In Like Kin
Shane Phelps
Perry McParland, Red Pig Head, 2004.
Gallery Kin turns out to be portable, a concept rather than a space. After the interest generated by their underground "SHOW1," the three founders went overground and used "SHOW2" to initiate a new gallery in Lisbon, "Terceira Andar." Although not artistically bound, these three artists exhibit a certain commonality: they share a distaste for the prescriptions of stylistic consistency; each seems to have found a method of usurping expectations of medium or genre that allows them an opportunity for engaging directly with the material of their medium without forfeiting any conceptual weight.
Hjelmeland has been gaining a name for herself. This was my first opportunity to see a collection of her works together: seven large "abstracts," in oil, highly worked and heavily collaged, glued and stitched with paper, silk and canvas. Despite these visibly apparent processes, the works appear unquestionably light, imbued with personality and warmth rather than the frigidity of a noumenal vacuum. Abstraction’s historical form and meaning are treated with a natural irreverence. Though hers is a largely pastel and pastoral palette, Hjelmeland regularly spikes it with lurid highlights, like how one of Kirchener’s adolescents might have ended up the first time they were let loose with a make up box. The drawing too, often refutes its non-figurative nature-a loping abstract line might spring into a sudden spray of larking pink cunts, or sag resignedly like a pair of old tights the color of weak tea. Even the stitching that winks in and out across the different colors affects a furtive and sexy discretion. The Portuguese poet Manuel da Silva Ramos recently wrote, "We are overwhelmed, enveloped and imprisoned by these spectacular paintings," which is true, but not the whole story: we mustn’t overlook the inherent generosity and mutuality of these pictures’ personality, vivacity and verve. Fun without being camp and effervescent without being cheap, they are enormously enjoyable paintings.
"Dang," by King, consisted of seven works–paintings, perhaps, but pressed towards their own objecthood to such an extent, they almost contravene their own nature. The canvas is nailed through to the stretcher at scattered points, folded and overlapping itself; the cloth hanging loose and swaying from a stretcher that in turn is projected through it. They are paintings, as far as the word goes, only in garbled form, with their insides turned out. Their surfaces are characterised by what appears a random spew of impasto paint, polystyrene, wooden brackets, wires and light fittings. While there is evidence of plentiful activity, the drawings often seem to obliterate their own personalities, with the marks bearing little sign of deliberation or even a trace of the hand; instead they are more akin to random stains, rubbings and spills.
King seems to drive most of his pieces to a white noise of accumulation, yet instead of succumbing to a senseless entropy, a last-minute-formalist swerve conserves them, managing even to invest the works (to my mind) with a kind of cartooned personality. One large work (5x 3m), extending from ceiling to floor, was pushed into a corner (most of the pieces force the viewer to find a "better spot" than directly in front for their viewing), and being too large for its nominated area, its bottom third lolled out turgidly into the viewer’s space. For all the raucous energy above, the flayed sails of collaged paper that hung limply from its midsection and its enervated and abandoned tongue managed to articulate and elicit a genuine human sentiment.
The final show was McPartland’s and he is really the slipperiest of the lot. He showed ten paintings, not large but each dynamic, taut and difficult. He appears bent on taking up an artistic position that repeatedly and deliberately shoots itself in the foot. The paint itself is handled with great virtuosity, and allowed an enormous physical freedom, sustained to its material limits. Yet this striking ability and furious commitment to the medium are only matched by a seemingly unquestionable atheism with regard to its significance. The paintings usually realize themselves in an insensate stupor of matter that McPartland might finally reign in, or conversely, and just as often, allow it to break itself. One method or the other, it doesn’t really seem to matter; "Failures 1 and 2," an admixture of cynicism and red herring, was the name the show went under. Whether the paintings finish figurative or abstract, what remains from this strategy as abortion, there remains a desperate trace of significance that cannot be annihilated; if Hjelmeland’s paint exudes personality, materially, figuratively and nominatively, McPartland’s works speak of the body, and particularly its bleak and visceral comedy. Red Bay might well be a red bay, but it struck me as more like a pair of viciously cartooned varicose legs; next to it an image of a yellow carcass bore the contradictory legend, Torso. This double-natured iteration of each picture is a recurring leitmotif, one which rehearses itself in the tense forcing of mutually exclusive genres, and again through the fact that a lot of the pictures are literally doubles, one painting over another. Repeatedly, their nominated and significant nature is refuted–conceptually they aren’t allowed to settle. At each turn they disseminate our trust in them. Coarse, comic, perverse, cruel, contrary and undermining; they are original and brilliant.
So successive and explosive, and one week later all gone. Which I’m sure is part of the fun, but it makes catching them difficult. Gallery Kin: "SHOW3" is at the start of June. Taking place in an abandoned xxx amongst the general detritus of abandoned lives, of furniture and catshit will be 5 monitors showing video work from Andreas Gaviria, Bodil xxx, McPartland and King and a performance from Advance De Lux. It lasts for two nights only?just to keep us on our toes.
Information: gallery_kin@hotmail.com, maria.hjelmeland@xldirecto.com
