MARCUS JANSEN – WHISTLEBLOWER

Over the last decade Jansen’s subject matter continues to question a puzzling, fast moving world transformed through rich gestural paintings. The artist leads his audience on a journey across multiple views of abstract narrative scenes, combining action painting with objective subject matter while playing with space, light and perspective. The new series of complex constructions comment largely on socio-political issues of today, suggesting depth and movement within a flat plane using dramatic contrasts of colour, form, and texture.

Jansen belongs to a new generation of artists exploring urban influenced forms of expressionism, constructing landscapes with an embedded connection between street and contemporary art disciplines. Demonstrating a keen awareness of his surroundings the artist creates a surreal atmosphere filled with subconscious revelations that foretell of a future fraught with consequence.

Exhibition runs through to November 20th, 2014

Lazarides
11 Rathbone Place
London
W1T 1HR

www.lazinc.com

YAZID OULAB – SURVIVANCES

The works of Yazid Oulab are, for the most part, autobiographical and rich in a multiplicity of meanings: they bear witness to contemporary artistic practice and a spiritual path nourished by the heritage and symbolism of Sufi philosophy. However, Sufism is only one aspect of Oulab’s formal vocabulary. His work brings up the subtlety of paradox: born to a labourer father and an intellectual mother, Oulab defines himself as the result of them both, referencing and complementing manual labour and intellectual reflection while borrowing from religious imagery.

Clou and Alif represent the cornerstone of Yazid Oulab’s work. In 2006, he began developing the theme of the nail, which has many meanings, depending on the time and place of its use: it was once a form of currency, it is an important architectural tool, and it is also a reference to writing, since it was used in Mesopotamia for the cuneiform script. Far from being a spiritual equivalent of the stylite tower, this nail refers to building labours Maghreb immigrants undertook in France; something the artist has done himself when he arrived in Europe.

Exhibition runs through to December 6th, 2014

Caroline Pagès Gallery
Rua Tenente Ferreira Durão, 12 – 1° Dto.
1350-315 Lisbon
Portugal

www.carolinepages.com

DIANA RATTRAY – NEITHER HERE NOR NOW

Rattray’s style is quite her own, inspired by black-and-white photographs from English and German photo albums of the second half of the twentieth century. The artist’s own reading of this historical pictorial matrix is highly realistic and she interprets it in the same vein, albeit with the requisite pinch of irony, as when she lends the positivism of the 1950s a twist in the particular outcome that may be comic, awry or eccentric and quirky.

The types of figure that people the world of Diana Rattray’s pastel paintings will be familiar to everyone – folks at family celebrations, children in their Sunday best, families on day-trips – events recorded in order to have remembrance of this special day or that one moment on tap at any time. Some of the people seem to be adopting poses. They suspend what they are doing, face the viewer and lay on a smile in the knowledge that it will be recorded. The smile conditioned for the purpose is a preoccupation in this artist’s work. It is a smile that only takes place on the surface and reveals nothing about a person’s inner being.

At first glance it seems as if these paintings preserve a time in which everything was that little bit more ordered, a little simpler. But the viewer also becomes conscious of the choreographed nature of the scene. By heightening her colouring and amplifying a situation depicted, the artist points us toward a wider scope of meaning. The subtle elaboration of areas of shadow hints at the emotional world beyond the visible surface. A melancholy trait comes to the smiling lips, and something rigid to the faces; and, finding themselves face-to-face with the figures in the pictures, viewers are thrown back upon themselves. As a chronicler and at the same time an alert contemporary, Diana Rattray makes use of the distance in time and space to reconnect emotional memory. One’s own memory is triggered by the recognition of certain situations, and the figures in the pastel paintings become the projection surfaces for moments and feelingsout of personal experience. Simultaneously, the everyday nature of the situations Diana Rattray chooses for her paintings lends them a universality.

Exhibition runs through to December 20th, 2014

Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer
Heinrich-Heine-Allee 19 & Neustrasse 12
40213 Düsseldorf
Germany

www.bugdahnundkaimer.com