JENNINGS KERR - PULPED


David Hamilton, Daniel Hollier, Ochre Lawson, James Lieutenant, Catrin Llwyd, Roman Longginou
 

Nov 17 - Dec 17, 2023

“Paper has been critical in dissemination, our stories and recorded histories but also our day-to-day, the family photos and important documents. We often forget it in favour of what it supports, and maybe now it has lost a little agency in the screen age. The great newspapers going digital, the kindle and the touch screen. Paper starting to resemble the status of the vinyl album, enjoyed for its romance and material quality and a strange thought while writing on screen to output to printer for laying on paper (and exporting to screen). It was born from cloth sheet around 200 BCE in China and immediately changed communication and the recording of information, before this it might have been clay tablet, barks, palm leaves, animal skins or various parchments. The processes vary, however the majority of pulping occurs through the use of plant based fibres and water to sheet a material through a screen. The pieces in this show all sit on paper but empathise the negative space, the material operating in the image making, contrast underlined. This emphasis occurs through the absence of colour in most if not all the work. The drawing and painting a balance of control and chaos, light touch and expressive marks, composed or wild, and in some cases both. This show ignores any notion of hierarchical material structures, there are no ‘studies’ in the room and the artists all approach material and medium with this in mind.”

“The raw and incidental is an important contrast against the mastery of charcoal in the work of Roman Longinnou or the delicate control in the Hamilton watercolours. 
Roman Longinnou makes exquisite drawing and in many cases he borrows from the traditions and associations of vanitas painting. The works play on connotations of cloth, its drape and quality, its ability to conceal and in many cases how it is used to mask as well as operate as a second skin in creating persona and status. The work ‘Smoke’. 2023 renders the shirt as smoke, pulled apart, billowing up and out into space. The suggestion as always is that there must be fire, perhaps a danger in falsely idolising, placing our faith in the materialistic. Longginou is able create theatricality and grandeur in his staging and treatment of image and material. A chaotic and mesmerising scene that speaks to the ephemeral.” - James Kerr, 2020