ART CITIES:London-In Pursuit of Elusive Horizons
Pursuing an elusive horizon conjures an image of afigure in a lone and distant landscape, both longing for and questioning the existential relationship between self and nature. A decade ago, to describe an artwork, or an artist, as ‘romantic’ would be to suggest the absurdity of this scene, the romantic hero lost in his own subjective illusion.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Parafin Archive
The exhibition “In Pursuit of Elusive Horizons” at Parafin in London brings together five artists whose in their own way, occupies the border between emotional experience and objective reasoning, often fluctuating between multiple and contradictory positions, drawing on a wealth of art historical languages. Through shared concerns for meta-narratives of scale, time and perceptual relationships to landscape, Martin John Callanan, Simon Faithfull, Rebecca Partridge, Katie Paterson and Richard T. Walker have found ways of combining languages, from the scientific to the sublime, that generate both ambiguity and intellectual clarity. The artists, through a variety of strategies and a diverse range of media, incorporate and embrace the contradictions and uncertainties of our time. Martin John Callanan’s “A Planetary Order (Terrestrial Cloud Globe)” (2009) is a terrestrial globe showing clouds from one single moment in time, highlighting the fragility and interdependence of the Earth’s environmental systems. The globe created from raw information, being a physical visualization of real-time scientific data. From all six cloud-monitoring satellites that are currently overseen by NASA and the European Space Agency was transformed into the delicate outlines and profiles of the clouds emerging across the surface of the sphere. Unlike most of NASA’s own data visualizations, the globe features no added color, only the sculpted whiteness of the raw material that throws a maze of faint shadows across the structure. Simon Faithfull’s. “Going Nowhere 1.5” (2016) presents a walk around the perimeter an inter-tidal island as it slowly disappears under the rising waves, the work is an attempt to witness an absence and to check whether the world still existed during this absence. With a distinct phenomenological approach, and an attitude of careful attention, Partridge explores the reversabilities between inside and outside; the resonances between body and landscape; between our inner subjective world and the external environment. Her “30 Day Sky Studies” (2017-18) paintings create an almost dream-like space, the works are a contemporary tip to John Constable, whose “Cloud Study” (1822) would have been right at home. Katie Paterson’s conceptual, interdisciplinary practice combines a scientific, research-based approach with a clean minimalist presentation. Focusing on cosmology, ecology, and geology, Paterson’s intimate works engage the viewer with monumental ideas of time and the cosmos, her work “Ara” (2016) is a string of lights in which each wired light bulb produces a quality of light the brightness of each star corresponds to the constellation Altar. In “a paradox in distance (inverted) #1” (2014), Richard T. Walker visually collapses the distance between two summits in time and space. The artist’s hand is seen holding up a circular cutout of a mountain peak from a 19th Century engraving, placing it in front of, and in alignment with, Mount Shasta in Northern California. A tripod supports the lightbox on which this destabilized representation of the landscape appears, one leg resting on a Casiotone keyboard on the floor, on a single key, which emanates a sustained note.
Info: Curator: Rebecca Partridge, Parafin, 18 Woodstock St, Mayfair, London, Duration: 20/7-15/9/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-17:00, www.parafin.co.uk
