Heavier than Light: These Colours I have Shored Against My Ruins

A two person show by Keith Bowler and Peter Suchin 

23 Feb – 24 Mar 2018

Artists’ Talk: Sat 3 March 1pm

Explore the show by torchlight. Thurs 15 March 6.30- 8pm

The exhibition brings together the work of two very different conceptual artists; Bowler, working in three-dimensions, creates sculptures from salvaged metal objects and coloured light; Suchin, acclaimed critic and artist, in two-dimensions, creating complex colour-driven paintings.

Both artists explore concepts of colour and abstraction; In One Paved Court these abstract paintings and sculptures dialogue to express the divergent journey of these two artists in their investigation.

Suchin: 

“Roland Barthes described colour as a “field…freed of both the Law…and Nature”, also calling it “A kind of bliss”.* In this complex designation colour’s primary feature is its endless transgression of all fixed forms, its playful rejection of every allusive demand. For Barthes, colour is aristocratic, sovereign, forcefully refusing all values other than its own.”  

Light and colour are more than merely contingent attributes of the work of Keith Bowler and Peter Suchin. Bowler’s sculptures critically juxtapose the rigour of reconfigured found metal with cold cathode lights, framing the muted colours they emit. In turn these (sometimes mirrored) metal envelopes shimmer and are themselves enframed. With other smaller, wooden constructions Bowler has focused attention more directly on the stream, pulse or band of light at the centre of each work, but in either sculptural strategy presented here  geometry, solidity, and abstruse functionality consistently enter into dialogue with light. 

For Suchin, colour frequently carries the day. It might easily be regarded as the raison d’etre of his paintings, were they not so carefully and laboriously composed. Leaking and spilling out, colour nudges these pseudo-classical compositions into a conspicuously unstable state. Simultaneously appearing resolved and yet a jumble of amorphous forms, Suchin’s paintings operate between order and disorder, deliberation and chance. They share with Bowler’s sculptures a sense of the optical illusion or visual game. In Suchin’s “Pocket Paintings”, a number of which are displayed at One Paved Court, miniaturisation and portability suggest a yet more tangible aspect of engagement and play. 

*RB, Roland Barthes, 1977, p. 143; RB, The Responsibility of Forms, 1986, p. 166.