The Sleep Of Reason: New Work By John Clark
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THE SLEEP OF REASON JOHN CLARK An exhibition of new paintings by John Clark that reflect upon a world re-invented by global business .
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A catalogue of paintings and texts to accompany the exhibition The Sleep Of Reason, Cambridge, 2015. An exhibition of new paintings by John Clark that reflect upon a world re-invented by global business.
Transcript of The Sleep Of Reason: New Work By John Clark
T H E S L E E P O F R E A S O N
JOHN CL ARK
An exhibition of new paintings by John Clark that reflect
upon a world re-invented by global business .
T H E S L E E P O F R E A S O N
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C A M B R I D G EU N I T 7 , G R A F T O N C E N T R E
J U N E 1 9 - J U L Y 1 5
M O N - S A T 1 0 A M - 6 P M
S U N 1 1 A M - 4 P M
JOHN CL ARKT H E S L E E P O F R E A S O N
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C a m b r i d g e
The work in this exhibition brings together paintings that were made last year and first shown in three separate exhibitions in New York, London and Stock-holm as part of a collaboration with Eton Shirts.
They are simple motifs; small scenes that comprise only a few elements in which a figure or figures are deployed on a plane, most commonly set against black. Drawn from low resolution digital models, they play to an appetite for the dramatic and the stark, and echo the absurd in theatre and dance.
For all that they appear articulated and lit, the figures that populate these works are left in a state of becoming, no more defined than the indeterminate space they inhabit. In the mix of visual clarity and narrative ambiguity, paint-ings emerge that occupy a space somewhere between traditional narrative painting and still life. As for the motifs themselves – the falling figures, those that lean and those that sit, the strivers, the individuals and the groups – they draw on the mythologies that saturate the modern workplace: professionalism, teamwork, inclusion, commitment, and the quiet desperation these notions produce in a workforce.
The experience at the heart of this work is not rooted in art, but its history and methods provide the means to engage with common experiences lived out in turbulent times, where trust in our institutions has been shaken and our faith in order continues to be challenged.
T H E S L E E P O F R E A S O N
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1. Heroes, 2015
2. Heroes 2, 2015
3. Gone, 2015
4. Incomplete Structure, 2015
5. King, 2015
6. Study For Prism, 2014
7. Study for Glitch, 2014
8. The Edge Of Reason, 2014
9. The Sleep Of Reason, 2014
10. Monsters, 2014
11. The Staff, 2015
12. The Staff 3, 2015
13. A Really Difficult Problem, 2015
14. In The Absence Of Information, 2014
15. Unwritten, 2014
16. A System, 2014
17. The Winnowing, 2014
18. Complicit, 2014
19. Taxonomy, 2014
20. Taxonomy 2, 2014
21. Wanderer, 2014
22. Wanderer 2, 2014
23. Proximate Study 1, 2014
L I S T O F W O R K S
T H E S L E E P O F R E A S O N
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24. Proximate Study 2, 2014
25. Distant, 2014
26. Baltic, 2014
27. Study 2 for Veil 4, 2014
28. Study For Veil 4, 2014
29. The Good Man, 2015
30. Inversion, 2014
31. An Interior, 2014
32. Figures in a landscape, 2014
33. Before Dawn, 2014
34. At Night, 2014
35. Midday, 2014
36. Study For Later 2, 2014
37. Secret, 2014
38. Secret 2, 2014
39. Let The Sun Shine In 4, 2014
40. Let The Sun Shine In 2, 2014
41. Let The Sun Shine In 3, 2014
42. Emergency Room, 2012
43. Race To The Bottom, 2012
44. On The Shoulders Of Giants, 2012
L I S T O F W O R K S
T H E S L E E P O F R E A S O N
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Heroes | 2015Oil On Canvas40 x 30 inches | 102 x 76 cm
£3200
You don’t see much dynamic posing in painting these days. Whatever else can be said about the impact of the camera on painting the most obvious result seems to have been the ending of action in narrative painting. All that rude energy, and those gurning faces, along with the stories they told found a new home in comics, cartoons and film, leaving painting to be, largely, still.
