The Great Outdoors

Jon Braley & Luca Sangjun Kim

Paint is a luscious material. Morphing between liquid and solid states, it gives artists the chance to be alchemists as a kind of fluid philosopher’s stone. Key to this is the element of natural processes: what the paint does, how it behaves, and how the artist intervenes to manipulate the material to their own ends. But it is by no means a one-way relationship. Gravity and time clash with action and intent, so that paintings become the place where natural forces and human endeavour collide. Process painting becomes, more often than not, a battle of wills.

The Great Outdoors presents new works by Jon Braley and Luca Sangjun Kim who use this process as a focus in their painting, and as a result use their paintings to explore how we relate to the natural environment - from the desire to control and exploit, to the romanticism of the sublime, and our increasing distance from the organic world we inhabit.

In Jon Braley’s work, this romanticism is articulated through a sense of separation, as if the sublime ideal had been captured in amber like a fossil of a lost age. Braley’s amber is industrial resin, a material akin to liquid glass that the artist grapples with like a paint to turn his works into slick reflective objects. What it encases seems to have been packaged and shrink-wrapped, turning any naïve notions of a transcendental sublime into a tidy consumer product. In this new series of paintings, Jon explores this through the use of metallic gold pigments, creating rough underlying landscapes that glitter with the allure of a gold-rush. They suggest both the escapism and the profit so often associated with the raw natural world, and hint at the increasingly disconnected relationship we have with the natural world.

Luca Sangjun Kim’s paintings allude to an idealised purity of nature but in a contradictory way – as if the idea were compressed, squeezed out of a tube, and then engineered beyond recognition. His works are constructed from layer upon layer of pure acrylic, into which the artist makes intense, definite gestures that compound the colours in the centre, leaving the sedimented excess colours outside. The paintings ooze purity around the edges, whilst bursting with creative intervention within. Luca acts like a prospector on the desire of an uncomplicated vision of wholesome nature, bringing his energy to bear on the materials in a very visible way to create a kind of visceral, visual electricity.

13 July – 5 August 2011

Opening Reception: Wednesday 13 July, 6:30 – 8:30pm - RSVP 
Request Online Catalogue (available Tuesday 12 July)

The Outer Limits

Andrew Rucklidge – Luke Turner – Jung-Ouk Hong

Art and logic have never been the cosiest of bedfellows. For many in the sciences, art is too fluffy and cryptic; for those in the arts, rationalism can be too confining, too clinical. But in today’s world, with every aspect of our lives ruled by efficiency and demands for administrative compliance – where does this adoration of rationalism really take us? What kind of world has it created? Dada, Radicalism and a host of other artistic movements have sought to combat this advance of the machine mentality, but today’s technological sophistication and scope only makes it more and more pervasive. So how can artists defend art’s special status against the databasing behemoth? What can they do to highlight the excesses of logic without limits?

“The Outer Limits” brings together three young artists who each approach this challenge from different perspectives, using their artistic practice to expose, articulate, ridicule and undermine the implications of a society that trusts blindly to Reason above all else.

Andrew Rucklidge is a Canadian artist who targets a zone of conflict between traditional romanticism and 21st Century industrial design. His sweeping panoramas of grand Sublime landscapes are finely inscribed with graphic diagrams and architectural skeins, suggesting a technological framework supporting the Sublime Ideal that has been mapped out with military precision. On the one hand grandiose, the undertone is cold, hard, and calculating, the paintings seeming almost apocalyptic as they surge in protest against the intrusion. Like a subtle subterfuge, it is as if the romantic tradition of landscape painting were a target to be observed, analysed, and exploited without remorse. Based in Toronto, Andrew Rucklidge received an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea College in 2003 and has exhibited widely in the UK including at Limoncello, Rokeby Gallery, New Contemporaries at Victoria Miro, and a solo at Store Gallery in London. His work features in numerous collections including UBS & Bloomberg.

Luke Turner also examines what happens when art history and science collide, but with almost masochistic relish. His large-scale photographs are the end product of a process that puts the essentialism of Old Master paintings through a veritable endurance test. Taking a painting such as Cosimo Tura’s “Virgin and Child Enthroned”, Luke takes the line that charts the picture's chromatic densities, whips it around like a spinning top, and then creates a three-dimensional model of the resultant form, which he photographs like some kind of strange, auratic, kinetic object. Deeply technical but also highly subjective, his practice turns abstraction into encryption to explore just how pure, how essential, and how unique an artwork really is. Luke Turner graduated with an MA from the RCA in 2010; notable exhibitions include “Systems and Patterns” at the Whitechapel Gallery (2009), "Let's Go Home", Hamburg, Germany (2009), Purdy Hicks Gallery (2010), and he was selected as “One to Watch” by Jotta Magazine (2009).

Jung-Ouk Hong’s sculptures explore the extent to which our imaginations can be colonised by external order. His sculptures look like creatures from the unknown which suddenly find themselves in a new, alien environment. Their shapes are reminiscent of insects and bugs, with unusual antennae that probe the unknown space around them; but these insects are somehow more machine than organic, like animals drawn from the depths of our imagination and then technologically reconfigured. We are as alien to them as they are unsettling to us – life-forms so adapted by engineering that we share not even the same parameters of perception or experience. His sculptures articulate the uncomfortable reality of how alien the rational becomes on its furthest fringes. Jung-Ouk Hong graduated with an MFA from the Slade in 2009, and has exhibited widely both in the Europe and Korea, including Bloomberg New Contemporaries (2009) and the Guasch Coranty International Painting Prize in Barcelona (2010).

