Constructure: Simon Haddock and Matthew Swift

About

Standpoint is proud to present ‘Constructure': a sideways look at ideas of construction, fragmentation and illusion. Simon Haddock and Matthew Swift's visual language shares a desire for complex integration and constructivist rigour that is also very alive to a playful and experiential sense of the city: its forms, solidities and speeds. While being a world away from the dogmatic thrusts and parries of Futurism, their work carries a similar sense of possibility, or architectural ‘becoming'. The title of the show plays on Structuralism's idea of the complex system of interrelated parts, and also constructivist theory's ‘accommodation and assimilation': the idea the individual builds structures of meaning or understanding that co-exist and interrelate rather than replace one another. The paintings and sculptural installations that Haddock and Swift make are indeed complex: they orchestrate sometimes awkward differences in both material and form, creating causative fields and linear tangles of not-quite-narrative drive Simon Haddock's new paintings condense the energy and tempo of different places, to re-present them, not through mimesis, but through memory and accumulation. Working for the first time on canvas, his mark making becomes more spontaneous and exuberant. The signature, routed forms from his work on solid surfaces as illusory cuts and fissures, and compete with physical holes drilled into the flesh of the work. Haddock keeps his architectural calligraphies in a state of constant flux, his paintings balance the impulse to contain and comprehend against the desire to surrender to fleeting dissolution. The points of departure for Haddock's work are largely subsumed by energetic rays and spatial games; yet the ‘space' of his work clearly echoes a world of out of town shopping centres, multi-storey car parks and luminous motorway signage; internalised as a kind of science fiction of the everyday. His work plays on a mythology of modern experience that is opened up and yet ambiguous. It is the translation of experience that interests him: the explosiveness of a life that is framed by modernity - not the clean facade, but a shifting reality of heightened disquiet.