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