The official John Moores 25 website features images of all the selected works, by the prizewinners & other exhibitors, & artist's statements & biographies for all concerned, as indeed does the exhibition catalogue, itself as ever a handsome object & 'must-have' for the library & archives.
This being the 25th such John Moores exhibition of contemporary UK-based painting, a related show of past winners of the prize can also be enjoyed in another of the Walker's first floor galleries & the catalogue too features a nice historical survey of the competition: again, it's a pleasure to revisit some old familiars & favourites, notably something like Dan Hays's 'Harmony in Green' from the 1997 show, which had, in general through a number of its exhibitors' work, the quality of an epiphany on a personal level (to a then final-year undergraduate), such an enduring influence did it come to have on my own thinking & practice.
The current exhibition is not necessarily a great Moores, an especially significant one, but any Moores is a good Moores, of interest & enjoyment, to one who enjoys painting & paint itself: here it is, from traditional oils to modern household stuff, applied in any manner, from the obsessively meticulous (such as Julian Brain's Magrittian take on the English domestic interior, with its significantly oversized objects & paintings-within-the painting 'Special Relativity' - the carpet especially is spookily realistic - & Geraint Evans's slyly amusing comment on English suburban bourgeois aspirationalism, pretension & acquisitiveness, whilst referencing too an historical quirky tradition of the gentry, the incongruous figure of 'An Ornamental Hermit') to coolly impassive to more sketchy, scumbled, washy, tentative, uncertain styles of sometimes varying apparent crudity, to outright bold splashiness - it's all fascinating to observe & study, on a purely material level, a tribute to the medium's endless versatility & adaptabilty to the personal aesthetic, a reason, no doubt, for its enduring utility &, for all that painting's demise has been regularly predicted & announced, vitality & significance.
Perhaps not surprisingly, given that 2 of the jurors were Jake & Dinos Chapman, there's a sense of the macabre in some of the selected work, & a fair smattering of humour too, sometimes allied to a certain abjection, which itself is something of a staple concern, an aesthetic approach & identifiable strand in contemporary painting practice, along with a referencing-of art historical styles: nowadays, for example, there's no real conflict between the 'abstract' & 'figurative' traditions (all painting is, essentially, 'representational' in some way, anyway, & that is its purpose), anything goes & mixes-&-matches freely occur, often within the same painting. A case in point (of all these factors) might be found in the winning painting, Peter MacDonald's 'Fontana', which in bold, simplified, 'abstract' forms of colour, depicts in highly stylized, cartoonish manner, a narrative of the late Italian artist Lucio Fontana (incidentally whose retrospective at the Hayward Gallery around the turn of the millenia was a wonder to behold) at work upon one of his signature oval canvases, not with brush poised but rather the sharp implement with which he punctured their surfaces to realise his 'spatial concepts', creating through an act of apparent sabotage & destruction: 'Fontana' itself has its surface lightly pierced in similar fashion. Coincidentally, Ian Homerston's 'Four' has, perhaps, at a stretch, something of the appearance of a painted detail of one of Fontana's canvases, an interesting little dialogue.
The Romantic is in evidence: in gothic, humorous form referencing both the mythological & contemporary soft-porn horror cinema in Stuart Pearson Wright's 'Woman Surprised by a Werewolf'; as stated by Neal Jones in his abject-humorous Lakeland camping holiday gone typically rainy & wrong, 'Breughel Camp' (turning the experience from a leisure break into the grotesque ordeal such frequently become); & also the classical landscape of Ged Quinn's 'There's a House in My Ghost', where a sense of ruin (of more modern ideals, too) & bathos predominates the dark foreground, which also include a little art hist ref/joke in the form of a decapitated head being that, in fact, of one of Philip Guston's caricatured self portraits - the tent canvas, too, is of course itself a painting.
Also referencing art history, in a very direct manner, Michelle McKeown's 'Cunt' displaces a Rorschach butterfly onto the genitalia of Coubet's 'L'Origine du Monde', creating a powerful visual analogy.
Another landscape, Tom Bull's 'Black Flag', subtly Japanese in its pale, watery washiness, although small in dimension is given a greater sense of scale through the placement in its midst of a miniature, rickety hut upon stilts, of which Mie Olise Kjaergaard's delapidated, abject (again) 'Watchtower With Green Stick' could be an enlarged detail, now viewed not from above but below, at ground level, situating the viewer more immediately within the landscape.
Also painted, as the latter, with a bold, splashy informality is another man-made structure, the ducking machine of Neil Rumming's 'The Baptism', a striking design of a simply effective mechanism, both somehow abject in both appearance & its harsh functionality, & certainly humorous to the point of hilarity.
A sense of dialogue is also established between of a pair of paintings referencing more domesticated settings, through the use of the floral patterned vinyl collaged onto Jake Clark's 'Cornerways' suburban bungalow - serving a number of surface & spatial purposes, whilst also echoing the painted flowers in the immediate foreground of - & the grid-pattern overlaying the retro interior of Stephanie Kingston's '252 Solitude': both these works inspire a sense of nostalgia, of & for the somehow faded & the failed project of the Modernism they suggest.
I particularly liked that which is absent in Matthew Usmar Lauder's quiet, subtle 'Untitled (Hole)' & the unsettling blankness of Sista Pratesi's 'Black Farm II', which has something of an analogue in Alex Gene Morrison's 'Black Bile', where intense blue eyes stare from a shroud of lusciously textured jet-black paint, combed like hair or fur, becoming active as one moves across its surface, changing in the light, which in turn is juxtaposed with another prizewinning entry, Grant Foster's 'Hero Worship', where the paint is mixed with actual human hair to create a clotted, matted surface that might initially inspire revulsion & horror through its grotesque appearance but whose subject, poignantly abject as it is shocking, also may elicit a more empathetic reaction: this painting in its turn then establishes some relation with Tim Bailey's similarly military-jacketed portrait 'Cadet Congo Ganja' - certainly it's a neatly chosen & curated show.
Enjoyable too for more purely formal reasons are the colourful Modernist arrangement of Marta Marce's 'Flowing 2', & the all-over surface activity, strong, architectural design & vivid colour scheme of Richard Kirwan's 'As Above, So Below'. The empty studio space of Matthew Wood's 'S-CAT LRABI' in its muted way has a poignancy for any who might have shared such communal spaces, with works-in-progress, the beginnings of art, on display.
The highly-defined photorealism of recent Moores is largely absent on this occasion, although it was good to see Roland Hicks's 'Sometimes We Sense the Doubt Together', delicately balancing the beautiful & abject with its enlarged image of discarded chewing gum suspended between ground & sole, not least because it established a 'Cheltenham connection', the artist being a particular year's Research Fellow at the college during my undergraduate studies there. Last time, my old personal tutor Paul Thomas was represented, it's always a pleasure to see something of those one knows in some way.
Further to this, later, in town, I picked up a bargain copy of 'The Drawing Book' by Sarah Simblet, who visited us frequently in Cheltenham from the Ruskin School at Oxford, treating one to the most wonderful, generous, supportive tutorials & taking workshops in anatomical drawing, at which she herself is quite fantastically talented: the book itself is a delight, informative & an inspiration, to keep drawing, learning, developing.
A couple of other little things, observed during the course of the journeys traversing the Wirral: the tanning salon, in the New Ferry area, wonderfully-wittily named 'Sunjunk-e' (at least to one with leanings towards things Japanese); &, the delightful anachronism, related to recent comments on English nostalgia & retro, of the charity shop in Bromborough still bearing the legend 'War on Want' - the Wirral, indeed, being one of those places where such suburban 'timelessness' endures & is oft in evidence.
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