Strange Gaze at Cross Lane Projects

Overview

Today’s neo-surrealism neither smoothly continues surrealism’s original projects, nor makes a clean break with them. Instead, it adapts the pioneers’ discourse to what each artist finds pertinent at the present juncture. The exhibition, curated by the artist Rebecca Scott, brings together 16 artists with dreamlike and figurative works that reference and react to the current political and ecological context.

Artists include Emily Allchurch, Hans Bellmer, Dan Coombs, Emma Cousin, Mark Fairnington, Ian Frith Powell, Martin Greenland, Dereck Harris, Denise Hawrysio, Mike Healey, James Mackie, Bex Massey, Pascal Rousson, Rebecca Scott, Perdita Sinclair, and Suzy Willey.

Emily Allchurch creates complex photographic images that closely reference Old Master paintings and prints. Adopting the compositional framework of these original images has evolved as a useful device to allow her own explorations around architecture, place, and culture to emerge, dealing with the passage of time and changes to a landscape, and infusing the present-day with a sense of history.

Her starting point is an intensive encounter with a city or place, to observe and absorb an impression, and gather an extensive image library. From this resource, hundreds of her photographs are selected and meticulously spliced together using digital software to create a seamless new fictional space. Each artwork re-presents this journey, compressed into a single scene in order to focus on a social narrative. The resulting images form a snapshot of our times and are peppered with topical markers spotted in the environment: signage, advertising, graffiti, CCTV surveillance, protest banners etc.

Hans Bellmer (1902–1975) was a German artist, best known for his drawings, etchings that illustrates the 1940 edition of Histoire de l’oeil, and the life-sized female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer. In often violently erotic photographs and drawings, Hans Bellmer developed the Surrealist theme of mannequins and dolls as metaphors of sexuality with a singularly obsessive focus. He explored the usually pubescent female figure as fetish object. Bellmer’s series Die Puppe (The Doll), debuted in the 1934 issue of the Surrealist publication ‘Le Minotaure’, and the photographs were described as “variations on the assemblage of an articulated minor.” The doll consisted of a wood and metal skeleton covered with a realistic body of plaster and papier mâché; a system of ball-joints allowed it to be shaped into endless disturbing configurations, appearing dismembered and monstrous.

Bellmer first made contact with the Surrealists in 1924 on a trip to Paris. In 1932 he was inspired by the opera The Tales of Hoffmann, and the next year collaborated on a production of Hoffmann’s The Sandman: both works feature female automatons. At around this time, in opposition to the rise of Nazism, he stopped all work that supported the state. Bellmer began constructing his first “artificial girl” in 1934, with his wife, Margarete. Photographs of the doll were hand-coloured by Bellmer for the first edition of his book Die Puppe. The second series of dolls, even more disarticulated than the first, were created in 1936–1938. Bellmer left Berlin in 1938 and settled in Paris where he was part of Surrealist circles. With the outbreak of the war, he was interned as a German citizen in a prison camp from 1940–1941. Bellmer’s work appeared in numerous exhibitions, including the 1947 International Surrealist Exposition in Paris.

Dan Coombs creates his compositions from studies in collage and paint, which unite his figures with entirely invented surroundings, landscape dream worlds and interior spaces. These are human encounters charged with a mysterious, symbolic power. They are explorations of guilt, beauty and fear of isolation, that draw on myth, religion and psychoanalysis in order to grasp the real within the imaginary.

The paintings have a formality of composition and balance that underpins the energy of their execution but remain deliberately left open to interpretation from the viewer. They are attempting to capture the essence of an emotional situation, to represent ideas or embody meanings. The figures have an uncanny ambiguity they can be interpreted as emanations of the artist’s psyche, or as creatures in their own right trapped within dreamlike, gestural landscapes of heightened colour. In this work Coombs presents a series of paintings of bathers. Taking a subject developed by both Cezanne and Matisse, depicting the timeless nude in an Arcadian setting, these contemporary versions of the bathers subject distort the human form to convey temporal passage and movement through and around the landscape setting, as figures lie, relax, swim, interact and observe each other, both separate from and at one with nature.

Emma Cousin is a draw-er and a painter working in Peckham, London. Cousin’s figurative paintings feature dynamic, carnivalesque scenarios that explore the space between realism and fantasy, felt experience and communication. Interested in exploring the normative tensions within contemporary society, her contrapuntal compositions, colourful bodily extensions and awkwardly precise drawing acts out alternatives, led by a formal and diagrammatic logic. Responding to the limitations of language, Cousin considers how we might interact without it, in pre- or post-linguistic states. Painting ideas of support, mobility and progress, she often initially responds to words, in drawings that highlight puns and linguistic playfulness whilst breaking down meaning. Using metaphor as a visual vehicle she demonstrates the breach between the figurative meaning and the literal application.

