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'The Time of Looking, Remembering, and Arranging (Just for Show) Having previously been presented with the assault course for the senses that the group exhibition The Noing Uv It was, a solo exhibition of the work of British artist Simon Ling, The Showing Uv It, is the second installment of a larger two-part exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall. How would the two exhibitions converse?

Simon Ling, Untitled, 2015. Courtesy of Bergen Kunsthall/Thor Brødreskift

In some reflections on part one, I tried to centralise what I saw as the

formidable challenge of The Noing Uv It as proposed by the curators Martin

Clark and Steven Claydon: to alter the “terms” of perception by encountering

objects on “their terms”. Simply put, the work in the exhibition seemed to

assert that this re-terming be initiated through encounters with materials and

stuff (and lots of it) rather than weighing upon experiential habits, prioritising

the “what” of sensation over the “how”.

Simon Ling, Untitled, 2015. Photo: Johnny Herbert

I had wondered whether the labour of such ambitions had been apportioned

in a twofold articulation: the first exhibition (contrary to my intuitions) being

the attempt to dismantle this “how” – encouraging the deformalisation of

things to render them unrecognisable to us – withThe Showing Uv It, as the

follow up, providing the “what” through which our perceptual apparatus

would be momentarily recalibrated. But, curiously, the former – the “how” –

is something Simon Ling’s work seems to address much more directly. For

me, this disorientation was exacerbated by the title of the two-part exhibition

as a whole, something I had previously overlooked, I Aint The Noing Uv It Im Onle The Showing Uv It. And there was I thinking this was either a reversal of

what I had thought to be the obvious order – “what” and then “how” instead of

the other way around – or that both exhibitions were concerned with “Noing”!

Am I being wooed by the stench of “red herrings”? Maybe there is no

delegation of a task between the two exhibitions? Damn those herrings!

The Noing Uv It comprised sixty-seven pieces of work made from disparate

materials. The Showing Uv It, curated solely by Martin Clark this time, consists

of twenty-seven oil and acrylic paintings by Simon Ling, all of which are

titled Untitled. The largest ever exhibition of his work to date, and his first

major exhibition in Norway, The Showing Uv It demonstrates a pronounced

concentration in terms of its colour palette, with a particular partiality for

subsumed layers of vivid, almost lurid greens and oranges which seep through

the images. This offsets the scenes of building frontages, verdant plantation,

and the more formally abstract objects and forms, adding to the warped and

transfigured quality of Ling’s work. However, this transfiguration is perhaps

elucidated with greater nuance in his fascinating approach to time.

Simon Ling, Untitled, 2015. Courtesy of Bergen Kunsthall/Thor Brødreskift

First, let’s calibrate our stopwatches: I think we can say that time has been

altered within current capitalism. One aspect we might venture is that time

has become an arbitrator, “labour time” being supplemented with “I-should-

be-labouring time”, further emboldening the capitalist social relation; idleness

has no value, youmust work (for someone, especially yourself). But how to

think about what I’m doing when the sole requirement is that I produce

evidence of my labour as soon as possible? And so flows the endless deferral of

reflective thought… Within our cultivated economies –the organisation of

time and materials (not just finances) – this aforementioned “pressure” of

time is structured by various processes. A prevalent method in art is to profess

working with the varying economies of “process”, rejecting the “closure” of

deciding on a path and unswervingly taking it. This processual focus is

heralded as then leaving open the possibility for contingency and/or

spontaneous activity, courting the alien collaborator of the “outside of time”

of ex-temporisation. Can we really harness this external temporality, or is it

oblivious to and/or contemptuous of our beckoning? If we beckon it – if

we can beckon it – is it really a radically alien temporality at all and not merely

something available to us within our ‘in house” logic, another way of deciding

on a path and taking it? As mixtures of frantic workers capitalising on every

moment, and proclaimers of practicing ”openness to contingency”, artists and

their work are often in dialectical and complex relationships with time. Simon

Ling’s work is no exception, and it is this aspect that struck me most in Bergen

Kunsthall.

Simon Ling, installation view of The Showing Uv It, 2015. Courtesy of Bergen Kunsthall/Thor Brødreskift

We can think of Ling’s work in The Showing Uv It as the compact residue of

three temporalities harnessed by the artist in his practice: painting directly in

front of his subjects (this done mostly in and around London, but with the

smaller acrylics painted in Bergen on a previous trip); working from his

memories of previous in situ work; and working from studio-constructed

tableaux. The work assumes these temporal shifts created in the public,

imaginary, and private situations of painting. One canvas partially depicts a

car as if it is emerging from a portal, but, otherwise, traces of the conjunction

between the fluidity of his public subjects and his sustaining, but distorting

memories of them are less explicit. The warping and contorting of

perspectives and structural contours, and the glaring colours evinced in much

of the work, particularly the street scenes, are perhaps markers of Ling’s

palimpsestic process and what he likes to term as our “creative relationship

with reality”.

Concentrating on the six more oblique studio-initiated works in the

exhibition, we can plot a point of perspective offering a greater dynamic to The Showing Uv It. These particularly rich pieces pose the sternest questions to

Ling’s process, emanating from the private environment of the studio in which

decision-making processes must be wrested from a potential lifetime of toil.

The production of a temporal economy within the studio – that the potentially

infinite period of studio work might be truncated – can be traced in both

Ling’s choice of tableaux and how he works when faced with them. We are

thus presented with a dual articulation of Ling’s approach and,

simultaneously, an aspect from which we might come to align ourselves to

Ling’s relationship with time. We might consider these six works as the

evidence of what he considers a subject worthy of time through the filter of his

painterly abstraction. He turns away from the “contingency” of his subjects

and his memory of them towards an emphasis on the “rogue element” of how

paint is applied to the canvas. We could here pose ourselves the difficult

question of what the relationship might be between time and (Ling’s)

abstraction.

