ANATOLE NOTES
Jane Bustin

                                                                    Image: Jane Bustin Beloved, 2010

The Anatole Notes project consists of assembled groupings of paintings, objects, paper and letterpress text. Each assemblage reflects on the unfinished fragmented poems 'pour Anatole un tombeau' by Stephane Mallarme (1879), 'a tomb for Anatole' translated by Paul Auster (1983).

These fragmented phrases are Mallarme's attempt to come to terms with the death of his eight year old son Anatole. Paul Auster comments;
  'this is one of the most moving accounts of a man trying to come to grips with modern death, that is to say death without God.'
As a major symbolist poet, Mallarme was interested in Art reflecting upon an emotion or idea rather than representing the natural world. He believed;
  'the sensation becomes the truth, not the time and place'.
He made many collaborations with artists of other disciplines e.g. Manet, Whistler, Munch, Debussy, Zola and Verlaine. The sound of Mallarme's poems were as important and sometimes more important than the meaning. His most famous poem 'un coup de cles' was a major influence on hypertext. His use of the blank space and careful placement of words and punctuation on a page allowed non-linear and consequentially visual readings of the text.
In Mallarme's pursuit for the 'oeuvre pure' he deduces that:
  'having found nothingness, I have found the beautiful'.
In the Anatole texts, it is apparent that Mallarme felt the inadequacy of words to translate the enormity of emotion he felt for his son's death.

My reflections upon his texts attempt to combine the written words with visual equivalents to reveal the expansive meaning of the text. Each work consists of three or four painted objects arranged on the wall and floor; they are made of various materials e.g. wood, linen, paper, metal, oil paint and readymade chairs. The Mallarme text has been hand letter-pressed onto paper or linen by New North Press.

Calligrams

Jane Bustin, Kevin Finklea, Matt Magee, Estelle Thompson

                                                    Image: Jane Bustin les derniers fleurs, 2010

Calligrams featured four artists whose work explores contemporary paths of minimalist abstraction. The exhibition brought together UK-based painters Jane Bustin and Estelle Thompson with American artists Matt Magee and Kevin Finklea. Calligrams poses questions about the challenge involved in reinventing non-representational genres. The artists work within traditional parameters of colour, form and support, yet each in individual ways extends them.

Finklea’s recent paintings arise from memories of place and time and have moved off the two-dimensional picture plane into three-dimensional reliefs. The range and vocabulary of Finklea’s colour, whether the exclamatory blush of two contrasting pinks or the meditative quality of a light blue are focused and projected into space through these sculptural forms

Echoes of Suprematism and Colour Field abstraction are evident in the work of Kevin Finklea and Estelle Thompson, in the use of geometric forms and the manipulation of ranges of complex, high-keyed colours.


The intense colours and re-worked surfaces of Estelle Thompson’s oils on panel bring to mind a range of associations from past traditions in painting, from the shimmering light of Renaissance frescos to the distressed surface of Jasper Johns ‘Flag’. Thompson’s nuanced surfaces act in counterpoint to her plays with geometric form, in which a simple division of a rectangle can offer myriad visual possibilities.

Matt Magee’s more emblematic paintings employ simple pictograms such as punctuation marks or numbers, as a way of incorporating language into the work under his own abstract terms. Formally satisfying simply as shapes, these signs are also weighted with exclamatory meaning and are held within surfaces of painterly marks.

Jane Bustin’s investigations into the potential for the abstract image to allude to emotional states or metaphorical ideas are closest perhaps to traditions of the sublime in abstraction. Exploring sources in literature, her recent series of works are made in response to Mallarmé’s volume of poems ‘’Pour Anatole un tombeau’. Employing a range of materials and supports the work has moved into the territory of installation where related paintings and text are sited in three-dimensional arrangements.

Jane Bustin's most recent solo exhibition Unseen – A collaboration, took place at the British Library, London.
Kevin Finklea’s recent solo exhibition Memories are Uncertain Friends was held at Margaret Thatcher Projects, New York.
Matt Magee’s forthcoming solo show takes place at the Knoedler Gallery, New York..
Estelle Thompson is represented by the Purdy Hicks Gallery, where she had a solo show in 2009.

The Eagle Gallery - EMH Arts. 159 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3AL www.emmahilleagle.com

24 June - 24 July 2010

 

UNSEEN
A Collaboration
Jane Bustin, Tracy Chevalier, John Hull

                                                                                                      Image: Jane Bustin I hold breath to hold you, 2008

Unseen is an exhibition of paintings and texts, which are the result of a two-year collaborative exchange between the British artist Jane Bustin, the writer Tracy Chevalier and theologian John Hull, author of Touching the Rock.

John Hull’s account of the onset of total blindness and its impact on his sensory perceptions and spiritual beliefs, prompted Jane Bustin to explore ways of making paintings that might involve an ‘unseeing’ of an original visual image. In 2006 she invited Tracy Chevalier to translate the effects of a series of minimal abstract paintings into words, as a means of making the works ‘visible’ to Hull. Chevalier’s texts acted as a conduit for Hull to respond to the original paintings. Completing the Chinese whisper, Bustin conceptualised Hull’s words as related ensembles of paintings, where the scale, colour, materiality and interval of each element were determined by Hull’s perceptions.The final visual images are in a sense, authored by someone who cannot see.

The exhibition includes the initial sequence of paintings: Touch-Shout, Stroke-Grief, Breath-Kiss, together with email exchanges between the collaborators. Chevalier’s texts are steeped in imagery that evoke the scents and textures of sensations and memories as a way of circumventing visual description – “The hiss of a radio tuned between stations…”. Hull’s responses are short and distilled, yet powerfully sensuous – “Kiss suspends breath / I hold breath to hold you…”.

Bustin’s final works, which employ various mediums of oil on wood, aluminium, silk and gesso have undergone subtle but perceptible changes. Arranged at irregular intervals on the wall (to echo the space between words on a page) they invite long and close contemplation. The works subvert traditional formal readings, since the related objects and the spaces between them must be read as a whole. The paintings have an extraordinary vocabulary of colour and texture, relying on the most minimal haze of pigment on the textured weave of a canvas, or a stain of oil bleeding from beneath a skin of overlaid paper. The painted objects and their after images, reflected at intervals as pools of colour along the walls, are meditations in the widest sense on ‘seeing’.

12 January - 14 March 2009

The British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB

A limited edition bookwork will be published by EMH Arts / Eagle Gallery Publications for the exhibition.
For further details please contact the Eagle Gallery on 020 7833 2674 or email: emmahilleagle@aol.com

This exhibition is in association with The British Library