In his complex, resonant images, Laurence Noga explores the spaces in between. His images are carefully structured interplays of colour, shape and surface texture that might be read in one sense like a musical score and in another, like a full orchestra in mid-stanza. “Music is the space between the notes” is a quote attributed variously to Claude Debussy, Mozart or Miles Davis but Noga’s images do not begin in music.

His mother was in fact a jazz singer and his father was the Maître D at Le Caprice in London, but it has been his father’s collection of ephemera that has prompted much of his work in recent years. Both the garage and latterly the garden shed in the home he was brought up in slowly filled with images and objects, album covers to barrel keys as a kind of library of significant mundanities. Now in Laurence Noga’s possession they are an endless source of raw material, not in themselves but in the relationships and patterns between them.

In recent paintings I have developed a calculated layering of colour and collage and mixed media. Drawing the viewer into a peripheral world of imperfect geometries.

A sense of history comes from collective and individual memories. As many of the elements, such as the support for the painting, are from my father’s collection of objects and memorabilia in his garage – hundreds of tools, packets, washers, menus, books and photographs. Their selection and use activate an open approach reliant on the environment and experimentation, alongside a human response to the mysterious, and forgotten items and their poetic sense of history. LN 2020

Born in London in 1961, Laurence Noga graduated from Wimbledon School of Art in 1984 and completed his post graduate studies at Byam Shaw (Central St Martins) 1991, receiving the Post Graduate award of Merit for Fine Art.

Alongside his personal practice as an artist and curator, he writes for Saturation Point, the online editorial and curatorial project exploring reductive, geometric and systems practice in contemporary British art. Interviews for Saturation Point have included Simon Callery, Richard Caldicott and David Oates; recent projects have included the exhibition Possible Architectures at the Stephen Lawrence gallery in South London.

He lectures at the University of the Arts, London.

LINKS

laurencenoga.co.uk

laurence.noga >  Instagram

saturationpoint.org.uk

Laurence Noga on singulart.com

From the catalogue to That’s Not What, 2014 at the Hide Gallery, London, curated by Laura Moreton-Griffiths:

Laurence Noga’s pictures are developed from collages; preparatory drawings, made from exhibition invitation cards, overlaid in vertical strips in a panoramic format. The work questions a notion of the in between…freezing a moment in time. The surface materiality emphasises a process of being simultaneously in and out of control, working with enamel, acrylic, and powder pigment; applied with a brush, roller or poured; the pictures narratively reveal their history. Offered up to chance and exposed to risk, in the making, the paintings are not always seductive but jar or create a dialogue that plays on the mind and the eye to impact on the emotions. LM-G 2014

Peter Ashton Jones on Laurence Noga’s painting Deep Pink Filtered Silver

The free-hand of the drawing, the layering of the painting, the contained release of the vertical bands of paint in contrast to the open field of disbursed paint, and most of all the exactness of the colour relationships, create a depth of field that is seen through the surface of the ‘painting’. There is a sense that a shadow or ghost of some thing or object is in the painting, not lying behind, not pushing to find a figurative form, but more as a signifier for the act of the hand.

Approaching the In-Between – Nancy Cogswell & Laurence Noga – a critical essay by Peter Ashton Jones, co-Editor of Turps Banana

Recent exhibitions include; ‘I’m in a window mood’ 2020 online showcase curated by Lucy Cox, Playtime (2019) curated by Sharon Hall at Arthouse 1 London, and Panel Paintings 3 at the Eagle Gallery London.

Recent group exhibitions include Momentum, Angus Hughes Gallery London 2018, Open Construction, Eastbury Manor London 2018 and the John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool 2018.