Simon Ling, installation view of The Showing Uv It, 2015. Courtesy of Bergen Kunsthall/Thor Brødreskift

The dialogue between Ling’s subjects, the situations in which they are

encountered/initiated and realized, and how his particular abstraction

enmeshes with these subjects and situations is a central kernel of the

exhibition. Each canvas renders the mixture anew. Even if we might say that

some aspects of Ling’s work occupies familiar and well-trodden territory, this

familiarity is somewhat deracinated by the situating of The Showing Uv It after

the titillating diversity of the previous group exhibition. When turning again

to the first exhibition, retrospectively reconsidering it in light of Ling’s

work, The Noing Uv It becomes a much more peculiar statement – perhaps this

is the challenge to the exhibition format to which Bergen Kunsthall Director,

Martin Clark, refers in an accompanying exhibition text. This uneasy

relationship between the two exhibitions does nevertheless produce fecund

tensions I look forward to considering in greater depth – the relationship

between deformalisation (part one) and abstraction (part two), for example.

When also bringing to the table the temporal aspects of Simon Ling’s work as

I’ve tried to sketch out here, we might also then begin to wonder about how we

could retrospectively think about time in The Noing Uv It. With forthcoming

publications on both Ling’s work and the two-part exhibition as a whole, it will

be fascinating to see whether the oblique dialogue of the two shows will be

fleshed out, veering the project further off the beaten path.

Ask to borrow a chair from Kunsthall’s reception and offer your time forward

into the mixture of The Showing Uv It. *** The exhibition is on display until April 5th.

Simon Ling, installation view of The Showing Uv It, 2015. Courtesy of Bergen Kunsthall/Thor Brødreskift !

!!Amado, Miguel, Simon Ling, Bergen, www.artforum.com, New York, March 2015. !Simon Ling BERGEN KUNSTHALL Rasmus Meyers allé 5 February 27–April 5

Simon Ling, Untitled, 2011, oil on canvas, 48 x 72".

In this survey of British painter Simon Ling’s output from the past half decade, Untitled, 2011, is part of a series that depicts a concrete foundation overgrown with patches of moss and grass, somewhere in the English countryside. The painting is a minute close-up of its subject, and such a scale suggests Ling’s interaction with it, both intellectually and physically. Fittingly, it was also featured in this venue’s previous exhibition “The Noing Uv It,” which speculated about the dynamics between objects, their portrayal, and the world. The artist often examines urban landscapes, particularly those where he works in East London, and in this exhibition, various pieces depict the area’s surroundings—for example, fragments of facades, especially shop fronts, are often pictured. A striking aspect of these images is his rendition of retail-store signs in monochrome. This introduction of abstract elements into the predominantly representational compositions for which Ling is known complicates his practice. Such stylistic devices echo other key series here, including his still lifes, of which Untitled, 2012, featuring arrangements of discarded articles in a molded-plastic box, is a prominent example. Elsewhere, Untitled, 2014, shows a building and two cars parked in the road with the rear part of one of the vehicles missing. Ling employs a combination of studio-based and en plein air techniques in his approach here, and the painting portrays a time lapse corresponding to the transient existence of the automobile in that particular location. This engagement with perception, rooted in a tension between looking and seeing, highlights a relationship between things and the mind that traverses both his and the preceding exhibition’s themes.

!!"#$%#$&'!()$&*+'!!"#$%#&'!,,,-)$&+#&-./0'!1/+2/+'!()$.3!4567!!!Martin Herbert picks ten shows on through March 2015 you don't want to miss By Martin Herbert !Simon Ling at Bergen Kunsthall, through 5 April Simon Ling’s exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall, The Showing Uv It, also sets itself against a sci-fi backdrop: Russell Hoban’s exceptional 1980 novel Riddley Walker, set a couple of thousand years in the future in a postapocalyptic Kent where language has regressed (à la the exhibition title) and a new generation is struggling, in part, to understand objects and what can be intuited of their inner realities. This is surprisingly germane to the English painter’s plein-air urban landscapes and studio-constructed still lifes, which intently track – and rebuild through tilted planes and subtle, pulsing distortion – the haphazard bricolage of London streets and tumbling arrangements of objects. If the looking couldn’t feel closer, hot fringes of fluorescent orange amid the realist paint-handling suggests a transfigured world beneath the outward one, one we can’t quite grasp; as Bergen Kunsthall curator Martin Clark has noted, Ling’s method also has resonances with speculative realism, making him a rare painter broaching that philosophic territory. This article was first published in the March 2015 issue

Spence, Rachel, Simon Ling and Chris Ofili talk art, The Financial Times, London, November 1, 2013

Simon Ling and Chris Ofili talk art Ahead of a Tate Britain show, two leading painters (and friends) talk about each other’s work

©James Royall Simon Ling in his London studio

A tall figure in blue tracksuit pants, Chris Ofili strides into greengrassi gallery

apologising in sonorous tones for losing his way so that he is a little late. Before I and

Simon Ling, the painter with whom Ofili has come to talk, can reassure him, Ofili has

already pounced on a painting. “Is that yours, Simon? Is that at home? In Wales?”

A neat, pale figure in tailored shorts, Ling replies in the affirmative.

The plan to interview two of Britain’s leading painters simultaneously was exciting

but nerve-racking. But Ofili’s instant engagement with Ling’s work sets the mood for

a generous, fascinating conversation.

Our focus is on Ling’s practice. Right now, the airy spaces of greengrassi, which is his

gallery, are devoted to a group of his paintings that will shortly travel to Tate

Britain for a show of five British painters under 50. Its aim, according to the press

release, is to interrogate “what painting might mean now”.

Ofili and Ling dive into this question via the canvas that has captured Ofili’s eye.