This painting along with its companion, “Heroes 2”, continues a long standing effort to re-introduce a bit of rumbustiousness into a figurative painting. There are, inevitably perhaps, echoes of Muybridge and Bacon in the set up.
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Heroes 2 | 2015Oil On Panel48 x 30 inches | 122 x 76 cm
£3200
Like its companion ‘Heroes’ this painting shows two figures in implausible motion to no obvious end. But they’re certainly trying. The shallow Muybridge space of Heroes ahas become deeper here and the relationship of the figures less easily interpreted. They’ve become an overlapping tangle of bits of anatomy that draws as much on Bacon as it does more classical renderings of heroic men striving to some end or other.
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Gone | 2015Oil On Canvas24 x 18 inches | 61 x 46cm
£1100
Two figures seen from behind running, or starting to run. As in “Heroes” and “Heroes 2”, this painting plays with dynamic posing. Here, the figures are faceted with no suggestion of the soft sculpting that characterises the others. They are angled and sharp, all knees and elbows and effort as they set off furiously for what can only be a short distance; their track is a sliver. In common with other more recent paintings the treatment is broad, the painting quick.
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Incomplete Structure | 2015Oil On Canvas24 x 18 inches | 61 x 46 cm
£1500
He weighs a lot, the figure in the centre. His lifters and supporters are taking the strain. Together they form a structure that echoes architecture as much as it does those old pietas. The incompleteness in the title refers to the levels of resolution in the group; the resolved sculpt of the little girl, the equally resolved construction of the figure on the right and the suggestion of the figure at the giant’s feet. There is a discontinuity of resolution that is played with in the painting which is happy enough to let the differences collide. Happy enough to let them be. Jumbled together they build a grouping that is in the process of becoming.
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King | 2015Oil On Canvas24 x 18 inches | 61 x 46cm
£1400
Control is an intoxicating possibility from which we are given to believe much good will flow. Scorsese explored this territory and its consequences at length in the Godfather, as did Shakespeare in Macbeth. This is a small addition to the genre.
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Study For Prism | 2014Oil On Canvas18 x 24 inches | 45.5 x 60.5 cm
£850
A multi-coloured man stands, his feet bound by a cloth. Where his head should be the figure of a woman inclines. They intersect implausibly forming a silhouette that is at first confusing. It takes some untangling but might eventually make some sense. Here, as in other work, the unreality of the computer and its product is mined for potential metaphors and allusions.
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Study For Glitch | 2014Oil On Canvas12 x 16 inches | 30.5 x 40.5 cm
£450
As with “Study for Prism”, “Study for Glitch” co - opts some possibilities arising from digital production to construct an ambiguous image in which a man and a woman intersect. Accident was once much talked about in art which embraced it for many reasons. In the digital world intention is everything and accidents, or ‘glitches’, tend to be hidden. They are problems to be solved on the road to perfection. This painting in common with others in the show accepts the glitch is more interesting than the solution.
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The Edge Of Reason | 2014Oil On Canvas30 x 40 inches | 75.5 x 101cm
£2400
One of three connected paintings inspired by Goya’s print ‘The Sleep of Reason Breeds Monsters’. It has been a long standing ambition to paint the monsters but in this, as in the others in the group, the temptation was resisted. Instead in the painting a disordered jumble of interpenetrating figures is presented. The plane about which they tumble is not impermeable as it is in other works, but porous. Figures leech through it. Nothing is fixed. It’s chaotic and perhaps just a little monstrous because of it.
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The Sleep Of Reason | 2014Oil On Canvas30 x 40 inches | 75.5 x 101cm
£2400
Goyas slumped and sleeping figure is replaced by a sleeping office worker who is not quite connected to the ground. There is no swarm of beasts but some dark flecks rise from a plane which shows some corrosion of some sort at it’s edge. Whatever danger he’s in is contained in his portly form, and if the dappled light falls on him prettily he might be right to worry whats casting the shadow.
