Stoke

About

“The problem of Art’s possession of a place’s protective spirit, its genius loci, is an old quandary…

….Now, after years of habitual property speculation, unable to protect anywhere anymore, these pale inhibited spirits have no spirit left…

…Artists squint hard whenever they sense any sign of genii in the vicinity… they sharpen their pencils, focus their cameras, reduce any magic to a mere impression of themselves for god like collectors to collect….

…Without genius, everybody and everything becomes a Stoke... unprotected and everywhere … Little, Bradley or Gifford - Bristol and its nibbled green belt has more than its fair share of Stokes. Everything and everybody now has to know its place. “    (Phil King)

STOKE brings together aspects of the work of three, quite different, post-art artists in one place so as to look at and fuel this problem without being defined by it. 

Pascal-Michel Dubois sees his work as an idle observation of life like a doodle… therefore, it is always in the making, constantly re-interpreting the fabric of reality. For his METEOR series he tries to see the seasonal transformation of trees from a different angle, putting us under the tree looking upwards… in an impossible space. 

Charley Peters’ investigations are concerned with the spatial potential of the painted surface, explored through the construction of geometric configurations that map the pictorial relationship between two and three dimensions … her paintings use subtle variations in colour, tone and scale to construct illusionary light and structural depth. They often exhibit properties that present as disorientating or other-worldly, but are perhaps also familiar through our experiences of the 3D environments of computer games or digitally-generated terrains. 

Gathering new and old paintings  Phil King unpacks and deals them in different sets. Not subject to a given identity they demand a different approach than one based on the identification of an a-priori common sense. For ‘Stoke’ however he has chosen to present an array of landscape paintings - inviting us to wander through manifold implications, past and future.