Described by Ling as “the foundations of a building that got covered in moss”, it

pursues the viridian flora until it dissolves into a well of silky, tonal greens – emerald,

moss, forest, lime – whose provocative, semi-abstract chromatism recalls the

landscape symphonies of Constable, Daubigny and Monet.

“It’s a painting of nothing as well as something,” observes Ofili. “You fall into it;

there’s nothing to hold on to.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to approach,” Ling responds enthusiastically. “The idea

that you can paint nothing and it becomes everything.” Ling and Ofili, who were both born in 1968, have been friends since their days as

students at London’s Chelsea School of Art.

Their backgrounds are very different: Ofili grew up “in a terraced house in

Manchester” and, without a bursary, would “never have considered art school”. He

enrolled at a local college with the plan of studying design but an inspirational

teacher, Bill Clark, opened the door to painting.

Ling was brought up on a farm in Pembrokeshire where outdoor work was part of

daily life. At 15, he took a book on Lucian Freud out of the library. “Then I saw what I

wanted to do,” he laughs drily. “It took me a long time to learn how to do it!”

At Chelsea, Ofili remembers Ling’s then unusual practice of working from a life

model. “It was the last gasp of a life studio,” Ling recalls with a smile. “This really

eccentric lady would come in and jabber [while we painted her]. But that kind of

observational painting was being squeezed out.”

Briefly Ofili had the studio next door. “I was getting a bit more observational myself. I

had started doing self-portraits. And I started to worry: is this a backward step?”

It wasn’t of course. Ofili’s decision, which was surely about turning his gaze inward

towards an exploration of self and the culture that shaped him, led him towards a

vision that has made him one of the most exciting painters of his generation.

Ofili won the Turner Prize in 1998, represented the UK at the Venice Biennale in

2003 and, in 2010, enjoyed an acclaimed retrospective at Tate Britain. Today, he lives

with his family in Trinidad and his work has evolved from the ecstatic collages that

made him famous to radiant, mysterious emanations whose intensity plumbs myth,

fantasy and dream.

Ostensibly at least, Ling remained true to observation. Unusually, he paints en plein

air. (Ofili recently spotted him on a roundabout in the middle of the city. “My little

girl cried out: ‘Oh look, Daddy, there’s a man painting!’ And it was Simon.”)

Two of Simon Ling's untitled works (2012) Ling’s subjects are deliberately nondescript: a dismal office block; an IT store

cluttered with gadgets; an anonymous stretch of high street. Sometimes he fabricates

curious objects to paint in his studio.

Ofili peers intently at a painting of enigmatic, lozenge-shaped objects. Painted in a

garish hue meticulously constructed out of a spectrum of orange, its original source

was a packing crate.

“It’s already broken down,” Ofili observes elliptically “So you’ve got yourself off the

hook right then! You walk in here and it’s buildings and orange paintings. So you

check out the buildings first, but the orange paintings have dissolved already. You’re

liberated. There are no ties.”

“There are slight ties,” murmurs Ling. “And that’s what acts [as an anchor to reality].”

Ofili’s gnomic insight expresses the vibrant tension in these paintings, the fruit of

Ling’s intense scrutiny of the world heightened by subtle, abstract betrayals. The

computer shop anchors you with the familiarity of its piled-high digital tat, yet in

truth the window display is a shifting patchwork of gestural dabs. If this is realism, it

is in the visceral vein of late paintings by Freud, which evoked not life so much as the

emotion it kindles.

“How do you start these paintings?” inquires Ofili, transfixed by a wan city building

whose architecture-by-numbers is made compelling by the haphazard perspective,

the scrupulous accuracy of its depthless windows, a ragged burst of tree-top

sprouting in one corner.

“Well, this is about the city’s lack of aspiration,” replies Ling. “The lack of planning

and failure, where the city is almost like a tectonic construction, a weird jumble.”

“It sounds like you are describing a painting,” observes Ofili.

“Yes, it’s the perfect subject,” agrees Ling before expanding on his technique. “It’s not

about getting everything covered and finishing it, and doing it right. Often, it’s the

bits you don’t do in the end that are the really active bits. You have to learn to leave

those bits.”

In the exultant pessimism of the discussion that follows, I am reminded of Beckett’s

conviction that a writer’s only goal was to “fail better”. Both agree that the narcissism

fostered at art college was a vital seedbed.

“You can make things because you’re trying to make yourselves,” remembers Ofili.

“Looking at yourselves over and over again. It’s unbearable at times.”

For Ofili, his teacher was a catalyst. “[Mr Clark] was interested in getting to that

breaking point that Simon is talking about as quickly as possible. When you’ve

completely given up and think ‘Sod it’, that’s the time you sit down and start painting.

You’ve bottled out, all of your bravado has gone, and basically you are left with all

that energy translated into another form.”

It takes, I murmur, courage to be a contemporary painter when there is so much

history at your back. “Is it hard to still believe that you can do something new?”

“If you have done your job, the self-knowledge job, then it’s going to be [new],”

responds Ling, “If you have been paying attention, you are going to come up with

your voice.”

His words prompt Ofili to reach for his iPhone to show us images of paintings by

Manet from a recent show he has seen in Venice. “Something in his brushstrokes

says, ‘Fuck you’,” he whispers in admiration. “It’s the revolution in his mind.”

Yet in Manet’s time, there were still huge leaps to be made. It’s much harder now,

surely? “Painting is really good at getting you close to certain kinds of things. Subtle

is radical,” says Ling. “You make a mark with paint, it holds that thing, for as long as

anybody’s going to look at it. That movement [of looking] is now held in a material.

You combine all those energies and you make this thing which is a living record.”

‘Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists’, Tate Britain, London, November 12-

February 9 2014. tate.org.uk !

Grant, Simon & Wroe, Nicholas, Making their mark, Theguardian, London, November 9th, 2013.