Mark Fairnington’s latest series of paintings offer an intricate exploration of the hidden world beneath the forest floor. Through his exquisite depiction of tree roots, Fairnington captures nature in motion, highlighting the vibrant and dynamic processes of growth, decay, and regeneration. His meticulous brushwork and detailed portrayal of varied surfaces generate a restless energy, revealing the transformative power of the natural world. His works, created from collaged photographs and referencing the rich histories of landscape and still-life painting, blur the lines between observation and imagination. While the landscapes are visibly English, the plants depicted are drawn from a myriad of sources, including the glasshouses of Kew, 17th-century Dutch flower paintings, and botanical collections from the Natural History Museum in London and Oxford.

Ian Frith Powell’s work, while being finely honed and visually beautiful in its own right, is of a conceptual nature. It suggests or conjures obscure, liminal levels of experience - the metaphysical or subconscious regions that can only be apprehended laterally, and that lie at the edges of everyday consciousness. The work invites participation in the numinous facets of reality that may be intuited beyond the limits of linear, linguistic, or rational knowledge.

This work is marked by an interplay of repeated motifs. While culture typically references a shared symbolic language to convey transcendence, Ian has developed an entirely original, self-referencing semantics to achieve this end. His uniqueness lies in his refusal to de-code the interplay of signs and symbols that occur with rhythmic regularity – across his output. Rather in the manner of a Zen koan, ambiguity remains tantalising and unresolved. In many ways, the overall impression created by this substantial life’s work is one of a coherent ‘alternative’ culture, replete with its own sculpted artefacts and semantics whose meaning emerges from, and functions solely within the matrix of Frith-Powell’s imagination and of his technically virtuosic oeuvre. The works provide touchstones of universality while never being reductive or simplistically didactic. They could be termed ‘a fiction of reality’, in a vision that resonates strongly with the literary school of magical realism.

Martin Greenland’s paintings stem from memory and imagination. He largely works in the landscape tradition and makes work on a very delicate balance between the believable, based very much upon what is seen, and the unbelievable, which is about the unseen, the imagined. The artist makes a delicate balance between appreciating the physical beauty, the technical craft of paint and the concept; subjugating the paint to make it do the job of creating the illusion to carry the meaning behind the imagery.

For Greenland, painting is like a walk; “it is an exploration, but if I’m ‘inspired’ by a landscape, I don’t paint the places or landscapes I encounter, I paint about them. They are the catalysts for my invention because invention gives me the true power of being an artist, like a composer. I need to be able to make changes and yet keep the paintings convincingly rooted enough in our ‘real’ world. On a walk I’m in the real world but I’m also wonderfully lost in my own world which is my own interpretation of it. Here I’m taking it all in; in the studio I’m letting it all out, then embellishing it, adding to it, discarding parts, dissecting it, scattering its parts and allowing them to mingle with imagery from my memory or imagination. Painting thus becomes a realisation, in both the understanding and the making real sense of the word. A lot of what I set out to do starts as insistent images which enter my head. I live my life often as though I’m experiencing a waking dream, with recurring images, often very clear but fiendishly difficult to put down, flying at me, quite often unexpectedly. Many of these images evolve slowly, giving me different possibilities, and they are all somehow based upon something within my experience. I get cross pollination of ideas. I will see something, and it will hint at me of something else, something seemingly unconnected. Thus, a potential painting is born where I try to amalgamate a number of visual and conceptual ideas in a work which ultimately must work as a whole and must not diminish the power of any element within it.”

Derek Harris is interested in the mythic and mythopoeic, in the painted representation of ritual and dance and the substitutes, or parallels that we find for these fundamental expressions of fear and suspicion. “We live the fragmented modern urban life of the neo-liberal developed west – but can fear and loath like any of our ancestors in the face of mortal threat or the power of the Other (religious or otherwise).” In ancient and pagan times rituals were performed collectively and a shared experience was core to their value in the community. Harris is interested in how these things are expressed in a rational demystified world where we understand so much about disease, pestilence, weather cycles and even outer space? Where do we direct our internalised fears and suspicions? How do we find (spiritual) respite or healing and what performative form do we share, where is our modern ritual?

