Extract from review in Art Monthly 09.07 by Martin Herbert of EAST International 2007 exhibition at Norwich Gallery 14th July - 18th August 2007
A cloud hangs over this year's EAST International. From now on, the country's premier open-submission show of contemporary art will be packaged as part of Contemporary Art Norwich, thereby going from being an annual event to a biennial one ... This diminution is especially galling given that this EAST, whose 27 artists were selected by Matthew Higgs and Marc Camille Chaimowicz, is easily one of the strongest of the last decade.
It is initially downbeat on an aesthetic level, too, since a bruised urbanism marks the show's points of entry. Nevertheless, where the art engages with concrete realities, it often shoots for some measure of redemptive transformation ... [Alexander] Singh is a playful fantasist who knows the power of obsessive detail, and an artist with an evolved and ramified aesthetic; his work feels utterly of its moment, and not in thrall to much other than his own imagination. It is at points like this - as in [Rose] Wylie's canvases and in Steve Dowson's superb painting/sculpture conjunctions such as Luminosa, 2004-5, a finely rendered image of a mangled chandelier painted on a cardboard box, atop another box that contains the glowing light fitting, which beautifully meld obscurity and deliberation into perplexing rightness - that this show really achieves lift-off. The sombre nimbus fully disperses, revealing a compact confederacy of gifted individualists. It leaves one hopeful, as EAST always should. Too bad it'll now only do so half as often.
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Catalogue entries for Norwich EAST International 2007
Luminosa; 2004-5
The chandelier was found, bent and broken, in a South London street near to where I used to live in Tulse Hill. The impulse for me to make a painting is nearly always triggered by the discovery of an object (just as the Surrealists sought the chance object that would answer their desire, and just as modern consumerism coerces us through advertising to desire things we don’t need).
The objects that answer my desire are most often of the Surrealist type – discovered in the junk shop (or its modern day equivalent the charity shop), flea market, rubbish dump, skip or street; objects that have fallen out of their original context and therefore take on poetic possibilities due to their intended meanings and functions having been lost, obscured or become unfashionable.
Once I’d ascertained the chandelier still worked electrically and I’d sourced some candle-effect light bulbs, a chain of associations started to form in my mind between the object, an old fruit box I was using for storage but whose graphics interested me, and a possible artwork.Initially I intended only to make a painting on the box leaving the viewer to make the connection between the graphics and the object, but as the painting progressed the idea of incorporating the working chandelier increasingly took hold, forcing me to consider ways in which this could happen.
Night and Day; 2006-7
'Night' was made using artificial lights, 'Day' in daylight. The polystyrene forms are fascinating as objects (like the chandelier they have fallen out of the use system they were designed for) and I had in mind doing an abstract-looking painting superficially like a Ben Nicholson or Naum Gabo but painted entirely from observation, but I soon realized the real subject was the light. I often think that light is always the only subject for a painter, and what is represented is similar to the pointing finger that oriental philosophers advise us not to confuse with the moon.
The view on this page is a privileged one – in the gallery the viewer can only see one painting at a time while holding the other in their visual memory. I have made several double sided paintings because I like the viewer to become aware of the act of looking, and this double aspect requires I be inventive as regards the exhibition of such works which causes the viewer to be an active participant rather than a passive receiver. This double aspect is also alluded to in the subject – night and day being complimentary but mutually exclusive.
Another reason for making double sided paintings is to make obvious the artifice of paintings that attempt to represent some aspect of the world – the thinness of the paint surface upon the thinness of the support while still appearing spatial when seen head on.
His and Hers; 2007
Some of my paintings take a very long time to make, but this painting was finished in three quick stages which I always trust as a sign for direct speaking of the subconscious, and having found the right form for the initial feeling-idea.
The subject is a mask I bought from a local charity shop that represents both Punch and Judy by splitting the features down the middle. I have now painted the mask several times but never as straight representation – each time I have contrived to represent the two halves as being distinct male and female while obviously sharing many similarities. Again, the view above is a privileged one – the viewer in the gallery only sees one face at a time (plus their own features reflected in the sliding mirrors).
This mask has become a symbol to me of many things, but perhaps primarily of a dualistic existence that nonetheless contains the seeds of unity; similar to a yin-yang symbol. Of course each viewer brings to the work of art their own stock of private imagery and symbolism, and whatever meanings I may have intended the artwork must also be essentially an empty vessel waiting to be filled.
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Review in Frieze 62 by Sally O'Reilly of exhibition at Sadie Coles H.Q. 26th July - 08th September 2001
A wardrobe door with a nude painted on one side and a skeleton on the other is not particularly revelatory (hey, the exterior hides an interior). But small revelations are not really what Steve Dowson is concerned with. The words on the water bottle label at the nude's feet are in reverse, which implies that the picture is a self-portrait, painted using a mirror. Some grapes and a broken wine glass lie useless at his feet, while the figure's shadow sports a great big erection. This confusion about what is real transforms what could have been a dumb truism into something more loaded about the relationship between painting and artist.