Making their mark In an era of installations and performance in which 'anything' can be art, a new Tate exhibition focuses on the work of five contemporary painters

Simon Ling

Untitled (2012)

When I was a student, painting was perceived as having run out of energy. Of course, the more you find out about it, the less sense that makes. But, in a way, it was good that the pressure felt off. At college, I saw a documentary about the painter Philip Guston (A Life Livedby Michael Blackwood), which convinced me that you should stick with what you are interested in and screw everybody else. What he said was a revelation to me, especially about the position the painter could occupy in relation to the world and to your own life, and how to connect the lines between the mind, painting and the world.

I paint in the street because the texture of decision-making is different. It feels sharper and healthier and quicker. One day, I saw a group of schoolkids approaching and I thought:"Here we go." But then one of them said something really perceptive: "That's live." And that is the reason I do it. I want to make this a live, but slightly shifted, version of the world that has me both in it and looking at it.

This picture is of a hotchpotch drag of shops on Hackney Road [in London]; elements constructed years apart that jut into each other. I started with the ornate bit of Victorian or Edwardian plaster decoration that seemed proud but useless. Then these other elements in some strange way hung around it. When you convert something from the real world into a painting, it has to function within the painting. And when it comes down to it, everything is a form of geometry on a flat surface. But the great thing about paint is that it still retains a sense of its temporality. So you make a fluid mark which then becomes solid. But the sense of it once being fluid is still there. That gesture you made to place that mark is held, as is the observation and the thought that prompted it.

The relationship between what I am painting and why isn't 100% clear to me to begin with. The subject is suspended in a way, and the result is more like a poem than a description, something that is evasive and slips away if you try to grab it. This painting is of a real place, but it is not to do with documenting or cataloguing; it is less a celebration of the ordinary than a demonstration of the idea that by painting something that is apparently nothing, it has the opportunity to become everything. The simple act of observation is a deep, mysterious and beautiful thing.

!

Wullschlager, Jackie, ‘Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists’, Tate Britain, The Financial Times, London, November 15, 2013. ‘Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists’, Tate Britain

Simon Ling’s ‘Untitled’ (2013) Painting has been quarrelling over its role and function for nearly 200 years – since, at least, the invention of photography. A fresh twist, according to Tate Britain’s new show Painting Now, is that it has become “a medium under the condition of its de-specification”. Poor painting! Its status collapsed long ago in museums more excited by installation, performance, film. Now it is deprived even of autonomy as a distinctive medium. For the youngish mid-career artists selected for this exhibition, Tate says, “the activity of painting can be understood as a process of resistance”. This is not to say they hate it, rather that they acknowledge a cultural climate where painting is losing currency as a way of responding to the world. As a result, painting risks dwindling – defiantly, even aggressively, in works by four of the five artists here – into a self-referential, sealed language. Converging painting and installation, Lucy McKenzie addresses this bankruptcy head-on. In 2007 McKenzie, “a bit bored with the way both my work and my career were going”, enrolled at the Institut Supérieur de Peinture Van Der Kelen Logelain, Brussels, a decorative painting academy founded in 1882 and more or less unchanged since. Under strict traditional discipline, McKenzie learnt skills of trompe l’oeil marbling, wood graining and panel decoration, then turned them to subversive effect as conceptual strategies. “Loos House”, her major installation at Tate, is a parody-copy of an interior by the modernist architect Adolf Loos. Wooden cubes pasted and stapled with trompe l’oeil marbling, rough and provisional, substitute for Loos’s concrete monumentality and aesthetic seriousness.

I read McKenzie’s subject here as the empty pleasure of faking it. Meticulous paintings of cork noticeboards pinned with reproductions – images of art deco objects, a photograph of deco-cubist Tamara de Lempicka, modernist architectural diagrams – also work by trompe l’oeil visual punning. This 2012 series, called “Quodlibet” – “that which pleases” – has subtitles (“Fascism”, “Nazism”, “Objectivism”) drawing attention to ways in which the modernist experiment was hijacked by political and philosophical extremists. Is all image-making propaganda? Are museum exhibitions mere demonstrations of cultural power? If so, as McKenzie said in an interview when “Loos House” was inaugurated earlier this year at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk, “social engagement within contemporary art is itself a form of trompe l’oeil”. It was centuries of eye-deceiving painterly illusion, of course, that modernism set out to shatter. Gillian Carnegie, Tomma Abts and Catherine Story are not quite archivists in the manner of McKenzie, but each adopts a retro look to pursue challenges posed by cubism, Russian avant-gardes and early cinema.

Gillian Carnegie’s ‘Prince’ (2011-12); Carnegie, whose best-known painting in Tate’s collection is the tree-tangled abstraction “Black Square”, is ostensibly a representational painter. Here she focuses on architecture, with Malevich as background. Interiors feature banisters, landings, stairs, their strict verticals and diagonals sometimes disrupted by the silhouette of a black cat. A still life, “Section” (2012), emphasises a room’s angular corners over a flattened arrangement of moribund flowers. In “Pearl Eyed” (2010), a façade and rear view of mock-Tudor houses imply an odd vantage point of turning back on oneself. Employing a palette of shades of grey and dirty cream, rigid lines refusing to align with picture planes, and stagy cropping reminiscent of early black-and-white movies, Carnegie insists that none of this quotidian world be taken as real. Devoid of pictorial life, her images seem to me frustrated attempts to deny representational potential – or, as Tate says, “the very obscenity of representation itself in its materiality”. Abts, 2007 Turner Prize winner, trained in Berlin making films of stripes blinking and fading in different rhythms, influenced by structuralist film-makers. That theory-drenched heritage persists in the interweaving diagonals, triangles, waving lines, arcs and circles, built up in

layers of oil on acrylic in her small, identikit 2010 vertical-format abstractions: red and grey stripes within arc-like forms in “Zebe”, sharp-edged orange and red lines over black rings in “Jeels”, terracotta curves casting falsely angled shadows in “Uke”. Abts’s fastidiously wrought surfaces, muted palette and monosyllabic, non-disclosing titles (plucked from a dictionary of German regional first names) admit no variety; no part of a painting arrests more than another, no single work claims particular attention. Though they use the geometric vocabulary of Utopian constructivism, Abts says her compositions are free of references: “I am constructing an image from nothing.”

