Amikam Toren - Armchair Paintings

Amikam Toren Armchair Painting - Untitled (inner beauty)

2008

 ‘What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or disturbing subject matter ... like a comforting influence, a mental balm – something like a good armchair in which one rests from physical fatigue’.

 Henri Matisse

Armchair Painting - Untitled (who needs 
actions when you got words) 2006  

Armchair Paintings is an ongoing series of works by Israeli/British artist Amikam Toren. 

Toren, who has been producing these works since 1989, sources original oil paintings from markets, car boot sales or second hand shops and lives with the work until he happens upon a suitable phrase to insert. The stencilled lettering is cut away from the canvas in a process of erasure rather than addition, spelling out appropriated phrases from graffiti, leaflets or signage. 

Sometimes uncanny, sometimes offensive, sometimes funny, the texts are always incongruous with the images behind them. Cutting through the image's focal point they are often somewhat confusing in a manner that one can imagine would please Belgian Surrealist René Magritte. This clashing of one world of banality with another lends a both the image and the text a strangeness that neither would have on its own. The works are funny at the same time as giving a knowing nod to their artistic precedents - Duchamp's readymades, Fontana's slashed canvases, the aforementioned Surrealists' play with mis-married words and images. 

The Matisse quote Toren references in the series' title is easily read as a defense, or even a call, for sappy leisure painting devoid of the kind any avant garde agenda or politics; it is worth noting that this was written in 1908 - a time when Matisse was widely derided and ridiculed by his artistic milieux for his radicality. The decorative and the avant garde are both present in these works, as is a questioning of the role of art in everyday life.

Armchair Painting - Untitled 2001

Armchair Painting - Untitled 1990

Richard Stone - Mono & The Day Will Come

Richard Stone - Mono & The Day Will Come,

Antique oil on board, antique parian porcelain, wax 

Appropriating found paintings and sculptures Richard Stone reclaims potentially kitsch artifacts and reworks them through simple processes of abstraction. The classical reference points of the figure and landscape are intangibly out of reach as Stone's investment in these objects has submerged their otherwise tawdry relations with a sense of absence and metamorphosis.

Either by adding wax to porcelain figures or removing paint from antique oil paintings, Stone's emphasis seems to be on solitude and enforced amnesia. Overlooked generic landscapes of past years and ideals are abstracted to a point of sublime like contemplation, and the proposed heroism of mass produced classical figurines is annulled. Neither destructive nor iconoclastic Stone's work offers up somber poetic entry points to these past monuments of taste.

Ruth Claxton - Lands End

Ruth Claxton Lands End

2008 - 09

    

Ruth Claxton's Lands End is an evolving body of work presented as a sprawling installation of steel structures housing and exhibiting a series of modified porcelain figurines. The structures themselves are nested rings of steel alternately open or filled with chromatic plates or mirrors extending and disrupting the exhibition space. Commissioned by Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK and subsequently touring around the UK and beyond, the installation is developed and reconfigured at each outing, responding to the specificities of each site that it visits.

The structures are peopled by kitsch figurines collected by the artist from car boot sales, eBay or junk shops and then modified through interventions that frequently see the heads, faces and eyes of the figures concealed. The blinded, obscured figures present themselves in uncanny tableaux shifting our attention from the grand, visually dense, sculptural complexity of the installation at large to the minute and carefully executed details.

Hadley+Maxwell - Improperties

Hadley & Maxwell - There is plenty of hope, but not for us

2010 - 11, Antique plaster and wooden figures, Chinese wooden lacquer box, styrofoam, wood, screws, bronzing powders, oil and acrylic paint. 

From the body of work Improperties 

Hadley+Maxwell, Who doesnt finger

Hadley+Maxwell's body of work Improperties is a sprawling series of sculptures and installations. Composed of cultural fragments and figurative models, Hadley+Maxwell have sliced the objects and placed them inside museological type displays. Almost as an anthropological section, the cutting of the ojects can be seen as a contemporary translation of past histories and how they are strictly placed in pseudo museological structures. The seemingly violent act also calls to question potential interpretations of these now discarded artifacts

"To cut is to separate, yet cutting also creates the possibility of new, uncommon associations and agglomerations of things beyond familiar properties and modes of classifiable identification." - Patricia Reed, Improper Human-ness

Hadley+Maxwell, Human?