Harris presents paintings of figures in a parallel stage-like space, a pictorial space parallel to the picture plain. They might be described as Carnivalesque Tableaux, featuring figures caught, frozen in a fleeting moment of fleeting choreographed movement. The figure-hugging Lycra costumes allow for near-nude anatomical players on my painted stage, they are video-captured images of Contemporary Dancers, sourced from the Internet. The progress bar indicates the Open-Source origin of the digital images which are the beginning of my image making. Harris carefully transcribes the images using light projection and scribe, before working up a faithful analogue imitation of the digital source image. He uses mechanical tools such as the data projector and the air brush to transcribe mechanical images, yet, in the process of analogue and hand-made production his own authorship seeps in and claims a small stake of transformation. “I do believe that while these read as photo-related paintings, they are not photoreal, rather my sensibility marinades the muscular bodies presented for viewing with a subjective aura that is hard to define.”

Artist Denise Hawrysio once heard that some cultures believe that photography can steal your soul and that the process was disrespectful to the spiritual world. When finding a 1987 Spotlight, the UK’s largest casting directory for actors and actresses, she began removing the faces in order to free the soul of the sitter. In removing the faces from the book, the cut-out photograph from the previous pages got revealed, making a succession of fragmentary images. The use of these historical directories follows the tradition of the cut-up/cut-out/fold-in techniques developed by the Surrealists, Dadaists and beat poets who revelled in the inversion and redistribution of meanings to which images and/or texts could thereby be subjected. The obliteration of the faces results in a type of failed portraiture. As the cuts reveal the layers and fragments of the photographs behind, a new reading of the portraiture emerges; such possible readings could be in relation to the tropes of the horror film. John Carpenter’s The Thing, for example, portrays the infinite plasticity and morphing capacity of an alien being similarly the altered Spotlight portraits stretch the imagination to the border of the unrepresentable within a multiplicity of dissolving identities.

Mike Healey was educated at Wadham College, Oxford. He began his professional career in the theatre. At the Oxford Playhouse he became Associate Director and worked with many fine actors, including Judi Dench, Ian McKellan, Leonard Rossiter (‘Rising Damp’), Leo McKern (‘Rumpole of the Bailey’), and Janet Suzman. BBC TV (Manchester) followed where Mike made documentary films. He later moved to BBC Glasgow where he created an award-winning series of drama documentaries including The early life of Beatrix Potter’, starring Helena Bonham Carter, which won gold medal at The New York Television Festival in 1992. Throughout these years in television Mike continued to paint, holding at least two one-man shows a year. He also spent ten years living abroad – in Carcassone (SW France) and Corfu (Greece). Mike is also a writer and currently has nine books in print. These include crime fiction, historical novels and stage plays.

In this new work, James Mackie extends his exploration of the painted narrative. He endeavours to offer moments in an imagined yet familiar world that evoke themes including crisis, survival and cost. The work is intentionally ‘Romantic’ and was initiated by the rereading of two books – Cervantes’ ‘The Adventures of Don Quixote’ and George R. Stewart’s ‘Earth Abides’ and, of course, pressing current concerns. Mackie works in oils and allow the internal monologue and developing story to steer the work, often in quite fundamental and surprising ways. He tries to inhabit the imagined world during the painting periods and to use little if any reference material, translating what he imagines next directly to the canvas.

Drama, in its broadest sense, constantly knocks on the door as things progress. “I think this is linked to the career as a musician and director working in the theatre, dance, radio and film that I have pursued alongside my work as a painter. The desire to stimulate questions like Where is this? What happened? What happens next? is often a motivation.” Mackie’ parallel interest in music delayed him from starting Goldsmiths University in 1979 when he was asked to join the Two-Tone band The Selecter. He recorded two albums with the Ska band and toured extensively playing Hammond organ, keyboards and tenor sax. He later played for the pop band Madness on piano, playing mainly TV work, festivals and, memorably, Saturday Night Live in New York. He then built a reputation composing and creating music for theatre, dance, radio, tv and film that was to span two decades. To keep his artistic ambitions, he learned the skills of specialist architectural painting and gilding. In 2001 he dedicated himself to this, starting a practice back in his hometown of Lancaster. Over the next fifteen years his work took him all over the UK and onto the continent painting murals and restoring interiors.

Bex Massey’s work examines the role of painting and the language of display in the face of popular culture. She amalgamates simulacra and allegory to investigate notions of ‘worth’ via motifs extracted from her childhood. Her practice has long utilised these multiple collaged images to relay the mass produced, current capitalist epoch and anxiety abound the pace of modern digital living. Previous canvases painstakingly rendered stock imagery only to obscure them with further screen grabs. Each layer of British nostalgia threatening the ruination of the last, which to a degree mirrored the zeitgeist of post Brexit ‘Great’ Britain and her unease in this milieu. Canvases therefore left viewers feeling uncomfortable by the very nature of the reams of imagery and varying painterly motifs used in each work.

