Content provided in partnership with
Paul Winstanley at 1301PE
Art in America, May, 2008 by Christopher Bedford
London-based Paul Winstanley's latest exhibition, "Republic," continues his restrained investigation into the complex relationship of representational painting to photographic imagery. Unlike his previous work, in which selective blurring and distortion played a primary role, emphasizing the artist's hand and developing a now rather familiar rift between painting and photographic sources, these new paintings evince a more faithful, mimetic relationship to photography. Based on photos taken during a recent trip to China, the seven works shown (all 2007, oil on linen) are serene and observational in character, capturing unremarkable outdoor vistas and interior spaces devoid of conspicuous action. Eschewing obvious distortion or manipulation of imagery, Winstanley instead employs color and very subtly exaggerated atmospheric effects to mark these pictures as more intimate, personal gestures than is typical of much photo-dependent painting produced today.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
In Hotel Room Still Life, which captures a cup, ashtray, vase and water bottle on an atmospherically it side table, and Station, which shows an institutional space lined with green chairs, Winstanley uses quiet passages of light and shadow to develop images thick with nostalgic ambience. Two monumental round paintings--Pod 3 and Pod 2, both 70 inches in diameter--develop this idea more vividly, proposing color (in this case pink) as the primary aspect of vision and memory; color is the dominant motif, bringing formal unity and an unmistakable subjectivity to both images. In these paintings, memory intermingles freely with mimesis to capture not the strict, empirical details of an experience or view, but the atmosphere of that moment, remembered and rendered over time. This capacity, Winstanley's paintings seem to argue, differentiates the act of painting a memory based on a photograph from the related acts of taking and looking at a photograph. In the surface of a painting, one sees how a moment or scene is remembered and felt.
The closest Winstanley comes to topical or loaded content is in Tiananmen Square, a modestly scaled rectangular painting that shows three Chinese officers, their backs turned to the viewer, before a field of inexact architectural details and blurry foliage. This painting is most remarkable for its obdurate neutrality. Here Winstanley renders his subjects with care while suggesting close to nothing in and through his medium, yielding a noncommittal image of a historically burdened site. If there is an argument embedded in this work, it is slyly buried and difficult to ascertain, which may be Winstanley's larger point: as records of a fleeting experience in a foreign country, these paintings operate as impressions, not conclusions. Their airy, notational character is an honest index of what it means to look and absorb without the time or tools to make judgments.
The subtle rhetoric of Winstanley's paintings can make for a frustrating viewing experience, simply because they refuse positions and polemics so completely, seeming to embody personal memory and little else. But they are also earnest works that represent vividly the slow process of remembering, thinking and painting. [Winstanley's work is on view in New York at Mitchell-Innes & Nash through May 24.]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
COPYRIGHT 2008 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
