The Room
“four walls and a floor”
John
Paul Evans
Tuesday
14 June -
Private
View 6.00 -
9.30 Tuesday 14 June
Viewing
by
appointment: 0208 808 9318
info-theroom@fsmail.net
John
Paul Evans was born in Cardiff, Wales. He
graduated in Fine Art at
“BED SHEET DREAMS”
In
the nineties, John Paul Evans established a credible reputation for
human-scale
portraits of action-men dolls — often so subtly organised that at the
first
take one presumed them to be psychological portraits of real people,
then
wondered why this person had painted his eyebrow! The
light source for these images was always
daylight and they were invariably black and white.
Bed
Sheet Dreams marks a
departure from
the frozen psyches harboured by the action-men.
It is now the artist himself who is in action; holding a digital
camera
at arm’s length as he manoeuvres himself with a degree of discomfort so
as to
fit within the frame. Evans tells me:
“The camera is effectively recording a movement of time rather than a
moment of
time.” No further manipulation of the
image occurs (in digital terms). The
artist achieves “what looks like a manipulated image through the
accidents of
the camera.” The intense backgrounds are
simply the result of performing the contortions on a variety of bed
sheets.
The
light source remains daylight, but now colour emerges as a key factor
in the
experience. Where the action-men
portraits were essentially sculptural, these bed sheet dreams are
painterly,
for the colour here has an astounding texture.
Accident
permeates the references the images suggest as well as their execution. The artist spread open on a dark green sheet
reminds me of the enigmatic nude peeked at in Marcel Duchamp’s
“Étants Donnés”,
while an almost crucified blur on a yellow sheet evokes the
“photographic”
paintings of Gerhard Richter. And then,
when I think of the artist contorting himself for the camera, I am
reminded of
the faces pulled by F. X. Messerschmidt in front a mirror, which led to
“character heads” of grotesque and “pathological” intensity. Are they exorcisms or manifestations of some
schizophrenic syndrome, these heads that have stimulated and evaded
explication
since first exhibited in 1793?
The
grotesque, that amalgam of horror and laughter, abject and sublime
tensions,
has been utilised as often as the innocuous (the humble still-life) to
reveal
the possibilities of skill. However, it
is not a term that exhaustively covers these bizarre images by Evans. There is also a vulnerability to these
dreams. Their general title suggests
those involuntary “maps of Ireland” that are matinal evidence of
adolescent
stirrings, and some female viewers have remarked on the foetus-like
aspect to
certain of these works; a quality that renders them womb-like, the
sheet as the
caul (and the arm umbilically connected to the mothering eye of the
camera).
Anthony Howell,
March, 2005
Large images
(including headline image above):
Small Images:
<> 