Last night was the opening of two-man show, Peacock Trousers at Josh Lilley Gallery. A delightful meeting of beautiful and provocative pieces offset by the Charlie Chaplin-esque Maple Leaf Ragtime by Scott Joplin that emmanates from a small room, where Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom’s playfully slapstick intermittant film plays.
Gabriel Hartley’s sculptures are structures on the edge of collapse, suggesting something of the monolith, previous giants now fragments and caught in a frozen state of collapse.
I’m compelled by sculptures which seem to as if born from the material they are made, as if the sculptor revealed something immanant and ancient within the material they work with. Despite the energy of these works seeming to work oppositely to this, a deconstruction rather than a revelation, the latant energy of the works is similar. They lean precariously towards the gallery walls, and appear to crumple before you, but possess the same kind of ancient force and potentiality as the revelatory energy awakened in works by David Nash et al.
The production process is in fact almost opposite to a carving of a natural material, the pieces appearing initially like discarded metal twisted and dented haphazardly. The appearance is deceptive, and the sculptures began life as flat sheets of paper which were then hewn and assembled using resin and fibreglass. This process of a form emmerging is shared with the sculptor carving a piece of stone or wood, but Hartley’s revelation is not a stripping back, but rather an assemblage and a construction.
The sculptures are complimented, unexpectedly, by the interrogative yet playful images of Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom. Again, in his series of photographs there is a palpable energy which is present, threatening, on the verge of breaking through, but frozen. Pools of light bathe varrying numbers of light bulbs in cartoon popping colours. The lightbulbs almost become reminiscent of snooker balls about to be broken, again emphasising a potentiality of movement which has not been realised, but is still present.
Two contrasting artists, working in distinctly different mediums and styles, the compliamentary playful exploration of processess frozen between something past and on the verge of something. Dissimilar on all accountable details the harmony and dissonance between the two artists’ works makes this an interesting and invigorating exhibition.
Catch the exhibition until August 13th
Josh Lilley Gallery
Rachel Bennett