Catherine Story’s ‘Lovelock (I)’ (2010) Can something come of nothing? Refusing expressive possibilities of colour, brushwork, texture, Carnegie’s and Abts’s hermetic paintings struggle to make a case for their own existence. Sure, they test the limits to which painting can or cannot survive a complete neutrality of tone and detachment – but that cannot sustain interest, or an oeuvre, for long. Story, a yet slighter talent, is concerned with painting’s relation to film. She depicts vintage wooden projectors in faux-cubist style – “Lovelock”, “Lowland” – as abstracted personages, sculpts them in white acrylic on clay (“8”), and anthropomorphises electricity pylons in black oil outline on baking paper in “Sweetwater”, an image faded and hazy as an old sepia photograph. Story says “painting is a way to communicate!...!like silent film”. On this showing she has nothing to say, other than to comment on the de-specification of her medium. Like McKenzie, Story’s affinity lies with fashionable modernism-revisited practices of historicising artists in other media – sculptor Martin Boyce, installationist Goshka Macuga – rather than with painterly values. Simon Ling, vibrant painter of Hackney’s disintegrating office blocks and shabby store fronts, stands in this conceptual battleground like a Trojan horse. Ling’s motifs – buildings – and a measured approach to pictorial construction, superficially connect him to the other artists in Painting Now, but his engagement with the world (he often paints en plein air) and exquisite physicality of paint lift his work to another level. Seen as if fleetingly from the windows of a bus, yet investigated with intense close-up detail, architecture in Ling’s animated, fragmentary compositions is unstable, fluid. Layers of office

windows precariously climb a canvas, resting awkwardly on a pavilion-like lower structure, itself perched uncertainly on a pavement: the whole edifice teeters towards breakdown. Windows, doors, drainpipes, chimneys slant and sway: piles of computers in a boarded-up electronic junk shop, framed in brilliant turquoise, threaten to topple; rococo cornices and neoclassical columns melt among garish hoardings and crumbling brickwork. A milieu we know is here created anew by a painter of individual vision who pins down the everyday and takes it out of the moment, allowing us to re-experience it, through his making, for eternity. All good painting deals like this with time, by implication considering mortality. But painting also celebrates life – as Ling wonderfully reminds us in the face of his death-by-theory colleagues.

Cumming, Laura, Painting Now, review, The Observer, London, November 17, 2013.

Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists – review Tate Britain, London Hats off to Tate Britain for showcasing five artists purely because their work deserves a wider audience

A visitor looks at Jeels (2012), one of Tomma Abts’s ‘endlessly various’ abstract paintings. Photograph: Ray Tang/Rex Features Something exceptional is happening at Tate Britain. The museum is holding a show of contemporary painting for absolutely no reason at all other than the sheer quality of the work. Painting Now presents five artists in mid-career, most in their 40s, none representative of a tendency, group or zeitgeist. The art is here purely for its own sake. This is so old-fashioned an idea as to be practically antique. I can scarcely remember the last time I saw a big painting show in a major museum that didn't have an axe to grind, an argument to expound or some specious curatorial theory to elaborate, using the paintings as supporting evidence.

Each painter is given proper attention and an entire gallery for their works. This is not a sample smattering, as in the Turner prize exhibition, or one small room as in the late, lamented Art Now shows at Tate Britain that were such valuable introductions to new artists but so far off the beaten track that they were frequently deserted. There are no inflated propositions about the state of the art – just the art itself, judiciously chosen, beautifully presented.

The best is first. Tomma Abts makes abstract pictures (not a contradiction in terms in her case) of great elegance and wit. They are small, immaculately made and identical in size, so that one cannot help seeing them as a series of variations, and sure enough they push at the edges of picture making. Their forms – scrolling, zig-zagging, rippling, geometric, curvaceous – are endlessly various. Sometimes the surface is incised, embossed or coated like verdigris on copper, as if the image wanted to break into three dimensions. Sometimes the canvas splits in two and a deep internal shadow appears, like the box of a violin, or the shadow is a painted illusion. There are

impossible perspectives and visual interplays that you can't exactly fathom, but above all there are gorgeous

metaphorical associations: the riffle of a fan, the shimmer of art deco moiré, children's tumbling blocks in constant cascade.

She makes the point that no painting is ever entirely abstract, but more than that Abts is inventing a new pictorial language entirely of her own.

Simon Ling is by no means as well known as Abts (a previous Turner prize winner), and it's good to get acquainted with his rich and surprising work. Edward Hopper relocated to the East End of London and jostled about, each painting appears strangely out of kilter. In his streetscapes, doors seem to hang off their hinges, signs butt at odd angles from the walls. The old telly shop, its windows full of relics, leans dangerously out towards the viewer. It is as if a tremor has disturbed the urban scene. What might be banal – fascia, facades, dirty windows – becomes compellingly alien, partly because the paintings are so richly worked, creamy, dense and solid, in marvellous hues of cobalt, violet and umber, and partly because the world seems so skewed. Ling's

eye is moving so intently over every inch of the scene that all of its oddities and dilapidations register with equal force in these powerful paintings.

