YOUR FOOT IN MY FACE and other tectonic strategies 

Edwin Aitken | Michael Ajerman | Karolina Albricht | Leila Al-Yousuf | Ned Armstrong | Phil Ashcroft | Suzy Babington | Anthony Banks | Tristan Barlow | Fungai Benhura | Kiera Bennett | Karl Bielik | Kofi Boamah | Miranda Boulton | Matthew Burrows | Simon Burton | Ilker Cinarel | Jake Clark | Sarah Cooney | Billy Crosby |  Martyn Cross | Leigh Curtis | Gordon Dalton | Luke Dowd | Grant Foster | Holly Froy | Carole Gibbons | Henry Gibbons Guy | Max Gimson | Luke Gottelier | Rebecca Gould | Thomas Greig | Rebecca Guez | Rob Hall | Jacqui Hallum | Andy Harper | Alice Hartley | Marcus Harvey | Helen Hayward | Adam Hedley | Adam Holmes Davies | Diane Howse | Mark Jessett | Liam Jolly | Patrick Adam Jones | Agnieszka Katz Barlow | Simon Keenleyside | Dominic Kennedy | Bernadette Kerrigan | Neill Kidgell | Phil King | Anna Liber Lewis | Iwan Lewis | Xiao-yang Li | David Lock | Scott McCracken | Kirsty McEwan | Vanessa Mitter | Francesca Mollett | Rosie Mullan | Hannah Murgatroyd | Tahmina Negmat | Mahali O'Hare | Joe Packer | Daniel Pettitt | Alexander James Pollard | Katie Pratt | Clare Rees-Hales | Ben Sanderson | Ed Saye | Mark Sibley | Mark Siebert | Leah Nyssa Stewart | Neal Tait | Ross Taylor | Susan Taylor | Hannah Turner-Duffin | Henry Ward | Paul Wardski | Joe Warrior Walker | Casper White | Isabel Wilkinson | Nicola Williams | Rose Williams | Sam Windett | Laura Wormell

 
“Come in, come in,” cried the old man. He was radiant with delight… Porbus and Poussin, burning with eager curiosity, hurried into a vast studio. Everything was in disorder and covered with dust, but they saw a few pictures here and there upon the wall. They stopped first of all in admiration before the life-size figure of a woman partially draped. “Oh! Never mind that,” said Frenhofer; “that is a rough daub that I made, a study, a pose, it is nothing. These are my failures,” he went on, indicating the enchanting compositions upon the walls of the studio […]

 [S]aid Poussin, coming once more toward the supposed picture. “I can see nothing there but confused masses of colour and a multitude of fantastical lines that go to make a dead wall of paint.”

Frenhofer looked for a moment at his picture […] He sat down and wept.

 - Honoré de Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece, 1831

During the past 18 months seeing paintings for all their material complexity has been almost impossible. Yet it would be too easy to say that the smart phone screen took the place of the gallery wall in 2020/21, suggesting that it foreclosed on the qualities and possibilities of scale, colour, speed and the rugged knot of sequential painting actions and changes-of-mind inscribed onto the surface of paintings. This temporary substitution of architectural space for digital space wasn’t absolute because we are complex ‘lookers’. We don’t see a thing at 2”x 2” and think that that is its actual size. We can look at paintings on a phone and know them for what they are: paint on a substrate, nailed to a studio wall somewhere. But unquestionably something is missing from paintings when seen backlit on phone screens. Meanwhile, the speed of looking at paintings further accelerated and superficial value judgements became okay.

 As well as indulging the return of exhibitions of material rich paintings after an extended period of home-bound incarceration, YOUR FOOT IN MY FACE … attempts to think about complicated and contested ways of looking.

The FOOT in the FACE of the title acknowledges the pleasure and almost masochistic challenge of looking at painting as material. When a painting refuses to give itself up as merely a sequence of signifiers; where a priori ‘meaning’ isn’t manifest by the painter sufficiently clearly so that a casual glance is enough to ‘get it’; when the ‘looker’ must get their face up into the painting to deal with it, and even then, only questioningly and never comprehensively.

 All looking at painting is difficult. Nearly a century of elegantly spaced white-wall exhibitions has lately bred a kind of zombie-looking. Instagram doesn’t help, with its round-the-clock scroll of deoxygenated painting surrogates. Busy salon-hangs seem to carry an implicit criticism of a time before modernism’s insistence on clarity and specialness, but in the light of Instagram might busy painting displays also propose a possibility for meaning and complex value judgements because of the challenge of their polyglot chorus?

 Could it be that spacious exhibitions actually give paintings too easy a ride? What are painters and curators afraid of anyway? That paintings can’t cope with complicated environments? Or that ‘lookers’ no longer have the patience or the skills to see and read painting? In reality, most paintings which are not slowly rotting on storage racks in studios and museums spend long and generous lives on the complicated and idiosyncratic walls of our homes.

This exhibition believes in the robustness and resilience of painting. It has faith too in those looking at paintings, but it understands that looking at paintings is as complicated as making paintings. YOUR FOOT IN MY FACE …doesn’t make it easy for paintings or for ‘lookers’ but it is a fertile environment for good painting and good ‘looking’ to thrive.

2020, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cm

2023, acrylic on canvas, 200 x 150 cm

All content copyright © Daniel Pettitt 2024