“With the proliferation of content and its complex web of sources, it is becoming ever harder to identify what is real in our technology-driven existence.”

Now, more than ever, as our usual cultural and social activities have been closed off by a global pandemic, our contemporary lives and experiences are largely mediated through small screens. Confined to our homes, our communication and consumption of culture and information have been limited to a rectangular screen, where we have no choice but to interact with the outside world through technology. Since the invention of television in 1927, digital screens have become ubiquitous and hand-held, adding ever more complex layers of information to our daily activities. With the proliferation of content and its complex web of sources, it is becoming ever harder to identify what is real in our technology-driven existence.

In this group exhibition, OPENART features the work of six artists whose artistic practice entails meticulous, highly skilled, and almost monastic approach to making; a ‘perfectionism’ of process. These artists use their finely honed technical skills to create visual trickery or present an illusion. Following on from Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the ‘hyperreal’, a term coined in his 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation, this collection of artists present fabricated imagery that slips between real and simulated. We cannot be sure what is ‘real’ and what is not, especially when viewing these works in a virtual, digital space. Flat surfaces appear three-dimensional; digital renderings appear to be photographs; and re-purposed imagery is obscured with layers of graphic symbols. We begin to wonder, where and what is the original?

In these times of iterative reproduction and distribution, is there such a thing as an ‘original’? Baudrillard painted a picture of contemporary life whereby individuals are no longer rooted in the real, but hypnotised by an ‘ecstasy of communication’, oversaturated and bombarded by external influences. Objects and events within this picture are continually expanding and superseding themselves, becoming more beautiful than the most beautiful, shinier than the most shiny, more real than reality.

Paradoxically, in a time of automation, acceleration and expansion, the artists in this exhibition take their time, work methodically and fastidiously to create artworks that not only engage the audience with its visual finesse, but also captivate through the irreplaceable human investment of time and dedication to their artistic vision.

“One could of course argue that this is not the real thing, but then—please, anybody—show me this real thing.”
Hito Steyerl, In Defence of the Poor Image, e-flux journal #10 (Nov 2009)

Olly fathers

Fathers graduated from Wimbledon College of Art in 2010. His work investigates how man made structures contribute to the way we perceive, judge and negotiate our positions in space. Fathers explores the subconscious interaction between people and objects, resulting in a visual journey inspired by architecture, people and the city he calls home.

Concerned with shape, form, edges and colour, Fathers explores surface and texture through collage and relief. His geometric forms reflect the spaces between manmade obstacles in the urban landscape, asking the viewer to consider their relationship to the built environment. Meticulously assembled, these works playfully dance between two and three dimensions, with colours acting as shadows to make some elements float above the picture plane.

Nicolas Feldmeyer

Feldmeyer initially trained as an architect before going on to study fine art at the San Francisco Art Institute on a Fulbright Grant, followed by completing an MFA at the Slade School of Art in London in 2012. His work explores place and memory, meticulously rendering imagined spaces in the digital realm. Empty of people, his digital landscapes are often inhabited by monolithic monuments, windows or archways offering a portal to another imagined place.

Printed on high quality archival paper or mounted on aluminium, these works have the appearance of photographs but are in fact entirely fabricated. They sit in the liminal space between reality and virtual reality; imagined and experienced, memory and invention.

Alastair gordon

Gordon completed his BA (hons) at the Glasgow School of Art in 2002 then an MA in 2012 from Wimbledon School of Art. He makes paintings about painting: images that oscillate between artifice and artifact. His paintings strongly reference a form of trompe l’oeil painting that proliferated in the seventeenth century in Northern Europe: a specific form of illusionism called rack painting. The notion of authenticity is central to his artistic enquiry. The viewer is often disarmed by the meticulous nature of representation within the paintings and the sense of authority communicated by their display. And yet, despite their whimsical irony and scrupulous attention to detail, the historical veracity of these objects are in constant doubt.

jonny green

Jonny Green studied Painting at Norwich School of Art, followed by an MA at London's Royal College of Art. Green makes paintings of sculptures. Green makes paintings of sculptures. In this new series, hastily assembled cardboard pieces stuck together with tape are meticulously rendered in oil paint. Green explains this approach as ‘an attempt to dignify and document or give testament to something that seemingly lacks dignity or a voice’. The resulting paintings are both still-life and portrait, animate and inanimate.

SELMA parlour

Parlour holds a BA, MFA and PhD in Fine Art from De Montfort University, University of Reading and Goldsmiths University, respectively. Parlour's oil paintings appear as though they're drawn, dyed, or printed. She creates what she calls ‘abstract paintings of photography's installation shot of abstract painting’ using units of 'back-lit' colour, shaded bands and diagrammatic space. She uses a specific, meticulous visual language to unpick the traditions and conventions of historical abstract painting.

In Parlour’s paintings blocks of colour appear to float above or below the picture plane, creating windows or frames through which coloured light appears to glow. The viewer cannot be sure if what they are looking at is representative or abstract; the scale and form is uncertain and seems to oscillate as the eye moves around the canvas.

charley peters

Peters holds a PhD in Fine Art from De Montfort University. Starting from an interest in the legacy of the hard-edge, Peters’ work considers the manifestation of abstract language in the context of contemporary visual media. Exploring the spatial potential of the painted surface through oppositions of colour, structure and technique, her meticulously made paintings are developed intuitively in layers with no pre-conceived understanding of a resolved ‘image’.

The material and illusionary properties of paint are important to the artist as a means of interrogating experiences of reading space, substance and abstract form in contemporary visual culture, in which the once radical symbols of formal hard edged abstraction have become aestheticised and familiar signifiers of the dematerialised post-digital image world.

Becca Pelly-Fry | curator

Becca is an Independent Curator, and Art & Culture Consultant based in London. She originally trained as a sculptor at Northumbria University and worked with film, performance and installation art. She was the Head Curator for Elephant West, a contemporary art space in a converted petrol station in White City, west London till late 2019. Prior to, Becca was the Director and Curator of Griffin Gallery (inside the Head Office of art materials manufacturer, ColArt International) where she curated majority of the exhibitions between 2013 and 2018 and oversaw the artist residency programme and the annual Griffin Art Prize.

Previous to her role with ColArt, Becca worked as an Arts Development Officer for both Kensington & Chelsea and Camden Councils, delivering borough-wide art programmes, festivals and large-scale public art events. She currently works as a freelance curator, developing exhibitions with emerging to mid-career artists, as well as working on a range of independent projects. Her curatorial practice encompasses an interest in materiality and the process of making, through to explorations of human/animal relationships, symbiosis with the natural world, healing and spirituality. Becca is also a Reiki healer and is currently learning about Andean Shamanism, both of which bring a complementary set of practices to her professional and personal life.

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IG: @beccapf

Perfectionism IV: a trick of the eye

Curated by Becca Pelly-Fry

July.16 - September.16.2020