Catherine Story's work has been shown abroad more than here, but in both cases scarcely at all. A late starter, who seems to have withdrawn from art for several years after college, her work is unhurried, pensive and peculiarly striking, given that its forms are so recherché. Indeed it is often hard to know quite what one is looking at in the first place. Story makes images of objects that don't appear to exist in the real world – anvils with ears, standing stones chiselled into canine forms, ancient flint axes that have a strong affinity with the shape of modern pylons. Those are only analogies, however, for in each case the painting shrugs off the obvious parallels to coin a new form which Story then paints

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with a light, precise touch at odds with the heaviness of each object.

Her works are enigmatic, nearly narrative in that they imply a back-story, and as marmoreal as any Magritte. And perhaps she is a surrealist in Picasso's original sense of the term to mean "something that is more real than reality".

Lucy Mackenzie feels like the odd one out in this show. She is presenting a lot of trompe l'oeil work – a walk-in colonnade of veined marble effortfully painted on plywood, noticeboards covered with clues to different cultural and political eras, from the cover of an old Ayn Rand book to a photograph of Lee Miller in Hitler's bathtub. They are never quite as meticulous as the technique demands, and they never add up to anything much more than the proverbial sum of their parts. Mackenzie is a conceptual artist – that is to say she uses painting as she also uses sculpture to propose certain ideas (can a painting be an environment, say). Many people are interested in her work, so this is an opportunity to make up your own mind.

Gillian Carnegie is still patiently working away in her distinctive grisaille, shades of grey with an immense range of nuances. A dark cat sits at the top of the stairs, palpably disturbed by the play of shadows on the wall behind it. A spiral staircase twists up through space like the blades of a helicopter in slow motion, but nothing is quite on the level or as familiar as it seems. Carnegie's paintings are full of glassy halations and odd perspectives so that one has to shift back and forth to see what fits together, where and how. It's as if the scene itself is uneasy. In the strongest work, a group of houses appear to have elongated to an uncomfortable height and one sees them through a thick mist, hovering at the uppermost level as if in a dream, weightless and insubstantial as the image itself, just pigment smoothed over canvas.

Carnegie's work has not been over-exposed in Britain since she was shortlisted for the 2005 Turner prize. Nearly all of Tomma Abts's solo shows have been staged overseas. Painting Now takes a long look at artists whose work has been elusive or rarely shown in depth, and though it could be argued that they share a high intelligence the exhibition is all against such generalisations and comparisons. It pays deep attention to living painters, contemporary art and the experience of the viewer. This is a wonderful precedent that I hope Tate Britain will repeat every year. !

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Dorment, Richard, Painting Now, Tate Britain, review, The Telegraph, London, November 11, 2013. Painting Now, Tate Britain, review An exhibition of five painters shows a new trend in painting, says Richard Dorment

Gillian Carnegie: Prince 2011–12 (detail).'Carnegie paints perfectly recognisable things from everyday life but in a way that never lets you forget that you are looking at paint on canvas.' Photo: © Gillian Carnegie courtesy the artist and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne There’s no question that painters rarely receive the critical attention routinely accorded to video, photography and installation art, but it’s not as though they get no recognition at all. Of the five painters in Tate Britain’s show Painting Now Gillian Carnegie was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2005, Tomma Abts won it the following year, while Lucy McKenzie has been singled out for praise in all of the group shows in which her work has appeared. But these painters certainly make life hard for journalists. For instance, the critical vocabulary that can adequately describe the art of Tomma Abts does not yet exist because no painting by her can be said to be ‘like’ anything we recognize from our experience – visual or emotional. Abts creates her abstract designs on canvases measuring precisely 48cm x 38cm by a process of layering layers thin layers of oil paint over acrylic. Like Paul Klee, she works at a table with the result that her paintings are best seen one at a time and from close to, like a manuscript or musical score. Starting without a predetermined plan she finds her design as she works. Her art is short on drama, scale, emotion, or humour. But it does have wit and the variety of her formal invention is inexhaustible. In ‘Zebe’ (2010) irregularly shaped arcs, curves and diagonals enclose flat areas covered in parallel or hatched lines of red and grey paint. These areas of pseudo-

cubist ‘hatching’ form the background over which floats a transparent shape made with both straight and undulating lines. Try to follow any line, whether curved or straight to a place of resolution and you’ll discover you can’t. In paintings like these Abts’s purpose is to create a thing that exists only in the realm of art. She will interrupt or curtail any circle, line, arc or wave before it can develop into a form that resembles something in the natural world. By contrast Gillian Carnegie paints perfectly recognisable things from everyday life like a vase of flowers or a cat sitting on a stair – but in a way that never lets you forget that you are looking at paint on canvas, not a description of the natural world. Her colours (when she isn’t working in monochrome) rarely correspond to any we see in nature, and she has no interest in differentiating between textures. Her painting of a black cat sitting against a grey wall on a staircase is anything but a casually observed domestic scene. Except for the curves of the cat itself, every line in the picture is horizontal, vertical or diagonal. Look how the long diagonal of the staircase is out of alignment with the picture plane. As soon as we viewers notice it we assume it’s our problem and so find ourselves moving from left to right in front of the picture in attempt to change the angle from which we view it. Likewise, if the picture’s black and grey tonality feels spooky, perhaps that’s our problem. All Carnegie has done is show the world as a cat sees it. The first time I saw the work of Simon Ling I got it all wrong. He paints crumbling facades of dilapidated buildings in a city I guessed might be Havana or maybe New Orleans. Hot orange, turquoise and electric blue paint is applied with the kind of freedom usually associated with expressionism. Not a single line in any painting is straight and virtually every architectural component from window frames and cornices to door jambs and front steps slants alarmingly. My first thought was that Ling had painted these structures in the aftermath of an earthquake. In fact, far from seeking out exotic locations, Ling paints the grimmer reaches of Hackney working with oils on canvas both directly in front of his motif and back in his studio. What I mistook for expressive distortion is a process of observation so intense that it sees what you and I would not – that a door is slightly off its hinge, perhaps, or that a weathered office block really does look as if it might collapse. Ling engages with the scruffiness and vulnerability of ageing buildings not by projecting his personal feelings onto inanimate things but by treating them as if they were living organisms that have expanded, shrunk, and changed their function over time. Trained in the most despised form of painting there is – the decorative techniques of marbling and tromp l’oeil, Lucy McKenzie uses her skills to create large scale installations. Pieces in this show include a painted representation of a typed letter pinned to a ‘cork’ bulletin board, the dust jacket of an imaginary book written by the artist, and blocks of marbleised wood inspired by the bathroom of an art deco house. Although McKenzie paints, she’s not a painter in the way other artists in the show are. The problem I have with her presence in this show is thatshe’s a conceptual artist who happens to use paint – not a painter who happens to be a conceptual artist. Rather than try to explain what Catherine Story does I’ll describe her 2010 painting in oil on wood, ‘Lovelock’. It represents an old fashioned and therefore obsolete film projector, but one that is made out of wood. Seen from slightly below and outlined against a wall of light blue it stands alone, blind, useless, stranded in time,-as dead paint itself is sometimes said to be.