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Monsters | 2014Oil On Canvas30 x 40 inches | 75.5 x 101cm
£2400
The third painting in the group catches a fragment of something vast that is passing or looming. A whirlwind of arms feet and bodies cutting through an ink blue space.
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The Staff | 2015Oil On Canvas40 x 60 inches | 102 x 152 cm
£4800
The first in a new series of paintings in which a mixed group of figures stand close together. There’s power in numbers. This and other works in this series were made with half an eye on Pirandellos ‘6 actors in search of an author’. There’s something noble about them and slightly absurd, and perhaps an echo of other works by other artists, Rodins’s The Burghers of Calais most of all. As in other groups and couples that occur in other paintings in the show they seem bonded by something more than circumstance.These paintings were made with the history of the space they’re now shown in mind: An empty retail unit whose closure will have had consequences to those who once staffed it.
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The Staff 3 | 2015Oil On Canvas36 x 48 inches | 92 x 121 cm
£3500
The group in “The Staff” is here deployed differently and painted more broadly in yellow against black. The painting declares its history not only in the brush marks but in the squaring up that formed part of its construction. The figures themselves are no longer so close and are more casually arranged. One looks out at us as if in challenge or confusion. As if forming the question ‘what you looking at?’
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A Really Difficult Problem | 2014Oil on Canvas24 x 32 inches | 61 x 81 cm
£1300
“It’s not power that corrupts, it’s fear.” Aung San Tsu Chi
A familiar scene of men sitting in judgement. They are management in the business of managing. Everybody seems to be a manager these days, but when everybody is a manager who is there left to manage? It presents a problem.
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In The Absence Of Information | 2014Oil On Panel24 x 24 inches | 60.5 x 60.5 cm
£1500
Somebody once said to me, “Being ignored is a form of tyranny”. It was one of those observations, delivered casually at the time, which has accrued resonance over the years working in offices. It helps explain a particular form of stress the grows in the heart of many a comfortable worker. Here a portly man sits. He does not look shackled or under the yoke but, in his splendid isolation, he is far from free.
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Unwritten | 2014Oil On Canvas36 x 24 inches | 91 x 60.5 cm
£2400
We live in a ‘knowledge economy’. Corporations understand the importance of creativity and communication and develop systems to harness it for their greater good. The principle tool for capturing it is the post-it note which is ubiquitous in offices of companies up and down the land. They are the physical embodiment of the bullet point and the x-statement. They suggest discipline of thought, and clarity of vision. But they obscure as much as they reveal and tend to smother as much as they stimulate. Here, through a blizzard of information and ideas a lonely figure can be glimpsed.
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A System | 2014Oil On Canvas48 x 30 inches | 121 x 75.5 cm
£2800
There is a long history in western painting of tangled and tumbling figures caught at the moment of their fall. From Rubens, to Rodin, to Breughel, our art history is stuffed with figures in rapid and desolating descent. The biblical stories to which they refer may not have the general resonance they once had but the images themselves retain their power. This painting and other in the series take up the torch. It imagines the image as an archetype and presents it as if it were an artefact dug up from some forgotten spot. Something to be studied much in the way that weather systems can now be modelled and investigated from a safe distance. Here the object has been dig up and is viewed on a slab.
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The Winnowing | 2014Oil On Canvas48 x 30 inches | 121 x 75.5 cm
£2800
An oblique development of ideas that provoked “Unwritten”. The tangle of notes is combined with the tumbling figures of “A System” producing a pattern of light and shade in which the geometry of the notes, hard edged in this, help describe the space in which the figures drop.“The Winnowing” in the title refers to a moment in the structured approach to creativity made popular by De Bono in which the flurry of ideas caught by the post-its are ‘ winnowed’ by leaders in the hope of finding some nugget that will deliver success.
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Complicit | 2014Oil On Canvas48 x 30 inches | 121 x 75.5 cm
£2800
As with “A System” this painting makes concrete an image lodged in our collective unconscious. Western society may be largely secular and full of doubt but it does allow us to study. This painting is made in that spirit and presents a coruscated group of figures to explore.
