BRENDAN FOWLER & MATTHEW CHAMBERS
2014-06-11Brendan Fowler’s gradual transition from the indie music scene to the art world reveals various experiments in breaking the rules of the newfound realm whose properties he seeks to tame. Seen from afar, the works in the exhibition look like segments of photographs gone wrong. The densely arrayed rows of threads, into which the image resolves itself on closer inspection, disclose the work’s means of production – an industrial embroidery machine. The shock of the encounter with the works stems in large part from their scale. Under Fowler’s directions the mechanical embroidery becomes a mechanism for the detailed production of an all-encompassing picture. Yet, Fowler undermines against the picture’s completeness at two levels: actively, before production, when he edits the images in Photoshop, and later on, more passively and randomly, through the production flaws of the industrial machine.
For years, Matthew Chambers’ abstract works were an inseparable part of a feverish practice of figurative painting. In a work routine involving dozens of canvases in parallel, the abstract works showed up as the destination for the paintings in which Chambers identified an overburdening: he would cut these up into strips and begin a course of assembly according to a geometrical pattern. In the past two years Chambers began to experiment more and more with the geometrical arrays, and gradually the abstract works have become an independent body of work, no longer dependent on the destruction of his figurative paintings. Out of the sequence of works in the exhibition, we witness two different modes of confronting the canvas: one seeks to contend with the unceasing flow of vacuous images from the outside world, while the other turns assiduously to realms of mathematical order and logic.
Opposite – Matthew Chambers, The Only Thing I Do Energetically Is What I Want to Do, 2013
Exhibition runs through to July 26th, 2014
Hezi Cohen Gallery
54 Wolfson Street
66042 Tel Aviv
Israel
