Going NOWHERE with Paul Winstanley

11Oct10

 

 

Veil 25, 2010.

 

I want to go Nowhere…

Leafing through the latest issue of TATE ETC (Issue 20 – Autumn 2010) on the tube recently, I stumbled across a full-page spread on Paul Winstanley, whose new exhibition Everybody Thinks This is Nowhere, was currently running at the Alan Cristea Gallery on Cork Street in London. The promo image was arresting: navy washes of bare forest in the early darkness of an evening. So when I met up with the wonderful Immi – of The Dog Show fame, see my earlier post – for lunch that same day, I mentioned this exhibition to her and we decided to go for a wander down Cork Street and see what was on offer.

When we got to the Alan Cristea Gallery, a new show was being hung — shock! I couldn’t believe we had missed our chance — we stood outside a little dejectedly, figuring out what to do next, when one of the gallery staff came out, and told us that the Paul Winstanley show was in its final day at the other Alan Cristea gallery on the same street. Phew! So we swung with relief through the big glass door at 34 Cork Street…and our jaws literally dropped in unison. This was one beautiful show. On every wall, there were beautiful painted aquatints, photo-etches, water colours and oil paintings of empty interiors and landscapes, executed with such delicate mastery that we were literally speechless. In front of the enormous Veil 25 [see image above] especially, we just stared and stared in amazed silence. And then, we dashed from wall to wall, debating excitedly if this was a photograph or a painting? A screenprint or a watercolour? Paul Winstanley technical prowess was legendary; it wasn’t until we picked up the exhibition catalogue that we could verify what techniques he had actually used. We spent a long time in front of his Landscape [2010] series, an entire wall of sugar-lift aquatints with handpainted forest scenes, discussing which was our favourite – for Immi the forest of grey washes, for me the forest of navy blue – and marvelled at the outstanding quality of the work.

But it’s not just for his handling that Winstanley is worth following: the conceptual force in his work is also highly engaging, with his ideas of exterior-as-interior, the painting as membrane between the present and the beyond, the space of ‘nowhere’ which is both some-place and no-place, and the suspension of self within a ‘non-space’. There is a slowness to the work, a quiet unfolding of information, that is very beautiful; Winstanley talks about how his paintings reflect a certain “desirable condition” in the self, and this, to me, is a condition of emptiness — a theme which I am currently very engaged with, and which will, I hope, find some realization in the works I am making for the WOUND exhibition. But back to Winstanley – we left the exhibition on a high, and none of the other exhibitions on Cork Street seemed to come close as an aesthetic encounter. The Alan Cristea Gallery gets my vote, for being both unexpectedly friendly and helpful, and presenting a superb exhibition of contemporary art in west London. Unfortunately, I came to the exhibition late and the show is now closed, but you can see more of Winstanley’s work on his website. Don’t miss Winstanley’s next show: he’s currently based in south-east London, so I’m hoping for plenty more forays into Nowhere.

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