MYTHOLOGICAL PROPORTION

About

JACK BRINDLEY, PETER LAMB, STEFAN RUITENBEEK

Mythological Proportion is a take on the allegory of magnitude, the fabrication of meaning, and the imaginary narrative created out of the void.

The three artists in this exhibition have taken on the challenge to experiment with the promiscuity of one space to parallel their own different practices. In twisting perception by reversing scale and playing with inverted mediums in order to blow the myth of representation, they all have a special interest in teasing the familiar and the hierarchy of systems.

Peter Lamb is a painter interested in the magnification of scale and in the pictorialisation of the real world, when inserted into the language of informal abstraction. He experiments with how things look when they are taken out of their own given physical context, and enter a new identity of forms. Hence, the cosmos that is so vast looks like a postcard to our mind. He uses as an initial support random photographed extracts of his studio floor, as a platform made of unintentional markings. The floor is the reject, the waste material, that questions the idea of painting, its status and its authority; his tool, a repeated collapsing process of scaling up photographs, painting over, rescaling and repainting. In Lamb's work, the image is loaded with attributes that confound proportions and allow the artist to play havoc with the dynamics of abstraction.

Stefan Ruitenbeek equally works his way from chaos to order. In classical epic painting, the defining factor is the composition made of abstract principles, rather than the story depicted. The cognitive experience is led by visual rhythmic structures, no matter what the story tells. In this staging of depth and shadows, light, lines, pleats and flesh arguably resides the near totality of art. Ruitenbeek seeks a similar metamorphosis with his photographs of live compositions. He believes that pictures come from nothing, as expressed by the chaos of his studio, which serves as a prop to his naked models posing in extreme situations. With their flesh deconstructed by generous amount of fresh paint, these figures emerge through smoke and lighting, pieces of smeared clothing and disparate pieces of wood serving as plinths for nudes, in a scenery of devastation, that become a perfectly ordered epic in itself. The random associations that emerge almost accidentally with the great masters and their enduring images, allude to the arbitrariness of all references and their persistent availability for appropriation.

Jack Brindley makes works from a diverse range of mediums; often drawing from conditions that exist in the world he manipulates materials and re-purposes 'found' material gestures into artworks. He is an experimenter of the reactions of mediums against each other, applying diversifications and dual purposes. His work is concerned with how temporal, spatial and economic practices have shifted throughout history and as a result how ideas and objects exist in the world. As every thing can be traced back to the set of 'conditions' that produced it, Brindley's work is engaged in exploring how expectations and encounters with objects can be manipulated. Concerned with the relationship art has with its environment, his work reflects on the way we think about, navigate and operate within space. The diversity that his tools bring to this exhibition include a work on aluminium, coated with his own brand of ink and its attempted removal, a printed rug, and collected rejects from the Savile Row tailors.