The Elusive Line

The Elusive Line is a show, curated by Siott Gallery featuring works by Sophia Burns, James Reynolds, Steven Porter and Natalia Davis. The show explores the 'elusive line' between figuration and abstraction.

Sophia Burns: “I experience painting as a visual game, an exploratory field where, as with sound, I can offer a visual possibility where one experiments a new sense of space; the body is at one with its surroundings, finding its shape in abstract and organic spaces”.

A sense of abstracted experience is one of the immediate impressions on first encounter with Sophia Burn’s work. The placing of human form in abstract space, depicted in an attitude of complete absorption in sense and emotion, encourages imaginative speculation on the experience portrayed.

The human figure, painted in accomplished and fluid line, is immersed in amorphous, imaginary landscape - created by layers of transparent oil glaze with subtle texture and colour-led compositions that subtly recall the work of Burn’s visual art influences, including Klimt, Peter Doig, Wilhem Sasnal, Christian Vincent and Japanese illustrators such as Al Shinohara. This fluidity, or suspended animation in the subject matter of her work, is reflected in Burn’s approach to painting. She allows a deliberate element of chaos and serendipity to enter the painting process – a risk-taking approach that is playful and improvisational, while at the same time strongly informed by 15 years of arts practice in France and the UK and a formal arts education in France and Canada (the Ecole d’Art , Aix-en-Provence, France and the University of Québec in Montréal (UQAM) Canada).

The visual arts scene in France and mainland Europe (similarly to the UK, Canada and US) has experienced an emergence of artist-led culture in the past decade or so. This has involved exploration of contemporary visual arts contexts outside galleries, a French example being the concept of ‘musiques actuelles’ - collaborations that bring together DJ events, contemporary dance, visual art, electronic/tech/dub and minimal music artists, soundscape, performance, video and live art. This influence is central to Burn’s practice as an artist, evidenced partly in the subject matter of her paintings but also in her work as an arts curator. Her upcoming exhibitions planned for 2013 include multi-media arts events involving contemporary dance and music.

James Reynolds: "Currently, my work is concerned with exploring landscapes and the figure. The subject of the landscapes is usually of a place that has some personal significance/memory but this is of less importance than the process of painting and discovering the images through the application of paint on canvas or board. My figurative work is predominately derived from 'the self' and I like to explore drawing through using paint and let the often quick, impasto techniques take the figurative references to a place that can only be evoked and described through painting. I relish the challenge of using and mixing colour, often overpainting pictures several times until the relationships between space and form become resolved. This can result in abstraction or different interpretations of the final image, yet hopefully retaining the strong traditional elements that underpin my work".

Steven Porter: "I have used water colour ink for several years, making abstract ink drawings on paper using geometric and organic forms. Sometimes they have made as part of a series or just one off images, where in a series I have investigated natural forms, often drawing using simple rules until the form works. I often producing many different images from one source, sketching and repeating until I am satisfied I have discovered a form that is original to me. The ink drawings are made quickly to trap the idea before I lose it. This process has allowed me to make imagined forms as well as show the process, in that I can use drawing to describe forms or let the actual process reveal forms in time. Drawing is a key term for understanding my work, I see it as is idea in time. Allowing me to think visually and keep the freshness of idea, sometimes how the architectural plan of a building can often hold and express the idea better than the final building. It's the close relationship between idea and drawing that I enjoy. Drawing allows me to plan and play, to be an architect of the made up. Colour is crucial to my process, I often work tonally with colour which means I use the light in colour to set relationships giving my work a tonal dexterity which allows my drawings to capture light through translucent forms. I always work on white grounds to trigger a strong form and ground scenario like in life drawing. I intend to lift the forms from the surface, giving them a glow of light and colour.

Organic and geometric forms appear in my work and seem to investigate different two very different aspects, geometry looks from my experience of urban space and architecture, whilst natural organic forms record an interest in abstract form, both for me are real and unreal, clear and unclear. In this contradiction I can make forms which keep my interest and become a visual diary of my thoughts, feelings and knowledge. Which ultimately allows me to capture a small amount of time in form".

Natalia Davis is a London based artist. She studied at Central Saint Martins before gaining her BA in Fine Art at the University of Leeds in 2009. Since graduating, she has exhibited in various group exhibitions and art fairs in the UK and was recently awarded the Milly Apthorp Award, second prize. With a background interest in biology and genetics, much of her work at university revolved around explorations of the body as a site of process rather than image, and the negotiation of the body as something of nature and/or culture. Informed by the writings of theorists such as Julia Kristeva and Georges Batailles, her works explored the experiential or essential body; a body in constant flux, with permeable boundaries and unfixed limits.

Both in terms of formal and conceptual content then, the works had their basis in the inbetween, the ambiguous and the unformed, of territories, boundaries and excess. Her recent works mark a decisive departure from any specific reference to a biological human body, in order to explore the above themes on a much looser basis.

Significantly, with this shift has followed a renewed dedication to the medium of paint and prioritisation of the painting process in the work. These new works range from large scale paintings of head studies to increasingly abstract images of urban spaces. Although not directly linked, references to the above themes continue throughout.

Characterised by bold, energetic brushwork that is both structural and abstract, the paint maps a topography of form, surface and space. Not only is the construction or formation of the image (physical artwork) present in the finished work, but significantly it is the process itself that is central in determining the work. Whilst intensely colourful and abstract at a glance, the eye will continue to extract the detail amongst the paint, mapping the image in the same dynamic by which it was constructed.

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