FIVE LONDON PAINTERS
ARTCO, LEEDS
3 OCTOBER - 11 NOVEMBER 2009
Maurice Cockrill, Stephen Chambers, Luke Elwes, Lino Mannocci, Christopher Wood.
Curated by Nicholas Usherwood
Unlike many curated shows of the present moment, this selection of work is not dominated by any grand-sounding intellectual scheme but rather by the selectors’ long-standing interest in, and admiration for, the work of the artists concerned (none of whom, remarkably enough, has ever shown substantially in the city before, even Leeds-born Christopher P. Wood). Thus Maurice Cockrill RA (b 1936), the most senior figure here and a painter always much admired by other artists nationally and internationally, has developed his painterly abstraction to a point where the subject and form of his painting emerges from the free flow of gesture and the encouragement of chance.
Stephen Chambers RA (b.1960), like Maurice Cockrill, is a Royal Academician but of a rather younger generation, his paintings, rich with precise drawing and luminous decorative colour, transforms the familiar and everyday, delivering to us a world of great beauty and exotic mystery.
Lino Mannocci (b1945) was born in Italy but has lived and worked in London since graduating from the Slade in 1975. Since then he has shown all over the world though principally in London and Italy. His paintings, with their characteristically limited pallet of sophisticated whites and muted earths create scenes of seemingly infinite quietude and poetry.
Luke Elwes (b1961) came to prominence in the early 1990s with a series of remarkable exhibitions that developed out of his exploratory travels to a wide range of different landscapes worldwide and are, in some sense, a reminiscence, or distillation, of that experience. He seeks to document the inner experience of his journeys by exploring the memories which surface through the act of painting, a process which for Elwes, is ‘a continuous process of loss and recovery.’
Christopher P.Wood (b1961), though born in Leeds, where he continues to live and work, graduated from Chelsea in 1986 and it is through a succession of solo exhibitions in London that he has established his reputation as a painter of great imaginative vision, an explorer of the inner world, weaving together imagery drawn from a huge variety of sources in a rich painterly fabric of dream-like character.
Five artists then with apparently rather different concerns yet, all of them, in one way or another, drawn to the power of paint as a means to transform and heighten our understanding of the world and its innate, imaginative richness.
GENIUS LOCI
GALLERIA CERIBELLI, BERGAMO ITALY
NOVEMBER 2008 - FEBRUARY 2009
5 British Painters in Italy: Arturo Di Stefano, Luke Elwes Glenys Johnson, Alex Lowery, Lino Mannocci
Curated by Luke Elwes
Download catalogue here
GLI AMICI PITTORI DI LONDRA
GALLERIA CERIBELLI, BERGAMO ITALY
GALLERIA GHELFI, VICENZA ITALY
MAY - DECEMBER 2007
Tony Bevan, John Davies, Arturo Di Stefano, Luke Elwes, Sandra Fisher, Timothy Hyman, Andrzej Jackowski, Merlin James, Glenys johnson, Ken kiff, R.B. Kitaj, Alex Lowery, Thomas Newbolt
Curated by Lino Mannocci
Extract from catalogue text:
With Luke Elwes I recognise and in some ways share his manner of working: the desire to contain the sign language behind the magical surfaces he creates. During his many travels Elwes has immersed himself completely in the new realities he perceives and has absorbed to saturation point the dominant aspects, often related intimately to sacred objects or beliefs in their various forms. It is only after his return home that he works through the records he has created to yield a distillation of what he has experienced. His work demonstrates how he resolves these influences in canvases devoid of grandiose gestures but perfectly controlled. They are canvases that seem to have been born divinely inspired, as it were with helmet and armour in place.
There is in England a long tradition of travelling painters who, armed with easel, canvas and brush, scour the world for subjects to paint. This is not Luke Elwes’s way of working. When he travels, Luke involves himself with all his being, seeking the new realities by total immersion in them. It is only afterwards, the voyage over, on the return to London, in the seclusion of his studio, that he embarks on the process of distillation and synthesis. It is as though this displacement of time and space is the necessary filter for recovering the essence of the experiences he has lived through.
