INTERFACE
Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
REVIEW
Transitions-Miranda Argyle, Claire Fahys and Marguerite Horner
Beverley Knowles Fine Art,
4 April 2007 to 5 May 2007
Reviewed by: Beverley Knowles
BEVERLEY KNOWLES FINE ART
TRANSITIONS 7 April – 26 May 2007
Turning off Golborne Road into Bevington Road, your eye is caught by a splash of pink: Beverley Knowles’ gallery. In the window hangs Marguerite Horner’s large seascape, Faith Pours from Your Walls II.
Horner’s titles are considered. Living in the Imagination of Others is prescient, and the positioning of Speed of Time and To be where you really are opposite one another is intentional. The image of the house in each signals a sense of the uncanny (literally ‘unhomely’), and this in turn is accentuated by this mirroring. In To be where you really are, Horner’s meticulous use of paint allowing colour to seep into this one piece, forces the viewer to be present in the painting. Speed of Time in contrast, plays with bleached out colours and the blurring associated with movement: the vegetation is dematerialising before our eyes. Reminiscent of Richter, reality is unreliable, tree trunks become shadows, the ground liquefies.
A similar jolt of the unfamiliar within the familiar is found in the subtle and arresting work of Miranda Argyle. Linen squares are stitched with repetitive phrases, reminiscent of girls’ schoolroom samplers centuries ago. But the wording shocks: How Does My Heart Keep Beating is both the title and the image. The words are stem stitched repeatedly until they fill the format. Their march mirrors the action of sewing and the beat of the heart, which manages to suggest both an incantation to keep the grim reaper at bay and a recognition of the inevitability of death.
The pieces’ sculptural quality, despite being framed and behind glass, is strikingly emphasised as the daylight picks out the shadow of the stitched letters. Threads behind Two and Half Billion Heartbeats are like veins beneath a transparent skin; the satin appliqué image of curtains is a play on words while the number of heartbeats is the number of an average heart at fifty. In Heartbeat the letters are set out with equal spacing, so their sense morphs into other words such as ‘The’, ‘art’, ‘she’, ‘he’. When more than one letter is before our eyes the brain has to read it, whereas a single letter is inexplicable.
Claire Fahys’ complex cityscapes are painted and drawn from fragments of memories of the cities she has visited: Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon, London. She calls this process ‘cutting’ which recalls the Lacanian symbolic as ‘a cut in the real’. Her delight in the process is palpable, as is her commitment self-evident. Ville de Nuit I and II are Fahys’ new cities in ink gouache and acrylic, built layer upon layer, in linear and block dirty browns and greys. They are full of Fahys fascination with the complexities of urban life. They are not only visual reworkings of architecturally linear skylines, but also of the physical guts of these cities: like a parcourt free- runner Fahys has sped up alleyways, climbed towers, padded the streets. There is a sense that the process has only been arrested because of the physical restrictions of the canvas. Fahys’ cities suggest immensity. They soar like fantastic cathedrals and should dwarf the viewer.
copyright Ilinca Cantacuzino
Writer detail:
Beverley Knowles Fine Art Gallery is the only gallery in the country that specialises exclusively in female artists.
Venue detail:
Beverley Knowles Fine Art
88 Bevington Road, LONDON W10 5TW
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