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A Taxonomy | 2014Oil On Canvas48 x 30 inches | 121 x 75.5 cm
£2800
The first of two paintings in which the tumbling forms that populate “Complicit”, “A System” and “The Winnowing” are laid out on a plane or hover just above it. A collection of stilled motion. Like so many butterflies in a case. Isolated and in an ordered assembly their part in the whole is not so easy to grasp. They’re there to be inspected and studied. A still life.
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A Taxonomy 2 | 2014Oil On Canvas48 x 30 inches | 121 x 75.5 cm
£2800
The first of two paintings in which the tumbling forms that populate “Complicit”, “A System” and “The Winnowing” are laid out on a plane or hover just above it. A collection of stilled motion. Like so many butterflies in a case. Isolated and in an ordered assembly their part in the whole is not so easy to grasp. They’re there to be inspected and studied. A still life.
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Wanderer | 2014Oil On Panel32 x 24 inches | 80.5 x 60.5 cm
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Caught at a moment of indecision a figure is poised at an edge. Beyond him a limitless space. He’s uncertain for all the crisp definition of his form. ‘The Wanderer’ echoes something of the title and spirit of Caspar David Fredreichs painting of 1818. Then as now the world was changing fast and long established belief systems were creaking under the weight of new thinking. That old Wanderer found solace and liberty in the experience of nature’s immensity. For this re-configured Wanderer things seem a little less clear.
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Wanderer 2 | 2014Oil On Panel32 x 24 inches | 80.5 x 60.5 cm
£1400
A variant on “Wanderer”, with none of the historical echoes of its companion. The shift in perspective introduces some comedy to the scene. All jutting chin, tense thighs and planted feet here’s a man who’s more likely to be mustering the courage to leap from a diving board than speculating on any grander questions of identity.
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Study for Proximate | 2014Oil On Canvas16 x 12 inches | 40.5 x 30.5 cm
£520
One of two studies towards a larger piece ‘Proximate’.In the final painting “Proximate” a man and a woman are shown in their entirety. They stand on the same spot but occupy different spaces. They are close but also distant, touching and yet not present to each other. The sliver of ground upon which they stand separates them but it is also held in place by their proximity and one suspects that should either move the delicate equilibrium of the whole would collapse.As with other recent work made in a similar vein the crisp aesthetic of the faceted forms serves, I hope, to throw into relief the ambiguities of the very human relationship its heart.
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Study for Proximate 2 | 2014Oil On Canvas16 x 12 inches | 40.5 x 30.5 cm
£520
The companion piece to “Proximate Study 1” shows the woman beneath the plane. She’s partially in shadow her feet touch the ground directly beneath the man.
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Distant | 2014Oil On Panel24 x 18 inches | 60.5 x 45.5 cm
£1300
Layers of grey paint laid in thin skeins over a warm ground. The orange bites through at the edges and warms up the translucent grey. As in “Baltic” this painting stills a memory, lifting it out of the flow of change. It seeks to encapsulate desire. The reduction of form to planes is no attempt to de-humanise. Just the opposite.
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Baltic | 2014Oil On Panel24 x 18 inches | 60.5 x 45.5 cm
£1300
Against a salmon sky the figure of the woman is silhouetted. Her faceted form softened by the light. The painting seeks to distil a moment, not so much in its particulars but in its effect. There is some romance at its heart. This is no lonely figure but one full of potential and mystery.
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Study 2 for Veil 4 | 2014Oil On Canvas24 x 18 inches | 60.5 x 45.5 cm
£850
As in “Study for Veil 4”, a couple drop through a space that is empty but for an inclined plane that will either save them or stop them. As with many of the figures in these works their form is indeterminate for all its hard edges and particularity. They receive light, cast shadows and occupy space.
