Oil & Silver: 5 dialogues between photography and painting

Hoopers Gallery, 15 Clerkenwell Close, London EC1R 0AA
2nd February - 2nd March 2007

This show features five artists whose work exists in the space between painting and photography.  This in-between space highlights the tension between these two mediums and invites the viewer to confront that tension.  One of the first things that we might do when encountering such work is to ask ourselves - what’s wrong with this picture? Looking at this work can be unsettling as each piece blurs the boundaries between what constitutes painting and what we consider to be photography.

Nicholas Middleton’s paintings are often mistaken for photographs, but here this tendency is extended in work such as ‘Restoration’, in which we have the opportunity to see something we’ve never seen before, because it was hidden and forgotten – rendered invisible.  This piece bears witness to the attack on Velazquez’s ‘Rokeby Venus’ by the Suffragette, Mary Richardson, restoring the full history of the painting through a trompe l’oeil restaging of the long-healed damage.  In 'Projection' Middleton replays the myth of the origin of painting, based on Wright of Derby's 'Corinthian Maid', making the classical allusions accessible in his depiction of a contemporary artist's studio.  Paul Kilsby’s work surreptitiously plays with us, distorting our comprehension by inserting physical props in front of an image, photographing the result, and unnerving us in the process.  Whether he’s dangling a cluster of plums in front of an Old Master, inserting a nautilus in front of a still life, or reworking Oudry’s virtuoso illusionistic painting with its knowing references to the story of Zeuxis and Parhassius, the effect is deliciously disquieting.

History is brought into the foreground, made contemporary and available to us in a new way through this work.  Jorma Puranen’s photographs, as they catch the light upon the surface of old portrait paintings in Scandinavian museums, enable us to see both the surface and the illusion of the painted surface at the same time.  We are seeing these Old Masters anew, as they peer back at us through their scars of time, suddenly fragile and blemished.  Similarly, Mark Bolland revisits the earliest surviving photographs by Niepce and Fox Talbot, making them anew with images of suburbia.  These images, remade with the camera obscura, bring us hard up against the domestic condition of everyday life; (that which is closest to us, that which is disposable and lacking in aesthetic substance).  In bringing us to this point, Bolland enables us to experience the same emotions felt by contemporary observers in the early 19th century, unnerved at seeing a moment of time stopped and reproduced.  The everyday, unsettled in Bolland’s work by framing it in the shallow focus of the camera obscura, is equally undermined in Nicky Coutts’ work.  Her eerily depopulated landscapes have been created by either magnifying a small detail or by removing all the figures from an incident-packed painting.  This draws our attention to unfamiliar aspects of familiar paintings.  In each case, Coutts brings us to a suddenly silent stage, a silence between the roars of battle or the babble of a thousand souls, an in-between time and place. 

It is the uncanniness – uncanny in Freud’s sense of the familiar made strange - that unsettles us. The damaged surface of a painting interrupts our pleasure of its viewing, a landscape becomes blurred, indistinct, the expanse of its view curtailed.  In all the images, something feels held in abeyance; time halted and caught – the drifting smoke of a battle, a violent act of protest hidden for one hundred years, a suburban view made to look old, a view of a painting that shows its true physical state.  Are these photographs or paintings, modern or something old?  What is 'wrong' with these pictures is that they challenge us to question our responses to historical work and bring them out of the static context of the museum, into the now. 

Mark Bolland teaches Photography at University College for the Creative Arts in Farnham and writes for ‘Source: The Photographic Review’ and has contributed to ‘Portfolio’ and other publications. His work has featured in ‘Afterimage’ and ‘Photoworks’ magazine, and he has exhibited in ‘Standing on the Edge’ at Hiscox Gallery in London, 2004.

Nicky Coutts is currently on an English Heritage Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship in Northumberland and is Post-Doctoral Fellow in Fine Art at Middlesex University. Her work has been widely shown, including in ‘A Season in Hell’ at Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London (2006), ‘The Art of White’, The Lowry, Manchester (2005) and ‘The Entangled Eye’, Tokyo, Japan (2003). Coutts’ writings have been published in a range of journals and magazines and the text ‘Portraits of the Nonhuman, Visualizations of the Malevolent Insect’ was published by The University of Minnesota Press in the book ‘Insect Poetics’, 2006.

Immersed in his research interests centring upon opticality and spatiality, Paul Kilsby’s practice as an artist often involves the seamless photographic juxtaposition of still life elements with reproductions of paintings. Paul Kilsby is a tutor in Photography at the Royal College of Art. His project investigating the paintings of Vermeer, After Vermeer, was exhibited at Hoopers Gallery in April 2006. Paul also writes texts for exhibitions at various galleries, including Focal Point and the Tom Blau Gallery and his work features in Kerstin Stremmel’s ‘Geflügelte Bilder: Neuere fotografische Repräsentation von Klassikern der bildenden Kunst’, published in 2000. His essay on the photographs of Florencia Durante is included in the current issue of ‘Next Level’ (Edition 02/Volume 05). Kilsby's photographs are represented in various collections, including the Bibliothéque  Nationale, Paris.

Influenced by seventeenth and eighteenth century art, Nicholas Middleton’s photo-realist works in this exhibition are acts of restaging. Two paintings are contemporary interpretations of pictures by Vermeer and Wright of Derby. Most recently Nicholas Middleton won the Visitor's Choice Prize at the John Moores 24 in 2006, and has exhibited widely, including the BP Portrait Award 2004 and 2005, the Discerning Eye 2004 and Defining The Times, Milton Keynes Gallery 2000.

Jorma Puranen's photographs of seventeenth century portraits achieve the difficult effect of simultaneously making the viewer acutely aware of the surface of the painting as an object, while still preserving an element of its illusionism. Jorma Puranen teaches at the University of Art & Design, Helsinki, where he lives and works. Puranen’s work has been exhibited widely, both in his native Finland, and internationally (recently in Paris, Rome, Berlin, Prague, San Francisco, and Ontario) and Puranen’s work is represented in many permanent collections, including the V&A and the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris.