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Simon English
dal 10/10/2006 al 18/11/2006

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10/10/2006

Simon English

Fred, London

He is primarily concerned with drawings and mixed media works on paper. "Banks Cream and the Somerset Owls" is the title of the exhibition that references the paper, the ground that is essential to the practice of drawing. English always plays games for the viewer. Decoys abound both in technique and subject matter.


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Banks Cream and the Somerset Owls

FRED are delighted to announce our first exhibition by Simon English. During the last two years, Simon English has had a number of international solo and group exhibitions that were commissioned to coincide with his first publication ‘Simon English and The Army Pink Snowman’. During this time, English has experimented with materials and scale to produce an impressive new body of work.

English is primarily concerned with drawings and mixed media works on paper. The title of the exhibition references the paper, the ground that is essential to the practice of drawing, Banks cream being the pink tinged paper English has used which is now discontinued. The insistant use of paper in the works and the rigorous definition of these works within the terminology of drawing stems from his combined fascination and horror with the idea of ‘painting’. His works rebound and defy painterly convention and instead seek to expose subconscious narrative through a complex and varied language, at once autobiographical, emotional and whimsical.

For this exhibition, in the London Gallery English displays three major new works each measuring 2.5 x 2.5 meters. These works are constructed from single sheets of paper. Extending this aspect of his working practice, English has progressed to using much larger sheets of paper, this has allowed English to highlight and increase the riff in scale within the composition. This hints at the constant underlying tension in the works between the detailed drawing and the seemingly more painterly expressive elements. Within each work the viewer can witness the journey of the work from the drawing board to its assemblage on the wall. On the wall the sheets are assembled and collaged ultimately piecing together narrative and associated references that amalgamate wide groups of drawings, paintings and texts into a related whole.

In his recent essay Bill Arning described English’s art as existing ‘as both a manifestation of and a royal indulgence in picture addictions, his way with pictures is self-aware and nonetheless compulsive’. Arning’s point is that when confronted by a large assembled piece by English, we are not shown a single image to experience, rather a myriad visual experience that can only be understood as a whole. The seemingly abstract arrangement of references, images and quotation, appears to be arbitrary, but this disarming display holds deeper meaning, as the carefully planned signifiers that make up each composition hint at the dark and complex emotional life of the artist, and over time, we can reap English’s passionate confessions, biographical clues and fantastical extravaganzas.

Stella Santa Catterina observes ‘The relationship between memory and oblivion is a crucial aspect of the creative experience" which certainly goes some way towards explaining why, confronted with a Simon English, we find ourselves consuming an image of a naked Wayne Rooney, playing football in a German Army base with the Railway Children.

Interweaved in the drawings we find crucial elements, with English revisiting recognisable iconography such as owls, ponies, cottages and tiny drawings of stately homes. These images returned to almost obsessively draw the viewer into the underlying hum of the concerns of the unconscious within the drawings. Alongside these familiar motifs newer subjects are being brought to the fore. The female presence both in an iconic female such as Miss Havisham, or the actress Margaret Rutherford and a more generalised female presence are explored in the new works. The cacophony of these subjects and influences are most readily obvious in the work ‘Love and confusion’, in which the bride figure looms large. In the same work English also appears in the setting of a fictitious double groomed wedding. In all the works the written element that is so vital to English’s work appears in oblique references to popular songs. English draws on the trope of the melancholic love song so the Walker Brothers lyric ‘no regrets’ is deliciously coupled with ‘Its only rock and roll’.

As such, English always plays games for the viewer. Decoys abound both in technique and subject matter. When looking at a series of works, hung together, the viewer is stuck by his wish to convey a particular history (true or false), to tell a story. However English excels in setting traps for his audience and often veils his messages with off hand moments of pathos, poetry and even hilarity. All of these elements, often summed up in the bands of badly spelt text such as his fantastic quotation of 10CC’s classic song, ‘I’m Not In Love’ (I keep your picture on the wall, it hides the nasty stain that’s lying there so don’t ask me to give it back I know you know it doesn’t mean that much to me) are always surrounded by truly great drawings and paintings of the most natural kind. Obsessively worked while seemingly unplanned, each work contains a riot of expressive images, packed with invention and rendered with fantastic skill.

Fred
Ltd 45 Vyner Street - London

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