Factory to Palace — Paul Housley at the Sid Motion Gallery
Ends 23rd Dec 2016
http://www.sidmotiongallery.co.uk
Studio time is sacrosanct for the artist Paul Housely. As he puts it, “you can have the gift, but you need to have the grind as well” to make something of it. You got to have the the grit & the gold in a painting.
For Housely it is simply evident in the final painting, whether swiftly executed or pausingly deliberated that hard work, problem solving, experience and distillation of the handling of paint is present and palpable.
Mind, sense memory, muscle memory, paint and the physical action of application, become one so that painting poses a special status as an object and as an action that makes man and time one.
A visceral, somatic time can be reflected in (Moon Temple, 2016) it is particularly useful to single this painting out. As it simply sums up one of the most subtle concerns of Housleys Painting.
It is an extremely simple painting, its main structure and focal point appears to be three simple rectangular strokes of yellow paint, two thin long parallel lines topped by a wider block. Yet this ‘simple’ application of paint flips and oscillates from this to the iconic image of a temple. Using the barest means to meet the criteria of a recognisable signifier for a temple. The motif underlines the intention of paint to monumentalise or commemorate a moment, a sense experience. (A monument in the end is created to guard as far as possible a cultural memory into the future, long past the passing of men’s bodies, launching like a rocket into alien futures, as a vital warning, a commemoration of joy, a refrain against material vanity or sometimes evidence and a warning of pride defeated- a monument is a guard against the greater fear of the death of an idea, and implicitly naturally a belief system). And yet it is significant, it is no accident that the artist has set out to do this with the slightest of means. We can say painting is this and it is also an apparition. One that poses a concrete quality and an almost nothingness passing ephemerally. Made from such slight material yet holding so much impressed, so much possibility, so much choice. Looking further, you notice several passing of the brush on the two down ward stripes. Noticing a mixing of the seas watery blue into the yellow. This pleasurable mix further destabilises the the temple. Then looking at the edges you can discern the different layers in which the sea was laid down, and then another stroke of yellow paint added to temple, then details of the waves put in, eventually to give an effect of the temples edges dissolving into the sea. The temple itself hovering between different layers, different layers of time. This sense of the passing of time happens again, this time feeling like the paint brush has laid down its strokes like drumsticks beating a rhythm or notes on a guitar, in the fusion of the Van Gogh/Picassesque chair.
You feel the passage of time in the strokes and you reflect on the speed of the paint. With Housely it feels this is at play more so than most artists. (And the sense if experience coming through).
The pauses, the lifting of the brush at certain points that, elicits a want to ask… having noted this hint of the artists mind.
Painting in its visceral, sensorially loaded nature is at its most aware amongst the arts, of death. All good painters instinctively know that feeling of death. That is the feeling they get when not pushing at the edge of what they know. Death is, not growing. Death is dying back. Death is the unfelt and is thoughtless repetition, death is comfort. And because of this acuity, painters most often have a greater sense of their organism.
In a sense paint is like the painters flesh, itself. But more importantly it most readily reflects the imprint of the mind.
Which as all things that pass or lose their bodies makes the act of painting all the more poignant.
Time features in other numerous ways in Housely work.
In the recurring motif of clock faces Clock and Chair (to Dai Bravely not that it matters, 2016, which reference how one perceives the passing of time to the time in painting. The motif of the factory can potentially be read as modern, regulated, accelerated, profane or capitalised time. The Palace as referring to potentially aspiring to the temple and the eternal. For the artist the parallel to the studio and the museum is obvious. But we should be clear that in the hands of Housely, these different places are facets of the same whole, the same painting, and same ‘self portrait’. Paintings of the city contain this composite as sites of production, of identity, of chance, of play and of time. To the clear depictions of night or day.
Histories of the surface.
Other motifs reoccur in the artists work, the use of which allow him to work through or bypass, concerns of subject as almost a method of distraction to enter into deeper concerns. In this play of motifs, returns erasures, compositional arrangements Housley encounters a flux. Which he pursues, (seeking a constant agitation of the painting object)…
Quickly taking a look at a few of the other works in the show
Nash like sculptures, primitive and Picasso like are fascinating to see and learn how they feed into Housely’s paintings. They have an incredibly Humane quality, made to the size of the hand. The Artist, 2016 is semi portrait of the artist, that has a life like quality, certain carved lines into the body of the piece look seemingly stung from the cold or having a had a light pressure removed from its flesh to then have its blood pool back to the depressed area. In this way the sculpture has taken on the tact of paintng.
The Power stations in England Burning, 2016, (possibly have something of William Blake’s dark Satanic mills). The yellow pigment seems to float off the cooling towers. Not only are they like pre-historic cave paintings, but you could imagine in a post-apocalyptic scenario, finding them painted on cave walls (as if hunted, to extinction like bison), or the passage of tens of millenia had passed to make these as ancient as mammoths.
The Housely adds with a great sense of humour. “That the Empty Frame, 2016 is the most conceptual piece in the show, as it is the only piece that isn’t framed.That’s because the painting itself is a frame, and frames itself.”
Showing Til 23rd December 2016
http://www.sidmotiongallery.co.uk/exhibitions/factory-to-palace-paul-housley/
The gallery is a super short walk from Kings Cross Station or St.Martins College of Art
142 York Way
London
N1 0AX
Opening Hours: Thursday — Sunday, 12–6pm.
Please contact the gallery for viewings by appointment