Loop

Buxton Museum and Art Gallery      
12 September - 14 November 2009

For Loop, Jenny Jennings has made successive series of paintings that grapple with the complexity of organising forms both visually and in terms of classification. There is an array of paint-handling processes from which she selects, such as: squeegeeing, stencilling, printing and collage.  Specific hybrids of these procedures are honed through her practice, constructing an array of linguistic solutions for the structure and configuration of each form or expression. 

As the title, Loop, suggests, imagery may emanate from the sub-conscious, sustaining the momentum of a self-generating gesture; like a Jackson Pollock in slow motion - as in Andromeda, for instance.  But at other times, the same technique of drawing with a syringe of paint is derived from a convoluted method of the re-registering of a found or appropriated motif with a reference that is specific or personal to the artist: a rose or Uluru. The original is copied and repeated, and, like signature, degrades slightly with each successive facsimile.  In these paintings, a distinction can be posited in the prevalent repetition between that of gesture and that of imagery.  The gestural notion is redolent of motion and activity, structuring the time devoted to the making process.  Repetition of motif, conversely, evokes much more the eternal or normalising: like an unending ledger on one hand, or a brush, never reloaded, that makes ever fainter yet nonetheless persistently visible strokes. 

Jennings’ paintings are surprising in that they seem at once lyrical and yet abrupt.  Flux and flow interchange perpetually. Expressions are interrupted by the crisp, hard edge of the stencilled or masked shape. There is a sense of pre-determined, reactive composition vying at times with an intuitive juxtaposition of collaged elements, but also tinged with chance. This engenders an abrupt schism between territories as well as across the surface of the painting. In Rainbow Light, cut-outs and autonomous forms seem to drift in a field of colour. The simplicity of the figure and flat-colour-ground dynamic returns us constantly to the physicality of the medium and therefore the actuality of the illusion.  The work has progressively escalated in complexity.  In Woven Space, the emphasis shifts from image and ground to more illusory content.

We may feel we see pervasive landscape iconography, despite the seemingly autonomous abstractionist agenda: rainbows, hills, clouds.  The insinuation of spatial depth and overlap is more recent.  In Indus, it is as if the vantage point shifts to ground-level, identifying more specifically the viewer’s position in relation to the picture.  In these new paintings, the compositional intricacy and sophisticated manipulation co-opt the viewer’s experiential understanding of painterly space.  Yet this is cleverly subverted as we are aware that we are projecting a construction of place on a candidly two-dimensional constellation of shapes.  If indeed these are landscapes, they are not psychedelic dioramas but a forum for the manipulation and juxtaposition of otherworldly fragments and constructions to which the viewer is admitted.

© Katie Pratt 2009




2011 Gallery North, Northumbria University ‘Working against the System’ (collaborative )