Cheung’s new paintings at Edel Assanti feature large romantic landscapes
recalling that tradition of painting which included John Martin and Caspar
David Friedrich. Primarily referencing the palette of photography, Cheung casts
a technicolour glow over the landscapes populated with rock features, swampy valleys
and windswept trees, and an epicentre of unnaturally brightened movement around
the bull and its rider. The language of graphic enhancement seems appropriate
here, as it is through the marriage of painterly knowledge and computer editing
of digital imagery that Cheung’s unique vision is developed.
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| Supercell, 2012, newspaper stock listings & acrylic on canvas & polycarbonate, 150x200cm, photo Edel Assanti, London. |
The machismo of the bull-riders set within these sparsely populated
mountainous worlds, appears like an analogy to the artist’s own command of
painterly material in the context of its intrinsically fluid and visceral
make-up, an alchemical substance that transforms tracings of the action of the
painter’s hand to solid illusory surface of an image. Slugs of colour are
applied as seemingly soft, unsolid ‘fresh’ paint, implying movement of the
central forms relative to their more static surrounds. Sunspots with their
spray-flecked fringes inhabit defined sky-areas juxtaposed against inky
silhouetted landforms. In Supercell, swirling lines describe the watery
ground, picked out through sparing painterly intervention. Attention is drawn
to the force of the bull’s movement, which appears to cause rainbowed worms of
paint to fly into the depth of field of the painting’s surface. Cheung associates
the movement of his subjects with the action of his technique, thereby linking
the challenge of his materials with the imagined struggles of the paintings’
protagonists, within a setting of materially evocative surrounds.
The use of stock-listings newspaper sheets, previously exploited solely
as tonal backdrop and implied conceptual comment, has now confirmed its
position in Cheung’s lexicon of materials.
Burnt for pigment, it now also contributes a craggy
charcoal relief to areas of the paintings’ surfaces. Strata of papier mache
pages made into ambiguously crafted objects, become reconstituted into a seemingly
aged and wood-like material. Collaged onto the paintings’ surfaces these
driftwood and stalactite-like forms maintain a separate quality, framing views
into the landscapes depicted beyond them, more separate even than the craggy
relief of the charcoal-material formed from the burnt paper. Unlike the previous
seamlessness of their use as tonal flattened ground, insidiously incorporated
into the beautiful material illusion of his painterly surfaces - the same
building block is now transformed into more consciously applied constructions.
For me this demonstrates a new sophistication in the use of the stock-listing
sheets, building on their long-standing status within his practice, and re-confirmed
as a truly integral language to Cheung’s work.
Gordon Cheung - The Solar Cry
25 October 2012 – 5 January 2013
272-274 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1
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