Elwes frequently starts a picture by scribbling on the canvas, making signs, as with typescript. These marks are then covered with a thin film of paint which in turn may be removed by dripping on to the new surface thus created a diluting agent such as turpentine. It is difficult to predict the effect on the canvas of these drops and trickles. The danger of losing the image completely is an essential part of the creative process, involving a degree of excitement stimulated by the risk involved in this process. In his newer paintings Elwes achieves thinner surfaces resulting in more complex effects; notwithstanding the inherently random effects of the process the painter is increasingly drawn to these techniques.
Lino Mannocci (Galleria Ceribelli, Lubrina Editore, 2007)
TRANSLATIONS
ART FIRST LONDON
4 JULY - 18 AUGUST 2006
Translations: New work in response to masterpieces in the National Gallery, London
Eileen Cooper: Piero di Cosimo
Luke Elwes: Giovanni di Paolo
Anna Gardiner: Alesso Baldovinetti
Diana Hulton: Titian
Simon Lewty: Claude Lorrain
Alex Lowery: Aelbert Cuyp
Bridget Macdonald: Nicolas Poussin
Will Maclean: J M W Turner
Lino Mannocci: Titian
Jack Milroy: Paulus Theodorus van Brussel
Partou Zia: Andrea Mantegna
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ARTIST STATEMENT
LUKE ELWES
Giovanni di Paolo: Saint John the Baptist retiring to the desert, 1454.
The journey starts with a departure, a leaving behind. What is known, contained, ordered, gives way to the distant and unscalable space of the wilderness. The path is both a physical passage and an internal exploration. It has a beginning but no clear ending, a curved ascent through time and space.
There are moments when Giovanni's magical image recalls the sky-bound ascetics in the mountains of Chinese pictures; and others when I remember walking in the mapless desert, with the acute sense of uncertainty and discovery it engenders in the pared down and vulnerable presence of the traveller.
SLOW ART
BROADBENT LONDON
16 JUNE - 10 JULY 2004
Artsists include
Luke Elwes
Pierre Imhof
Ingrid Kerma
Gary Komarin
Alf Löhr
Kate Palmer
Andrew Vass
“What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in ten seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures.”
Robert Hughes at the Royal Academy Annual Dinner June 2004.
The artists shown have very diverse ways of creating work, and different intentions, but all fall within the boundaries of the remarks made by Robert Hughes. The exhibition is intended to demonstrate that although not always considered fashionable nonetheless there is a dynamic, active area of painting that sometimes falls away from the mainstream ‘mass-media’ characterisation of art. And which highlights the notion of painting as something that benefits not from a “lifetime of experience” but from the more demanding “lifetime of practice”.
Luke Elwes Margin 2003
LOOK STRANGER
ART FIRST LONDON
29 OCTOBER - 13 NOVEMBER 2003
Look, stranger: Luke Elwes, Alex Lowery, Bridget Macdonald
WATER'S EDGE
ART FIRST LONDON
19 JUNE - 11 JULY 2002
Luke Elwes, Will Maclean, Lino Mannocci, Anthony Whishaw
Along the Waterline. Exhibition text by Andrew Lambirth
We are told that water constitutes around 60% of the adult human frame, and three-quarters of the earth¹s surface. It is the only substance found naturally in all three states of matter: solid (ice), liquid (water), and gas (steam). In its capacity as solvent, it is the main active force of geology. Life is said to have begun in water. There are more than a hundred compound words listed after Owater in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, my favourites being Owater-bloom and Owater hammer. This exhibition is dedicated to water, its appearance and essence, its contradictions and realities. Whether the works on show are to do with what Shakespeare called 'the rough rude sea', a Norwegian flash-flood or an English pond, their common territory and subject is water, the most mysterious of the elements.
Luke Elwes (b. 1961) is a painter-traveller, making pictures which are at once about the particular places he has visited and a record of that journey into self which is the lot of the true contemplative. In his recent evocations of Osea Island off the Essex coast, Elwes maps the almost-submerged land where earth and sea not only meet but mingle intimately. He writes of the making of these elusive paintings (apparently empty yet full of detail) as encompassing 'the pursuit of silence, a balance between something and nothing, that holds the eye and stills the impulse to literal transcription'. The map is nearly erased, a distressed palimpsest; it's difficult to decipher a single clear meaning. The viewer must, like a scryer, read the signs and interpret accordingly.
Andrew Lambirth. London, May 2002