Image: les derniers fleurs by Jane Bustin
CALLIGRAMS 24 June – 24 July 2010 Jane Bustin, Kevin Finklea, Matt Magee, Estelle Thompson
Calligrams features four artists whose work explores contemporary paths of minimalist abstraction. The exhibition brings together UK-based painters Jane Bustin and Estelle Thompson with American artists Matt Magee and Kevin Finklea.
Calligrams poses questions about the challenge involved in reinventing non-representational genres. The artists work within traditional parameters of colour, form and support, yet each in individual ways extends them.
Echoes of Suprematism and Colour Field abstraction are evident in the work of Kevin Finklea and Estelle Thompson, in the use of geometric forms and the manipulation of ranges of complex, high-keyed colours.
Finklea’s recent paintings arise from memories of place and time and have moved off the two-dimensional picture plane into three-dimensional reliefs. The range and vocabulary of Finklea’s colour, whether the exclamatory blush of two contrasting pinks or the meditative quality of a light blue are focused and projected into space through these sculptural forms.
The intense colours and re-worked surfaces of Estelle Thompson’s oils on panel bring to mind a range of associations from past traditions in painting, from the shimmering light of Renaissance frescos to the
distressed surface of Jasper Johns ‘Flag’. Thompson’s nuanced surfaces act in counterpoint to her plays with geometric form, in which a simple division of a rectangle can offer myriad visual possibilities.
Matt Magee’s more emblematic paintings employ simple pictograms such as punctuation marks or numbers, as a way of incorporating language into the work under his own abstract terms. Formally satisfying simply
as shapes, these signs are also weighted with exclamatory meaning and are held within surfaces of painterly marks.
Jane Bustin’s investigations into the potential for the abstract image to allude to emotional states or metaphorical ideas are closest perhaps to traditions of the sublime in abstraction. Exploring sources
in literature, her recent series of works are made in response to Mallarmé’s volume of poems ‘’Pour Anatole un tombeau’. Employing a range of materials and supports the work has moved into the territory of installation where related paintings and text are sited in three-dimensional arrangements.
