Exhibition

The Eye of the Blackbird - Peter Ashton Jones

3 Nov 2011 – 3 Dec 2011

Save Event: The Eye of the Blackbird - Peter Ashton Jones1

I've seen this

People who have saved this event:

close

Standpoint Gallery

London, United Kingdom

Address

Travel Information

  • Old Street / Liverpool Street
Directions via Google Maps Directions via Citymapper
Event map

The Eye of the Blackbird - Peter Ashton Jones

About

In this fascinating and mysterious new group of paintings, Peter Ashton Jones acknowledges an intellectual debt to Wallace Stevens' poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (a poem that epitomises Stevens' reality/imagination dialectic), and extends and confirms his exploration of strategies, themes and motifs that have appeared in some of his previous paintings.

The strategy underpinning the paintings is multi-layered and complex, ranging from a preoccupation with consciousness, to historical situations, to poetic metaphor, to the post-modern situation, and to the history of painting. This rich terrain of ideas is rather like a field of battle from which the painting struggles to emerge as a thing in its own right. The Tug of War embodies the process by which a painting can 'become' something in its own right ' the image or picture is in the same state of stress and centrifugal force as the 'painting' - Milo's Muzzle becomes a very strange object/cage engulfed by a rather calm landscape, and the pub's familiar The One Armed Bandit is reduced almost to abstraction, entering a realm of ethereal mystery far removed from the garish original. Thus the banal becomes part of Jones' bigger picture, where all objects and pictures, and above all paintings themselves, become emblematic and metaphorical and open to rich interpretation and consideration.

Although the same hand and authority is present throughout, one could pun that Jones' work is 'unstylish' - no single painterly solution can be brought to resolve or amalgamate the raw material of ideas into a single 'new' position or style. Each painting is to some extent its own world, has evolved according to its own rules and has taken for itself some position or bit of territory which gives it an independence, as if Jones has given each painting a job to do. Perhaps they are all part of a big picture that can never be a picture.

Neal Mendock

What to expect? Toggle

Comments

Have you been to this event? Share your insights and give it a review below.