Massey’s latest series ‘My deuce, My double’ is a departure from this visual style, but a real progression in manifesting these feelings via paint. Canvases adopt a more minimal colour palette (lifted directly from the artist’s childhood) that feels retro, sticky and at points sickly sweet. They look softer, seem slower and feel more uncomfortable as the unease in this series is created via the relationships between the minimal elemental conflations. These works conjure silent sounds, unnoticed forces, and tonnes of pressure in an awkward ecstasy meets end of days power play. This climactic series aims to discuss global anxieties (cost-of-living crisis, imminent recession, global warming, wars, nuclear threat, echo chambers, conspiracy theories, disinformation and more…unravelling at terminal velocity) at best bubbling just below the surface of daily life, but for many ever present. She is painting ‘The [present] Age of Anxiety’.

Pascal Rousson is a London based artist and curator who’s work ironically debunks the ideologies and values embedded in Modernist art. From painting to sculpture and installation to ready-made objects, there’s a great diversity in Rousson’s work. “I tend to produce a lot, trying new ideas; not to exploit one theme over and over again. Irony is a constant component, also the use of popular culture and found objects (Comics, photo magazines etc). References to art history to try and highlight or understand today’s problems is another idea I have explored. I once did an installation called ‘The Museum of the Dispossessed’ which look like a car boot sale display where each found object referred to an art movement or persona. This title could summarise my practice quite well.”

Rebecca Scott uses genres of paintings as a metaphor, working through areas as diverse as nudes, flowers, still life, and figurative genres. Her large extensive body of works diverts into knitted works – which are an antithesis of painting and an acknowledgement of the feminist dialogue which is an important aspect to her thought process. The ‘Meat’ series of paintings emerge from the inherent conflicts surrounding notions of “the romantic” and “the real”, and most particularly, in the dichotomy opposing the ideals of nature with the realities of farming. The paintings’ seductive portrayal of cuts of meats originally found in the pages of traditional recipe books, represent the culmination of the collective urban disconnection with the land.

Having spent a great length of time living in the Lake District, Scott became increasingly interested in investigating the local landscape and rural heritage of the region. The quintessential beauty of the countryside offers a sheer and at times, almost obscene contrast to the harsh reality and demands of modern industrial farming. It is however, this very distance and illusion that the artist attempts to depict in the paintings, arguably trying to reconcile the banality and availability of the meat with the sensuality and carnality of the flesh. This undeniably points to the glamorised representation of the body as commodity in the everyday and to the recognition of “culture” as a product of the male gaze, with scarce consideration being given to the female as subject. Rebecca Scott’s Meat series is the artist personal response to the man made as well as a metaphor for the position of “woman” in male patriarchal culture.

Perdita Sinclair seeks out diverse first-hand experiences to inform the constructions of reality in her work. She pulls together climate change concerns, theories around mental health, and the beauty and challenges of scientific research with her lived experiences to create her hyper-visual, shape-shifting paintings and multidisciplinary work. Sinclair’s interest in mental health, especially Carl Roger’s theories that challenge the notion that we all inhabit the same reality has led her to train as a Person-Centred Counsellor. Her art draws parallels with this notion, and the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, situating it in a kind of superposition where many realities could be possible. This superposition also speaks of the unsettled Anthropocene times in which we live, where things are dramatically shifting in the world.

Much of her work is related to blue conservation and she regularly sea swims. She conducted a residency with Sail Britain and has been inspired by the work of marine scientists at the National Oceanography Centre and European Marine Board. She is currently collaborating with Sussex Bay to bring greater attention to the marine conservation zones. Her intrepidity has also seen her collaborate with Functional Anatomy, leading to her becoming artist in residence on human dissection courses at both Oxford University and Imperial College. She has also conducted two painting residencies with ESKFF at Mana Contemporary, USA, and worked alongside scientists from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, to make a large light installation that spanned the length of the Millennium Seed Bank atrium.

Suzy Wiley has been working from found cartoons since she finished the Goldsmiths MA in the eighties. Although the image is humorous, her work is all about materiality. Thick paint, particular brush strokes, and marks over the image emphasise the luscious materiality of oil paint, placing the painting into a new arena where there can be no hierarchy of image over materials. Instead, she is confronted by having to juggle the image with a pattern that seemingly has a life of its own, but which remains inescapably bound to the original image. As suggested in the introduction to her the ‘Rope-a-Dope’ exhibition, ‘alluding to the painting process often feels combative and risky’. In doing so, Wiley aims to bring together disparate elements, working within very strict parameters, in order to challenge her own expectations and find something surprising.