Dowson's dark and neurotically painted studies position the role of the artist as absolute progenitor of the art. The artist neither seeks nor finds, but constructs a kind of memento mori of the mundane. The tacky, domestic objects of his choice - wicker baskets, common or garden vegetables and glassware - are ridiculous in dead-pan paint. Yet there is an element of alchemy, of bringing the dead to life in these constructions. They are not limited to flat, heterogenous grounds; often a theme spills over into the form. A table, a chopping board or a gas fire serve as canvas or frame and echo and enlarge upon the content of the painting. Living Flame (2001), for example, is a cringing shrine to Princess Diana. A still life painting of memorabilia is propped behind the protective grill of a homely, burnished 1970s gas fire. The familiarity of the object breeds contentment, evoking childhood memories for those of Dowson's generation. The plastic flowers and Union Jack add to the utter kitschiness of the piece, its wicked irony enforced by the skull key ring grinning among the still life objects.
Dowson plays a lot on polarities - the in/out, dead/alive, still/fragmentary nature of things. The Diana and death theme of Living Flame is an irritating, adolescent sort of non-point to make. However, his play on contradictions within still life leads to more interesting incidents. Bacchus (2001) is a confusion of layers of reality and representation. A terse still life of wicker basket, grapes, broken glass and a classic red undulating cloth inhabit a pokey pictorial space along with a scarf printed with a wickerware design and a round tray printed with a Lisa Milroy-like arrangement of raffia covered wine bottles. One level of representation unravels out to the next until finally the canvas itself is pinned onto the wall by its raw top edge. These telescoping levels of wicker end in a gesture charged with pathos - a slovenly moment of amateurishness.
Ranging from adolescent scratching to aged daubing, this amateurism is all pervasive. Veronica (2000) is a basket of flowers painted on a small, folded wooden table that reeks of malted milk and blanketed laps; yet God (2000-01), a painting of a comedy vegetable man with long eyelashes and a top hat, is so silly that it goes full circle and seems anthropological. And then there's the most annoying pun right in the centre of the gallery: the supporting column has been painted candy pink and an over-sized Blackpool rock label stuck on to hammer the joke home.
Dowson's first solo show illustrates the intensity of his practice, his interrogation of painting, and also his primary downfall - his inability to resist a bad pun. A spring balance hung on the wall weighs a painting of a bag of apples. Yet also evident is the artist's joy in discovering what painting can do, how tradition can be perverted to relevant ends, factoring in self-mockery and self-reflexivity. This bridging of form and content requires real lightness of touch, which Dowson achieves when he curbs his gags. Lost World (1997-2001) is a painting of cartoon dinosaur merchandise, some painted straight, others in reflection. The pictorial structure is further confused by a bent tin lid and plastic key fobs with 3D images stuck mawkishly around the edge of the canvas. The composition is then replicated back to front in the mirror, placed perpendicular to it, and drawn into another converse dimension. It is difficult to unravel what is going on pictorially, as the objects are flattened by a sombre, muddy palette - another perverse polarity. Rendering low life in traditional paint, the distasteful mediocrity of clutter attains a significance, no matter how droll.
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Review in Untitled by Paul O'Kane of exhibition at Sadie Coles H.Q. 26th July - 08 September 2001
In the centre of Sadie Coles' gallery, a mildly obtrusive architectural column has been painted bright pink and disguised as a stick of Blackpool Rock. But despite this allusion to 'getting away' it only leads our eyes to the ceiling and floor, reminding us of the limits within which freedoms are compressed.
It's nearly a hundred years since Cubism turned Alberti's Renaissance window-on-the-world into a crackling surface of modern tensions. Now Steve Dowson challenges the worth of Twenty-first Century painting by aggressively deconstructing its objecthood and supportive apparatus. Yet he still uses art to seek an elsewhere.
Recurrent self-reflection - on behalf of both artist and works - suggests that Dowson's way out lies not beyond, but somehow within. His use of his own image addresses our need to concentrate on an elusive but essential self-worth amid myriad tempting diversions. This self-analysis occasionally digs deep, as in his anatomical portraits, but also in a shaving-mirror, Mint (2000) painted with the artist's insolently spread anus, displaying what might be called narsecissism (sic).
Such posterior views - a fashionable figure also seen in Luc Tuymans, Lucy McKenzie, Gillian Carnegie, John Currin and Marlene Dumas - might be millenial painting's 'one in the eye' to criticism; a way of shouting: 'what do you think you're looking at?' to all who theorise, historicise and rhapsodise mysterious making.
