation of the minimalist aesthetic and his persistent questioning of the nature of perception, and the impact of this exhibition of pared-down works is much greater than at first meets the eye.
Reacting specifically to the Ingleby’s upper gallery space, wall painting ‘En
Passant 5’ is the main focus here. Using regular house paint, the artist has mechanically striped the walls in grayscale gradations. Running from white through to black, this initially stark intervention faithfully engages with its site’s specifics and wall, floor, column and light quickly become entwined. As the viewer is compelled to move and walk its lengths, the painting becomes darkening skies, heat rising, weight sinking, fast forwarded scenes and flashbacks: a patterned composite of faintly associative elements. Nothing and everything at once, this affecting work not only encourages consideration of its formal, hypnotic aesthetic but also of its own physicality and the physical effect it produces. An artistic interest in ‘everyday experience’ is far from uncommon, yet you get
the sense that Espírito Santo takes this conceit further than most. Probing and at times difficult to unpack, there remains a disarming simplicity to these accomplished works. (Rosalie Doubal) ■ Ingleby Gallery, 556 4441, until 25 Sep, free.
REVIEW GILBERT AND GEORGE Fascinating mini-retrospective of Brit Art’s most enduring double act ●●●●●
There’s something quite unnerving in watching the three films that form the oldest contribution to this mini retrospective of Brit Art’s most enduring double act. Here they are, Gilbert and George, in grainy black and white, young men still in their 20s, but already suited and booted in postwar accountant chic and co-opting the iconography of Empire that subverts the politesse of the English establishment even as it flirts with its arcane protocols. It’s more than 40 years since the knowingly Joyce-referencing ‘A Portrait
of the Artists as Young Men’ depicted the timeless-looking couple not so much as still lives but lives in slow motion. And the post-bomb culture torpor they both preserve and channel through their (in)activity looks as archaic as the idyllic gin-o-clock ritual of their short ‘Gordon’s Makes Us Drunk’ and the ‘By Appointment’ seal that trails each film.
Only in the 1980s do they embrace the day-glo world outside where they can nestle next to pretty boys in ‘Existers’ looking like the indulgent grand- daddies of East London’s queer culture, while it takes until 1991’s ‘Faith Drop’, the most recent work on show, for the suits to come off completely in order for G and G to get naked and back to nature, their Mr Cholmondely-Warner-style celluloid exploits grainy remnants of a wasteland long since past. This bite-sized primer is part of the third Artist Rooms series culled from the National Gallery of Scotland and Tate collections. Gilbert and George’s image is present in most works bar the cartoon blow-job and adjacent ejaculatory spurts of ‘Hunger’ and ‘Thirst’ respectively, as well as ‘Fallen Leaves’. This latter piece features the sort of weather-beaten tramp who might have stepped from the pages of poet Heathcote Williams’ study of the eccentrics who gathered at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. Here, the tramp is tinged with the exotic allure that British colonialism in turns both fetishised and demonised. Like the provocatively amused young men in ‘Existers’, outsiders all, he stares defiantly back at the camera while England dreams on. (Neil Cooper) ■ Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, 624 6200, until 1 Nov, free.
REVIEW ALEXANDER AND SUSAN MARIS: THE PURSUIT OF FIDELITY (A RETROSPECTIVE) A journey back in time in search of truth, faithfulness and accuracy ●●●●●
‘I am in pursuit of fidelity and if I find it in no dearer time would I rather live,’ reads the passage written above two lovers on a 15th-century tapestry in the Burrell Collection. The tapestry, reproduced on a wooden board on the gallery wall at Stills, opens Alexander and Susan Maris’ retrospective. The lovers’ pursuit aligns with that of the artists, who claim to seek truth, faithfulness and accuracy through their artwork. However, as the inauthentic representation of the tapestry suggests, these goals are difficult to attain. Alexander and Susan Maris seek fidelity through photography, sculpture,
drawing and film. Assembled in the gallery like a scientific archive, it is the formal, museum-like presentation of work in cabinets and cases that suggests the potential to attain ‘truth’ exists, despite the inherently poetic nature of the work contesting otherwise. Collections of black and white photographs dominate the show. Early shots taken from the back of a moving motorbike create an imaginary landscape, while ‘Arbos’, a series of gelatine prints of sprawling bark, are so haunted by the legacy of Joseph Beuys’ trip to Rannoch Moor that they become a mythical, rather than objective, enquiry. The largest series, ‘The Pursuit of Fidelity’, is romanticised to the brink of cliché, documenting the artists being engulfed by nature upon their travels, much like a work by the 19th-century German romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich.
Their investigations leave a lasting impression of ambiguity: myth collides with fact, fiction replaces accuracy and history is continually unfaithful. The only ‘truth’ that resonates is the subjective, illusory nature of art, and as such its failure to ever achieve fidelity. (Rachael Cloughton) ■ Stills, 622 6200, until 24 Oct, free.
12-19 Aug 2010 THE LIST 85