From: Reg
Category: Art
Date: 20 April 2005
If you walk in to the Bloomberg SPACE you may think that you have misunderstood the sandwich board out side which advertises The Valley. As you tentatively follow the path through the maze of scaffolding which holds a platform above your head you may find yourself wondering if this is a major piece of art or architectural work that is going on, either may make you feel edgy. It will be a relief when you are met by two friendly guards who hand you the exhibition leaflet and point you up the scaffolding stairs which lead to the platform above – if you are lucky they will offer you the use of the chair lift. On the scaffolding platform you will be instructed to walk clockwise round the room, starting at the door in order to look at up tight little paintings of (mostly) rural type scenes made by 7 different artists. They did n’t reassure or excite me like good paintings do, but made me feel nervous like watching a bad comedian on stage. All have an eerie quality and I was unable to decide if this was their badness or goodness – but whichever I didn’t like them. To give you an idea of the artists, the art work and the exhibition I have extracted some key phrases from the leaflet for the show which describes them separately (I felt an amalgamation of all might give you more of a complete picture) ‘silent intimacy’ ‘forgotten landscapes’ ‘shifting relationships’ ‘playful innocence’ ‘fantasy, nightmare and scheme all at once’ ‘confuse our sense of space and depth’ ‘ the melancholic yearning for a romantic idyll that never existed’ ‘fragile fusion of different realities’ ‘familiar and evocative, yet impossible and unknowable’ ‘the pleasure and the haunting’ ‘memories both real and imagined’ ‘in the space between what is known and what might be’ ‘search for strangeness recognisable in intention’ ‘relationship between the possible and the improbable’ ‘romantic yearning’ ‘time seems confused’ The artists names are Ross Chisholm Jack Duplock Alistair Frost Paula Kane Lee Maelzer Penny Neville-Lee Christopher Orr
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