LA PEINTURE EST PRESQUE ABSTRAITE

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This exhibition is the second leg of a touring show from the ‘Transpalette' Art Centre in Bourges, France. It brings together 4 artists from London, Jane Harris, Richard Kirwan, Daniel Sturgis and Claude Temin-Vergez and 4 artists working in France, Xavier Drong, Olivier Gourvil, Geoffroy Gross and Nicolas Royer. The work in focus emerges from the genre of ‘abstraction' yet makes use of everything representational - images, figures, icons, ornaments, screens, and signs — with a kind of distance that they all share. Far from mere repetition, they loop, clone and use aliases… These works enjoy playing equally with the pictorial and graphic codes of art as well as those of our contemporary environment. The position of abstract painting today is problematic. Douglas Crimp popularized the view that the self-reflexive tradition in modernist painting was unable to progress beyond the monochrome (‘The End of Painting,' 1983). Yves-Alain Bois believed the challenges and perceived impasse of abstract painting echoed a similar impasse within modernism itself (Painting as Model, 1993). The artists on show play equally with contemporary pictorial and graphic codes and our everyday environment. What connects these works seem to be situated more in the impurity of its sources or notions of processes, drawing and sign-systems rather than a quest for purity as its modernist forerunners.