If The Walls Could Talk

‘If The Walls Could Talk’

Private View: Wednesday 21 February, 2018 (6-8pm)
Exhibition Dates: Thursday 22 February - Wednesday 11 April, 2018

Gallery Address: ALICE BLACK, 47 Berwick Street (1st Fl), London, W1F 8SQ
Opening Hours: Wednesday to Friday 10am-6pm, Saturday 11am-4pm & by appointment

ALICE BLACK will present the group exhibition ‘If The Walls Could Talk’, which opens with a private view on Wednesday 21 February (6-8pm). The show brings together the work of 6 contemporary painters in exploration of the role of the artist as allegorist; Jessie Makinson(b.1985), Dario Maglionico (b.1986), Lee Marshall (b.1986), Tristan Pigott (b.1990), Charlie Reed (b.1988) and Nicholas William Johnson (b.1982).

In this age of Instagram, ‘If The Walls Could Talk’ offers a counterbalance to our insatiable appetite for casual visual stimulus which is endlessly fed but rarely satisfied. Allegory, or ‘veiled language’, by its very nature demands a more active form of viewer engagement. As stated by Craig Owens in his seminal text The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism (1980), allegorical artworks “at once proffer and defer a promise of meaning, they both solicit and frustrate our desire that the image be directly transparent to its signification…they are runes which must be deciphered”.

‘If The Walls Could Talk’ spotlights a group of highly accomplished young artists whose contemporary take on the theme of allegory invites us to pause and dig deeper. In art history, this visual language of complex metaphors is epitomised by Sandro Boticelli’s ‘Primavera’ (1482) which tells the story of the burgeoning fertility of the world; Harmen Steenwyck’s 17th C. Dutch vanitas still-life ‘An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life’ (1640), which is a moralizing reminder of life’s brevity and the vanity of earthly pleasures; Marcel Duchamp’s ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even’ (1923), which is a multipart tale of male and female sexual politics; and Damian Hirst’s ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ (1991) which captured the public imagination with its raw depiction of mortality.

The works included in ‘If The Walls Could Talk’ reward the attentive viewer. The surreal interiors of Dario Maglionico ripple and seethe with latent atmosphere and untold stories. Scattered throughout his compositions are visual clues which speak of human activity and inner psychological states. Encryption and subliminal clues pervade the still-life paintings of Tristan Pigott. Through playful subversion, Pigott critiques our tendency to meticulously curate and control the outward portrayal of our identities. Lee Marshall harnesses the logic of Photoshop, with its layers, cut-copy-paste actions and selective masking and editing of imagery, combined with the tropes of past painterly movements which he samples and transforms. Marshall’s aim is to “reach the point at which a painting achieves its own pictorial logic”. Jessie Makinson’s paintings present a cast of anthropomorphic and genderless figures in a unsettling arcadia. Replete with extended metaphors and veiled meanings, her densely populated compositions are intentionally ambiguous. They find their touch stones in art history, literature, pop culture and speculative fiction. The richly layered work of Hawaii-born Nicholas William Johnson looks to “nature’s chaos” for its inspiration. Reconstituting and reclaiming the archaic and often argued obsolete genre of botanical painting, Johnson reveals the continued relevance of our natural world as a container of “whole sets of possible histories about humans and conceptual structures”. Charlie Reed’s ‘Canal Path 2’ is characterised by a striking sense of open-endedness. Looking South from edges of the Hackney Marshes along the River Lee Navigation, the tips of the Olympic Stadium floodlights can be seen in the distance. A tension exists between the man-made structures and an uncultivated nature.

The works of these 6 contemporary artists reflect the enduring power of the allegorical impulse. They remind us that “the allegorist lays claim to the culturally significant, poses as an interpreter. At his/her hand the image becomes something other” (Craig Owens).

Notes to Editors:
For sales and press inquiries please contact: Alice Black
alice@aliceblackart.com | (+ 44) 77 4348 8626 | 47 Berwick Street (1st Fl), London, W1F 8SQ
Featured artwork: Lee Marshall ‘Midnight II’ 2016, acrylic on canvas