A Gesture, An Action, Touching….

The exhibition ‘A Gesture, an Action…Touching’ brings together the work of ten contemporary artists, all of which are painters for whom the gesture in its broadest context is a principal component to their painting practice. The idea for the exhibition initially derived through reading a John Berger poem ’Twentieth Century Storm’ where the line ‘In origin, a gesture an action touching’ resonated with my practice,  the word ‘touching’ seemed to offer a meeting point not only between the gesture and the action, but also a kind of interface between possible polarities where the result becomes something intangible and sensuous, both delicate and physical. For the title of the exhibition, I wanted to emphasise the ‘Touching’ as a juncture between the gesture and action. Gestures reflect evidence of the hand or body or remnants of past actions, each mark navigating its surface independently, feeling and searching, pressing, and touching. Actions reveal themselves through the history of the making; and touch reflects an action that can present itself as sensitive as a breath, or as physical as a dance. Each artist engages and experiments with these infinite possibilities and offer encounters where the intimate questioning of material, surface, boundaries, and edge can reveal multiple spaces and gestures where the absent self is still somewhere present within. All the selected painters engage with the process of layering in some way, building layers and the erasure of marks create complex compositions that invite the viewer to participate in the process of meaning and making.

The selection of the remaining nine painters was driven by their deep engagement with the physicality of paint, colour and the visceral impact of gesture, rhythm, and haptic sensation. By foregrounding the embodied experience of perception, each painter is engaged in an examination of how the surface of a painting can be explored, not as a settled notion of picture making but as a process that is being constantly renegotiated.

For Stephen Buckeridge, Catherine Long and Steven Walker the gestural application of paint conveys the rawness and sensuality of a bodily experience, whether the physical movement through a landscape or as in the case for Catherine Long the use of gesture as experience is synonymous with physical movement and dance. EC engages with the painted material as a gesture, and in which remnants within the painting are often deconstructed to become the fabric of the painting. Tony Antrobus, Karl Bielik, Dido Hallett, and Sabine Tress make visceral process driven oil paintings where the surface evolves out of the encounters between gesture and colour, paintings are often layered exposing their history and evidence of doubt. For Patrick Jones and Lindsay Mapes colour is an important the focus for the work, Patrick Jones who likes to work on large unprimed canvas, improvising a varied technique, like a giant watercolour. The pigment is intense, so working flat on the floor allows the thin washes to overlay and dry. Playfulness and materiality a focal point of Lindsay’s work as is the understanding of how these combinations melt together or scream in separation.

The aim of the exhibition is to present an exhibition which explores gesture both through is historical and contemporary practices and including generational and gender responses where the process is intuitive and incorporates the body as a tool both through its gestures and actions. The exhibition presents both larger scale work and more modest and even tiny works, where the juxtaposition between large and small would engage with each other creating different dialogues in response to the exhibition title.

Accompanying essay by Dan Howard-Birt