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3/10/2006

Limits

Andrew Mummery Gallery, London

Alighiero Boetti, Maria Chevska, Ellen Gallagher, Louise Hopkins

A collaboration conceived by Maria Chevska

Introduction by Martin Holman

"I think there is the right balance between 'will' and 'limits'", wrote Alighiero Boetti, "understood as the basic factor of our present life conditions: these two elements have the effect of neutralising each other, breaking off their ritual relationship in an organisational sense, and discovering undifferentiated matter."

While this installation of work by four artists, of which Boetti is one alongside Maria Chevska, Ellen Gallagher and Louise Hopkins, tilts the balance in favour of will over limits, the place of "undifferentiated matter" remains in the domain of discovery. And because words play a significant part in the texture of everything on show here, sensitivity about definition must be observed. Each piece interprets "undifferentiated" in its own way, as "indiscriminate", for instance, and "elementary", even "uniform". The "matter" cited by Boetti is, quintessentially, the empirical world of experience. It provides the formal and psychological key to the mental model that, informed by these compelling individual permutations, draws this quartet together over the passages (written and otherwise) of time, geography, culture and practice that separate them.

Limits emerges as a temporary collective. The artists' shared "will" challenges the settled order to shun the prescriptive forces of traditional art generalisations. Materials more commonly immerse these makers in a poetry of possibilities than offer meaning. Consequently, they are likely to tackle the accumulated baggage associated with their sources, and render the machine-made intimately compelling. By using only what already exists publicly in the world, Louise Hopkins disrupts our expectations with charged activity. The newspapers, maps or music scores she has worked over, items formerly harbouring the possibility of sound in speech or song mouthed by the mind, are no longer repositories of opinion, narrative or information. They are reversed into harsh silence or the chaos of transformation; both require us to adjust our standpoint and assume a uneasy freedom to insert our own melodies, thoughts and stories.

The language that Maria Chevska fragments into her painting depicts the heated subjects of love, revolution and art. Two installations extend from opposite walls nearly to touch across the gallery floor in a flag-like form, as if spurned lovers had abandoned private correspondence for a semaphore of blackest punctuation. The language of this work is the language of the streets - of passion transmitted over distance and in battle, even - that debunks idealised romantic notions. By using their words, Chevska rehabilitates the activism of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Rosa Luxemburg. Brought in as fugitives from another time and place, their attitudes none the less gain fresh currency with Chevska's sampling of phrases composed eighty years ago and more. They chime with a contemporary ring: "You mock me?" probes one work. This question is still loaded with vehemence and mutual incredulity: injected into current sectarian disputes - personal and public - it is pursued in the pages of newspapers, at street corners and through city centres emblazoned on placards.

Ellen Gallagher starts with what others have already discarded. A process of searching and finding in the pages of archaic ephemera is followed by scanning, printing, cutting and altering before organising into a kind of map or score of a possible tale or news story. Or into a collage resembling a ransom-note set out in blob-like shapes built into thick relief. As with Hopkins, surface activity transforms the source which, in the case of Gallagher, derives on closer inspection from magazines for an African-American readership. By modifying each head preposterously into near-comic vignettes of distorted nature, she disrupts the game played by the skin- and hair-care products these faces once advertised. While she recruits from the past, Gallagher converses with the present, releasing those heads from the prison of some mad attitudes of the recent past. Her vocabulary of order and chaos, false notions and truth is simultaneously her invention and also strangely resonates like we have always known it.

Alighiero Boetti also treated the complex with extreme simplicity and humour through the medium of the commonplace. And, like the other artists in Limits - for whom, in more than one sense, he was a forerunner - he aspired to capture the world. Because language is interwoven with life, the perceptual, oscillating flow of text provided his work with its collective relevance. Both "text" and "weave" have a common root in the Latin word textum, and in Afghan culture embroidery had the place occupied in the West by pen-written pages as living documents. Added to his propensity to re-write language in terms of systems and signs, Boetti's adoption of non-European modes exemplified the artist's fascination with permuting possibilities with which to express endless facets of everyday life, its mutability and mystery.

None of these artists has appropriated material in the sense commonly applied to recent art practices in this country and elsewhere. Nor is anything erased by reducing. Secondhand is, in fact, their route to new knowledge and by that token, their practical limits have been widened in order to re-invent, or to invent anew. Echoes of those former uses, none the less, still come through as the artists have intended that they should. They help to fire the electrical impulse of our own perceptive experience into the poetry of new work.

Maria Chevska and Louise Hopkins are represented by Andrew Mummery Gallery.
Works by Alighiero Boetti kindly lent by courtesy of Ben Brown Fine Arts, London.
Work by Ellen Gallagher kindly lent by courtesy of Hauser & Wirth Gallery, London.
This text (c) Martin Holman 2006

Alongside the exhibition LIMITS, the Andrew Mummery Gallery will also be showing work by Philip Akkerman, Ori Gersht, Alexis Harding, Merlin James, Carol Rhodes and Graeme Todd.

Image: Maria Chevska, Can't Wait (each spark), 2004, canvas, kaolin 41 x 41 cm

Andrew Mummery Gallery
Studio 1.02 - Tea Building
56 Shoreditch High Street (Entrance is on Bethnal Green Road) London E1 6JJ
Open Wednesday - Saturday, 12-6pm and by appointment
(also open during the week of the Frieze Art Fair on
Tuesday 10 and Sunday 15 October, 12-6pm)

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