LOVE PEACE & HAPPINESS

If you want to agitate even the most unrustled artist, ask then about the utility of art. Every artist who has the stamina to pursue a career has dealt with a continuous stream of incredulous uncles and joe publics asking the question ‘but what’s it for?’ One the one hand the special sovereignty of art resides in it’s ability to stand outside of norms of use, as art for art’s sake, separate-yet-reflecting. On the other, the greater context of an increasingly precarious world, in which art is pulled into the ponderous gravity of everyday life. The moral rumblings that art cannot be exempt from the squeeze that places all other aspects of society under pressure. The art of the past performed various functions, as a moral arbiter, a panacea, a condemnation. Technology mediates our contemporary needs but the lingering desire for something inwardly uplifting, dare I say spiritual, remains. These artists each respond to the question of art’s function in a different way. Where they come together, through painting and sculpture, is in their buoyant and playful spirit. They each show how form can be necessarily put to work in the stimulation of the intellect and the senses. By disavowing the traditional boundaries between the decorative, the crafted and the “fine” arts as a matter of course, these artists point to the possibilities of joyful form as a bulwark against the indifferent and mundane.  

We’ve come home to painting and sculpture for good reason. They make us feel good. When we stand in front of a great painting we realise it’s a screen-beating picture. It simply cannot be reproduced, dimensional colour and texture that we can feel like warm rough hands with our eyes. A painting doesn’t remind you of the bureaucracy of life, it tells you to eat, enjoy, sleep in, dream. Colour and texture create sensations, they are the content of the work. Studies have shown that one hundred hours of art appreciation a year significantly improves your well-being and mental health. The radiance of a painting is a like a tanning booth that cooks the soul. 

As the Japanese artist Taro Okamoto often said, Art is an explosion. It disrupts in the ways deemed necessary in a given period. In a time of frivolity and peace art explodes with questions of doubt and suspicion. In periods of turmoil and degradation, art breaks through with a timely reminder to return to simple truths. In this moment we need an art of life and celebration, that pops with colour and seduces with form. We need painting and sculpture to receive our confusion and worries and give back intelligence and complexity. These most ancient modes of production have the capacity to carry us, rich histories into which we can plunge ourselves, drawing on familiar forms but charging them with contemporary psychology. Art is gloriously useless, but it does serve a psychological function. It can be a rope to tether us to reality, or a screen to shield us from our worst excesses. 

The work in this exhibition is imbued with an unabashed optimism, and a belief in the kick of satisfaction that comes from the manipulation of material for pleasing affect. In each case there is a sense of wrestling with the canon, the question of how to enter into a meaningful something with the legacy of the medium. The motif of the fragment, of segmentation and assembly, admits to the challenge. By working from details to whole forms the problem is reframed. Joy and elegance were sensations neglected in the nineties and noughties, but it seems (through the perennial influence of figures such as Matisse) and the new energy for painting and sculpture we can acknowledge the relationship between well being, joy and material play.