"Structures of the Sublime; Towards
a Greater understanding of Chaos"
Robert Wyndam Bucknell and Viktor Wynd
May 27th - July 2 -
"looking for meaning in history is like looking for patterns in clouds"
J.Gray
The work shows a fascination with the ways narratives are structured, both
in the sense of oral fictions, such as in The Brothers Grimm or the Arabian
Nights, where a handful of events need to be strung together in a certain form,
but how they are strung varies and is of a lesser importance than the story
and with literary stylists like Sterne, Fielding, Michado de Assis, Pessoa,
B.S.Johnson, Calvino and many others, where it is often the how, rather than
the what, that is uppermost.
Within this fascination with the narrative structure
there is an attempt to examine themes of perception and truth, the point at
which a meaning is expressed,
the gap between the intention of the meaning and the interpretation, the corners
that meaning escape into, or the cracks through which meaning is lost. The
work is evidently influenced (almost to the point of obsession) by the art
of the early Islamic era, specifically calligraphic and architectural ˆ such
as the Mosque at Samara or the Walls of the Palace of Mschetta (presently in
Berlin), with the idea of coming closer to the divine through forms, together
with an awareness of the drawings of Henri Michaux and the buildings of Daniel
Libeskind. The work is also heavily tinged with a Neo-Dadaistic/nihilistic
tendency to despair and a sense of the pointlessness of things, combining an
Artaudian howl of misery with a Beckettian awareness of the absurd.
There is
an almost nightmarish quality to much of the work, in the uncompromising lack
of any cohesive ordered composition with only occasional hints as to what might
be there, there is a sense of a world lacking in space, or more specifically
lacking any way of perceiving space and one‚s own relationship to it.
Hovering above the space is a pared down version of the bedroom which Wynd
fled one night, sleepwalking, only to awaken in the bathroom after fainting
and smashing his head open on the sink, and left trembling on the floor, unable
to emerge for fear of being engulfed by the world outside.
To this end the work
in the show is elusive and often seemingly empty, combining, in the small gallery,
the pointless obsessiveness of "15 hours of complete and utter boredom" a
large, and virtually invisible drawing, made up of tiny lines scratched
onto the paper with a sharp point and the whimsical nature of "love in the
woods" where
sticks cascade off the ceiling collapsing and disintegrating onto a large flat
painting resembling the forest floor, where dirt, sticks and sand combine with
other debris and human detritus in what superficially appears to be an abstract
composition, but which under closer examination reveals a pair of stick figures,
made of sticks, copulating, watched from the wall by a ball of dancing figures
made out of dried orange and banana peel whilst listening to two competing
sound pieces presenting excerpts from the Brothers Grimm and the Arabian Nights.
Meanwhile
in the main gallery an anti-narrative is promised, but never seems to emerge,
as a set of five suites of disintegrating drawings marches around the walls,
accompanied by an extract from the notes, trying, but never succeeding, to
tell a story, like the saloon bar bore, or indeed Tristram Shandy, one feels
that the story is never told, and indeed one gets lost as the story stops and
changes and diverts. One gets the feeling that it isn‚t the story that‚s
important but the sense and the soul behind it, an empty soul, examined in
"Abyss, a video trilogy," presenting three moments of nothingness, inertia
and self destructive indecision.
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