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Study for Veil 4 | 2014Oil On Canvas24 x 18 inches | 60.5 x 45.5 cm
£850
From a series of studies that imagine a couple falling towards an inclined plane that could be a sheet as much as the ground. All chiselled limbs and carelessness they are not entwined so much as fitted, although not perfectly. Not snuggly. There are gaps, and their limbs clink as they fall. But their touch is not without tenderness.
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The Good Man | 2015Oil On Canvas30 x 48 inches | 76 x 122 cm
£2000
Along with everybody else I wonder about the messages we give to our kids: Be good, work hard, believe in yourself. When the evidence all around us suggests that these qualities are, in fact, little valued amongst the other things by which people are measured. So here’s a good man, trustworthy, diligent and a little confused to find himself like an island, naked and alone in an empty space.
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Page 65
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Inversion | 2014Oil On Canvas36 x 24 inches | 91 x 60.5 cm
£1800
A man stands on his head in a starkly lit space. He may be spinning although he seems unaware of it. Maybe he’s a banker, but he could just as well be a cleaner with aspirations to be a banker.‘Upside-downess’ and ‘rightway-upness’ is something I like to play with. The more straightforward the inversion the better. It can be comical but it can also, aside from any metaphorical motive, transform the familiar and make it strange again.
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An Interior | 2014Oil On Canvas36 x 24 inches | 91 x 60.5 cm
£1800
Beneath a brightly lit stage a couple stand against a red glow. They are inclined towards each other but are quiet. From the edge of the plane a cloth drapes softly. Here, as in other works, play is made with up and down, above and below with clear metaphorical intention. The only clue to orientation is the cloth upon which gravity pulls. Without it would be reasonable to assume we, the viewers, were the ones who upside down.
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Figures In A Landscape | 2014Oil On Canvas32 x 24 inches | 80.5 x 60.5 cm
£1800
The two figures that echo through various pieces in this show are here seen on a bright stage. They’re still going somewhere. On the underside a blue tree grows against the dull glow of a sky. The tree might be a root system but the plane is impermeable and not trunk emerges from it. The two worlds are permanently separated.
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Page 71
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Before Dawn | 2014Oil On Canvas36 x 24 inches | 91 x 60.5 cm
£1800
More often than not, work is the prism through which we understand and judge ourselves, far more so than through any relationships we have outside of work. Notions of work life balance seem mythical echoes of a bygone time, no longer relevant in a world of thrusting ambition. And in all the competition and striving, people inevitably fall and get hurt, while others help. This couple occur in a number of paintings. It’s unclear what has happened but there is something generous in the hold that the portly figure has on his slumped companion. Some bond exists that is not determined by their goals and some values that are not completely constrained by the demands of their ambitions or aspirations. In that respect the image is one of hope.
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At Night | 2014Oil On Panel24 x 18 inches | 60.5 x 45.5 cm
£1100
One of an ongoing series of paintings that imagine this couple in different lights. A little like Monets’ haystacks or his cathedral facades the light that plays upon their surface effects them without changing their reality.
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Midday | 2014Oil On Panel24 x 18 inches | 60.5 x 45.5 cm
£1100
One of an ongoing series of paintings that imagine this couple in different lights. A little like Monets’ haystacks or his cathedral facades the light that plays upon their surface effects them without changing their reality.
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Study 2 for Later | 2014Oil On Canvas16 x 12 inches | 40.5 x 30.5 cm
£520
There is some threat in this painting. A suggestion in the spaces between that something untoward has happened or may be about to happen. It is paired with a painting, now lost, in which a woman tips toward us while over her shoulder a man looms. On its own it tells a part of a story that speaks to a sense of vulnerability that is perhaps common.
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Page 79
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Secret | 2014Oil On Canvas16 x 12 inches | 40.5 x 30.5 cm
£520
In cartoons and comedies as well as nightmares things tangle under cloth. In this painting, the earliest in the exhibition, fragments of figures are glimpsed emerging from the cloths moving edge. The rest is hidden from us. There is something comic about the scene and tragic too. It’s a fusty and redundant corner with a lot going on.As in “Incomplete Structure” and “An Interior”, resolutions butt up against each other without disrupting the whole. Soft against hard. Light against dark the work is as much about sensuality as it is about the stories it may provoke.
