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‘Cedar Avenue' by: David
Gledhill curated by Comme Ca Art & David Gledhill
@ The Comme Ca Art Gallery
24 Worsley Street, (Off Ellesmere Street), Castlefield, Manchester,
M15 4LD
23.01.03 - 08.03.03
As a painter, David Gledhill is principally concerned with
recognition as a dynamic in the process of image making. His
work embodies an experiential apprehension of the world, in
terms of sense of perception, memory, rational thought and
feeling.
'Cedar Avenue' is a group of paintings adapted from photographs
of a housing estate in the West Midlands. David Gledhill was
brought up on the estate and returns frequently to visit his
family, who still live there. This fairly typical provincial
middle-class environment was particularly stifling during
David's teenage years, when he began to define himself in
opposition to the values it seemed to enshrine. In recent
years he has come to regard this intensely familiar scene
as potentially rich in visual terms and this realisation represents
a parallel to developments in his work.
David has been engaged in a process of refining his practice
around its essential elements and investigating the nature
of representation as a self-contained procedure. The resulting
work has largely featured isolated groups of figures without
context, but with a sense of human presence and ambiguous
narrative forming the thematic focus. He has interrupted this
sequence in order to deal with suburban landscapes characterised
by a sense of absence and mood.
In some of the 'Cedar Avenue' paintings the compositional
device of telegraph poles or lampposts, which partially obscure
the middle ground detail, implicates the viewer. David wants
to locate the observer as a voyeur of his or her own nostalgia
and of a certain prescription for living. There is a conscious
reference to the kinds of images used by estate agents to
convince us that there is an achievable sense of security;
a reality external to ourselves that we can somehow capture
through ownership.
The process of transcription from photographs provides a degree
of stylistic neutrality and underlines the contingent nature
of image making; each 'snap' representing an unrepeatable
instant of time. Painting from photographs allows for unpredictability
in composition and emphasises the artificial nature of painting
as a culturally determined activity. These paintings are not
just about what they are 'of' nor do they pretend to be 'true'.
The overlay of a monotone field is intended to assert the
'object' status of the paintings and to set up a resonant
conflict between drawing and colour, thereby complicating
a simple documentary reading of the image and denying any
sense of illusionism.
The overall intention in all of the recent work is the analysis
and manipulation of painting as a paradigm of consciousness.
The 'Cedar Avenue' paintings are an extension of this programme
and constitute a meditation on identity as determined by the
faculties of recognition and memory.
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