In her paintings she uses light and dark to create volumes that feel so sculptural it would not surprise me to learn that she had actually created a three dimensional projector out of wood before painting it. Just as Magritte painted ordinary objects as though they were made of stone, Story’s wooden projector is a lifeless thing that paradoxically reminds us what miraculous things real projectors were. Her paintings are surreal in the original sense of the word: she creates painted images in a way that heightens or intensifies reality. If this exhibition truly reflects what is happening in painting today, then the medium really has changed since the early 1990s when painters like Gillian Ayres and Fiona Rae were nominated for the Turner Prize. What strikes me about these five artists is how suspicious they are of the expressive possibilities of painting, how they distance themselves from their subjects, damp down emotion, and refuse to use colour, texture or dynamic brushwork to seduce the viewer with an easy visual fix. I’d call them cerebral, but that’s not quite right. Nearer to the mark is the word integrity. This is painting you can respect.

Güner, Fisun, Painting Now, www.theartsdesk.com, London, November 13, 2013. Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists, Tate Britain A refreshingly focused show exploring the work of five mid-career artists

A chronological hang of its permanent collection instead of the once so modish thematic one, a show devoted entirely to contemporary painting, which was not at all modish until quite recently – things are definitely astir at Tate Britain. Next week, the gallery will be unveiling its new Millbank entrance, restaurant and café, as part of the final stage of its two-year refurbishment and Painting Now is, I suppose one can say, one of the shows designed to re-establish Tate Britain’s prestige and increase its footfall, since it probably still suffers something of the frumpy sister syndrome next to its sexier continental sibling, Tate Modern. And if it can’t do it with big names – no Klees, no Matisses – then it can at least put on shows designed to tell you exactly where art is at, right now. The buildings sag and droop like a many-tiered wedding cake after a few guests have piled inThis show, as the curators are careful to point out, isn’t being presented as the definitive anything – just five artists who paint, exemplary in "their practice", and who demonstrate the diversity and range of painting. And...it’s great. It’s a really interesting show, though it does start with two painters that I can’t get too excited about: Tomma Abts, who won the Turner Prize in 2006 and who’s rarely exhibited in the UK since, and Simon Ling, a figurative painter who paints buildings that look on the verge of collapse. Then it gets a bit more chewy (in a good, thoughtful and provocative way) with Lucy Mckenzie, the darling of group shows which have a claim to some intellectual heft, Gillian Carnegie, whose austere, moody and largely monochrome paintings are supremely seductive, and Catherine Story, who wouldn’t look out of place among a line-up of English surrealists, (including Paul Nash, whom she brings to mind). Abts is an abstract painter who paints elegant (yes, that slightly damning word) ribbons and zigg-zagging lines and intersecting and oscillating planes in gradated shades of bright colours. They’re thinly painted, with delicate, shimmering textures, and modest in size, a uniform 48cm x 38cm. And they’re given curious names, such as Zebe and Jeels andTheiel. Zebe (pictured right) is very Bridget Riley, though she tones down the vibration effect of her blue/orange diagonals with a subtle layering of

darker colours. And elsewhere, too, you get that sense of “Oh, this is just like…” and then the painting slides off into altogether more elusive terrain. They have a quiet little magic going on, but, for me, they slip out of mind as easily as they delight.

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Simon Ling strikes one as an anomaly in this whole set-up, and not because he’s the only male artist, but because he’s a painter who taps into his inner expressionist (without ever really unleashing it), whereas restraint, rigour and meticulous precision seems to, to a greater or lesser degree, define the other four. His paintings are dirty and messy, with a creeping garishness – close-up paintings of buildings in Hackney that he’s painted en plein air, or at least they're begun that way. The buildings sag and droop like a many-tiered wedding cake after a few guests have piled in and whose carefully applied icing – that beautifully stuccoed edifice – has been scraped and nibbled round the edges. They’re all untitled, the locations withheld, though most look identifiably English and urban.(Pictured left: Untitled, 2012.) Lucy Mckenzie is the conceptualist of the group, one who uses paint, occasonally, to explore ideas that could just as neatly be expressed in other media. The paint, in other words, is arguably not really the point, although the obvious fact that they’re painted adds another element of interest and subtlety. Here she presents several trompe

l’œil canvases that looks like cork boards with various items pinned on them: drawings, colour charts, photographs, reproductions of paintings. These come under the title Quodlibet, which can either mean a musical medley or a topic of philosophical discourse.