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Secret 1 | 2014Oil On Canvas16 x 12 inches | 40.5 x 30.5 cm
£520
A companion to “Secret” that touches the same territory: unknowable history.
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Page 83
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Let The Sun Shine In 4 | 2015Oil On Canvas12 x 16 inches | 30 x 41 cm
£450
For all their minimal characteristics and sensuality this painting and it’s two companions are motivated by the same appetite for narrative and symbol as other work in th show. In these light fills the space and warms it. The dark shadows aren’t harsh but fold into and around the box gently funnelling the light that falls across its faces.
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Page 85
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Let The Sun Shine In 2 | 2015Oil On Canvas12 x 16 inches | 30 x 41 cm
£450
For all their minimal characteristics and sensuality this painting and it’s two companions are motivated by the same appetite for narrative and symbol as other work in th show. In these light fills the space and warms it. The dark shadows aren’t harsh but fold into and around the box gently funnelling the light that falls across its faces.
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T H E S L E E P O F R E A S O N
Page 87
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Let The Sun Shine In 3 | 2015Oil On Canvas12 x 16 inches | 30 x 41 cm
£450
For all their minimal characteristics and sensuality this painting and it’s two companions are motivated by the same appetite for narrative and symbol as other work in th show. In these light fills the space and warms it. The dark shadows aren’t harsh but fold into and around the box gently funnelling the light that falls across its faces.
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T H E S L E E P O F R E A S O N
Page 89
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Emergency Room | 2012Oil On Canvas40 x 30 inches | 101.5 x 76.2 cm
£2400
Along with “Race To The Bottom” and “On The Shoulders Of Giants” this painting from 2012 prefigures much of the work that makes the bulk of this show and shares its concerns, although it addresses them in a very different way. Here tumbles of anxious actors are painted directly, from memory with no preparatory work, and look to find a graphic analogue to the bustling business that characterises the modern work place.Churning in masses that build into abstract patterns, people stand, collide, lift and fall. They are glimpsed in action, implausible, dynamic and melodramatic. The paintings are mostly about men about how we jostle and posture.
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Race To The Bottom | 2012Oil On Canvas36 x 24 inches | 91.5 x 61 cm
£1800
Part of the same group of paintings of which ‘Emergency Room’ and “On The Shoulders Of Giants” formed part.Here a group lurches onward tripping over itself. The momentum is irresistible and some of the throng are being overrun. It is nobody’s fault, unless it’s Adams Smiths ‘hidden hand of the market’ having some fun at the groups expense.
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On The Shoulders Of Giants | 2012Oil On Canvas36 x 24 inches | 91.5 x 61cm
£1800
As in “Emergency Room” and “Race To The Bottom” this work is painted from memory.But I forget as much as the next man and the act of remembering is inevitably as much about invention as it is about distillation. So the action is a figment as wellas a fragment of some larger story, a partial reconstruction of experiences lived out in spaces that are filled with far more drama than the airy neutrality of the decor would immediately suggest.
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S h o r t B i o g r a p g h y
John studied art at Oxford University’s Ruskin school of Fine Art and Draw-ing, graduating with a first in 1986. In the years that have followed he made sculpture, lectured in art schools and worked in galleries. For 15 years he worked in the games industry, most recently as Art Director at Sony Cam-bridge.
Following more than a decade in which he worked exclusively and enthu-siastically with the computer he began to paint again in 2010. It’s a return that is in large part explained by his growing feeling that, for all its utility and power, the computer is limited by the very qualities that make it so exciting.
In the time since returning to his own work fulltime, he’s exhibited in New York, London, Stocholm, Bristol and Cambridge. In addition to these exhibi-tions, other open shows, and art fairs, he was also featured in a BBC2 Arts Programme ‘Show Me The Monet’ , and the Guardian, which featured an interview ‘From Killzone to Canvas’.
Currently John’s undertaking a number of commissions and developing a new series of paintings that builds on the body of work shown here.
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