Opening Reception: Wednesday 23 February, 6-8PM - RSVP

Exhibition runs 24 February – 24 March 2011

NEW BEIJING: Young Painting from China - Chen Hongzhu & Liu Guangguang

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

What is it like to grow up in the China of today - to come of age at the same time as your country steps forward as a major world superpower? Being a young adult in China now means being exposed to choices and lifestyles that your parents never dreamt of. It means being influenced by Western culture - and by Western values. It also means that you, and all your friends, are the product of the one child policy: a generation of only children, facing a world of change and uncertainty.

New Beijing takes a snapshot of this New World Order through two young artists at the cutting edge of this post-80s generation: Chen Hongzhu and Liu Guanguang. These painters explore issues that are changing the shape of the Chinese contemporary art market, and as such the show gives a unique insight into the shifting of the sands in this most exciting of art scenes.

Chen Hongzhu is one of the New Generation of Chinese women. Confident and rebellious, she graduated from the prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts, and her work has already been picked up by the Chinese contemporary uber-collector Uli Sigg. Influenced by American painters such as Mark Ryden and John Currin, her zoomorphic self-portraits meld surrealism with self-examination. They depict seemingly perfect porcelain dolls that are nevertheless damaged & fragile, the cuts and dripping blood on the otherwise pristine bunnies hinting at traumas faced and survived. Her paintings suggest a tragedy in beauty, a disappointed innocence, but also a steely determination – disillusionment, yes, but also a persistence to carry on.

Liu Guangguang’s paintings depict young Chinese who dress up in animal suits and costumes, playing with identities but still disjointed and unsettled. Dazed and confused, his subjects stare out at the viewer as if gazing into the void. At every turn they find themselves in cold, stark environments that offer little in the way of comfort or homeliness. It is as if choice in identities has only served to create an atmosphere of uncertainty and insecurity for his lone, lost adolescents. Liu draws a distinct parallel between the experience of coming-of-age as a young adult, and the current condition of Chinese youth society, coming to terms with its new, more open position in the global order and attempting to find some means of orientation. Liu Guangguang is a graduate of Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts.

Both artists address the themes of how Chinese youth grapple with an open consumer society – with choice, options, expendable cash and pop culture… all the trappings that were unknown to their parents’ generation. In their stark portraits of fractured innocence, it is as if the optimism of pop is corrupted by the pressure to make life choices without any guidance or values. Unlike their predecessors, these Chinese paintings are less about politics, and more about individualism – an exploration of how Western values take root in a communist context. The previous generation of Chinese artists defined their vulnerability in opposition to the state; this post-80s generation looks to the expanse of “choice” that the New World Order has delivered, and the sea of uncertainty that it has placed them in.

Jon Braley shortlisted for the John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize 2010

 

Jon Braley has been shortlisted for the John Moores Contemporary Painting Prize 2010!

JM2010 exhibition will be on show from 18th September 2010 until 3 January 2011 at the Walker Art Gallery. 

Please click here for more information.

 

Jon Braley's solo show 'Myth & Nature' at Sesame Gallery is until 24th July.

Myth & Nature Installation View

Front Window

 

Main Gallery

Downstairs

MYTH & NATURE: Jon Braley Solo Show

Jon Braley, Untitled, 122 x 122 cm, Mixed paint and resin on board, 2010

Sesame is proud to present Myth & Nature, the first solo show of new painting by Jon Braley since 2007. 

The Opening Reception is on Thursday 24 June, 6.30 - 8.30PM.

RSVP: info@sesameart.com  

Sesame is proud to present Myth & Nature, the first solo show of new painting by Jon Braley since 2007.

Jon Braley’s paintings are about we relate to nature in an urban, technological age. The more we live in cities and cocoon ourselves from the natural world, the more we become separated from it. In the process, “nature” seems to have become like a commodity or consumable idea that we have come to see as separate from ourselves. Like ancient myth or legend, the natural world has managed to become something romanticised but distant: an essential part of our identity that we nevertheless have increasing trouble reconnecting with.

With their pure organic colour and almost liquid resin finish, Jon’s paintings tackle this head-on. The works are loosely based on landscape painting, but are non-specific: in their imagery, they are more about exploring the idea of raw, untempered nature. There are hints of horizon lines and figurative suggestions – a painting might remind one person of the sea, another of smoke from a fire, or of the depths of a forest – but the objective is to use abstraction to tap into something more amorphous and primeval.

This approach is rooted in the painting process. Jon paints with his hands rather than using brushes, working the paint in an almost trance-like state to create something organic and fluid. This quality is tempered with resin, a plastic-like substance that leaves the paintings looking still liquid, but somehow shrink-wrapped and preserved. The resin acts like a kind of synthetic shield, a physical barrier between the viewer and the abstract natural ideal, to echo this state of separation of the viewer from the myth of raw nature.

Myth & Nature opens on Thursday 24 June, the opening reception running from 6:30 – 8:30.

About Jon Braley

Jon Braley was born in Leek, Staffordshire in 1976. He studied Fine Art at the University of Derby 1996-99, and European Fine Art at Winchester School of Art in 1999-2000, including a 10-month placement in Barcelona. His work has been exhibited nationally with solo and group exhibitions at the Sesame Gallery (London) and Tregoning Gallery (Derby), and internationally at SCOPE Basel in Switzerland and Art Daegu in South Korea in 2009. He was shortlisted for the Blindart Prize at the Sense and Sensuality exhibition at the Bankside Gallery in London in 2006, and awarded second place in the Derby Open in 2004. His work is represented in collections worldwide, including Mountgrove Capital in London, Glaxo Smith Kline UK, De Villeneuve Collection in Holland and Mimaroglu Collection in Istanbul.

'True Stories: Koh Sang Woo Solo Show' Opening Night!

The show ends on next Thursday, 3rd of June. Please come along if you have not checked the show yet!