Here, with three paintings subtitled Nazism, Objectivism and Fascism (see main picture), fascism and Ayn Rand free-marketeering become interior décor tropes – you too, can get that period fascist look in your bathroom by following the design codes McKenzie carefully sets out in her little pin-board research project. It’s a witty visual deconstruction that also suggests how ideologies are, in some ways, underpinned by their surface accretions: as fashion statements, as brands, as tribal allegiances – and here as interior décor. A big, crudely painted marble-effect 3-D model Loos House, based on the interior of Adolf Loos’s house, occupies the centre of the display, and the ghost of Loos, with his modernist creed “Ornamentation and Crime” signalling a moral battlecry against superfluous decoration and "style", appears here to wag a duplicitous finger. McKenzie would be the clear star of this exhibition were it not for Gillian Carnegie’s coolly seductive paintings in glossy monochrome: a sleek black cat on the landing of a stairwell; another, as self-contained as a

sphinx, glimpsed beyond the black bars of a bannister (pictured right: Prince, 2011-12); a spiral iron stair; a vase of flowers; a tree with a swirl of abstractly spreading branches, reminiscent of Mondrian; an abstract pattern of Harlequin diamonds that provide the only burst of colour. Everything has the same value and texture in Carnegie’s paintings, but these silent and sexily impenetrable film-noirish worlds are enticing for their bold and striking geometric arrangements.

Finally, there’s Catherine Story and it’s difficult to make out what any of her strange figures are. The form of an ancient movie-projector in Lovelock (pictured left) seems also to suggest Mickey Mouse – with its reel-to-reel “ears” – as reconfigured by Eduardo Paolozzi. Another might be a stone carving of a toy bear, its big snout doubling as a probing lens. And two similar paintings called Big Foot are like huge flattened balloons with tiny, sad eyes. These oddly anthropomorphised objects are a bit like Rorschach tests – you see what you see. They create a mood, a sense of drama, and the drama is mysterious and sad and oddly comic. This is a very good show, but though at first it seems to demonstrate just how diverse and rich the current state of painting is, it also suggests that today’s artists – if this is in any way a true representation and I think it probably is – are keeping a tight rein on their emotions, as well their aesthetic convictions. Modernist references bob lightly back and forth, nothing fully embraced, nothing committed to. We live in the age of detachment – no, not irony, for PoMo irony long ago retired to its deathbed, but a gentler detatchment. This

may be a good thing. I’m inclined for now to think it is: the mood is more serious and reflective.

!!Guthrie, Rachel, Painting Now, Tate Britain, www.trebuchet-magazine.com, London, November 18, 2013. !

PAINTING NOW : TATE BRITAIN Contemporary painting exhibitions often intrigue me more than any other; firstly, for their comparative rarity amongst exhibitions of other contemporary art forms. Secondly, because I look on them as a failed painter myself. Someone – therefore – who has desired to create something valuable with paint, but struggled, making the excuse that my difficulties were down to “the state of painting now.” “The state of painting now” is a tired topic. The premise – that painting has lost its lure because of new media, which in their very newness enable their users to conquer new territory in the name of art – is a familiar concept in the art world. The evidence of this is Tate’s inauguration of this exhibition: Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists. Here the Britain branch of the Tate family fulfils its crucial role in contemporary art education, it acts as a certifying body to art practice: confirming, legitimising and exemplifying that the state of painting now is of ongoing ‘concern.’ In this context, the word concern should be read in two ways. While some worry about the worth of painting now, Tate’s curators expressed “the state of painting now” as a concern (consideration) of contemporary art, and not as something we should be concerned by. Their stance on the subject: positive. Penelope Curtis, Tate Britain’s director, introduced the show as a case study of the vivacity of painting now; and the exhibition text describes the show’s aim as “providing an opportunity for a wide-ranging and critical discussion about painting now,” as the show is constructed to

enhance our exploration. The work is organised within the space in a very satisfying manner; the consequence that the works can be read as triggers of key questions in the discussion. Each painter selected – Tomma Abts, Simon Ling, Lucy McKenzie,Catherine Story and Gillian Carnegie – exemplify a consideration of painting now. Particularly pleasing for the visitor is that each artist not only evokes different ideas but also appeals differently to the eye.

Tomma Abts First, Turner Prize-winning Tomma Abts: the pin-up girl for contemporary abstraction. Except, that she’s not an abstract painter strictly speaking (and avoids using the term.) Instead of beginning with a specific idea or

vision of the world and reducing it to a more condensed aesthetic as the original abstract artists that Abts is often compared to did, Abts begins the process of painting with one loose thread of thought, a hazy image or a lightly sketched composition, and works the image up until it reaches a point of resolution. Admittedly though, the aesthetic is highly evocative of the European and American Abstract godfathers, and as a consequence, her work speaks powerfully about the position and direction of painting now. Asking: does the abstract aesthetic have anything more to say? As a conscious response to painting before it, abstract art was provoked by a desire to clean up painting so it could become more self-assured, more self-standing. Can abstraction be appropriate now? If abstraction is where we left painting, when other mediums began to develop and dominate, does it stand in a post-modern age? Is the exclusiveness of paint in abstract painting appropriate in an inter-disciplinary and post-medium age?

Simon Ling In the next room, Simon Ling’s sometimes representational, sometimes objectless paintings consider: to what extent is it a painting’s job to reflect life? This understanding of the role of painting was prevalent in the late nineteenth century with the Paris-based Impressionists. Ling’s paintings mostly depict scenes from urban life – specifically snapshots from around the streets near his studio in EC1 – however their subject is not a place, but the emotional character of its materials: how the substance of these scenes impress and influence the eye. Therefore, Ling’s approach to materiality is unlike the abstract painters or Impressionists who use paint as form (the evidence of paint is the work’s subject matter and what makes the work a painting), and paint as a descriptive tool (a means through which the

painter describes the shape of things before him/her). Instead, he illustrates the feeling of physical objects through the tactile quality of paint. He distinguishes between things that require or desire touch and that detract from it, and between cold and warm, feminine and masculine, open and closed materials. !