Deleuze and Guattari's statement that "there is no difference between what a book talks about and how it is made" seems applicable to this first solo show in which Dowson's representation refuses to transcend its means of production. A carnivalesque procession of leaning, hinged, hung-up and strung works appear to parade physical discomforts while purposefully failing to transport their audience far from immanent materiality (as might a plane rendered invisible by an illusion painted onto it, designed to transport us momentarily elsewhere).
One painting, Bacchus (2001) is held up by canvas pulled roughly from its stretcher, while numerous nails create an Afro-fetish halo for Icon (2000). A full-length self-portrait, Other (2000-01) painted on a wardrobe door, leads only to a skeletal rear-view on its reverse side. Thus are we reminded of all we share with 'dumb' and inanimate realms.
At times, Dowson's delicately crafted painting goes almost unnoticed amid obsolete objects appropriated as self-conscious supports. These all but overwhelm careful compositions of cultural clutter, like the freebie fallout from a McDonalds promotion which may be viewed along with its viewer in an adjacent mirror in Lost World (1997-2001) implicating us all in a critique of consumer culture. This is a parallel thread; the consideration of economic strata - economies within economies - the market stall, the gift, the superstore and boot sale.
In Balance (2001) a rendition of bagged apples is hooked on a real weighing scale, itself suspended by cheap string and screws. Lofty artistic values are supported by base marketing, while the everyday is correspondingly elevated to imply a revaluation of value itself.
The combined pressures of immanence (sic) and economy constitute the driving force of Dowson's idiosyncratic enquiry. He plays around with perception, investigating not only what is valuable, but also what is real. In Veronica (2001) a square, folded card table leans on a wall hosting a painted view of a tablecloth spread beneath flowers in a vase. The image of the flowers is foreshortened and flattened-out, becoming one with the cloth, while the cloth's perspectival rhomboid flips a coin of reality with the table's 'actual' square surface. We are transported repeatedly from our present viewpoint to the event of the painting's execution and back again. The resulting head-spin recalls the magically turning table described in Marx's Capital.
Alongside conjuring tricks and commodity fetishism, myth appears before us in the guise of Princess Di. A small canvas titled Living Flame (2001) is pushed behind gas fire bars that suggest her heart-warming 'line-of-flight', snuffed out in the flattering traps of admiration by a hearth-bound, TV addict, fan club. Elsewhere, romance comes reflected in gaudy valentine balloons, or upheld by genuine lovecraft, as when, in Elvis (for Sarah) (2000-01) a hand-made, heart-shaped cushion, secreted in a canvas-back, seems to power a painting as if it were a monitor screen.
This show appears to strip painting of mystique while confidently mangling taste, but Dowson is notoriously painstaking in his carefully-crafted work, and might therefore use this clamour of cranky objects to over-determine the painting's matter, inspiring a corresponding reconsideration of its time. The time of painting has its own image and valuation, its time invested in the hand-made, time that superstores won't sell, time to reconsider the self as priceless 'event'. And perhaps this revaluation of values offers all a way of escape, as we pass from understanding self-as-subject, and as object, to appreciation of a universe peopled only by events.
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Review by Martin Coomer in 'Time Out' of exhibition at Sadie Coles H.Q. 26th July - 08 September 2001
Scouring streets and flea markets, Steven Dowson finds odds and ends that become the subject and sometimes the support for his paintings. Basically this is traditional painting with knobs on, or rather trinkets, knick-knacks and anything else that comes to hand. But if the thrift-store aesthetic is there to cushion the artist from accusations of seriousness, his own position is ambiguous. Visual puns - a small painting of apples in a bag that hangs from a real set of scales, a gallery pillar transformed into a giant stick of rock, a still life painted on a table - are juxtaposed with weightier statements.
It's sides studded with nails, 'Icon' - a painting swarming with depictions of junk food - seems a scathing attack on consumerism. Painted on a wardrobe door that juts from the wall, 'Other' is a double-sided exploration of young manhood. On one side the artist stands naked, meeting our gaze with a stern, almost arrogant expression; at his feet lie a bottle of water, grapes and a broken glass. In the shadow, he sports an erection. On the verso is a pastel drawing of a skeleton.
Strip away the layers of fashionable tat, and some of the paintings are not a million miles from the realist dirges that clogged Cork Street in the 1980s. Using the neglected genres of still-life and self-portraiture, Dowson seems intent on challenging prejudices. However, by including a gasfire-cum-shrine to Princess Diana and an Elvis jigsaw puzzle with two paintings of a Graceland souvenir attached, he makes it hard not to view the show through the safety goggles of irony.
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Post-Sensation 'picture making' amidst accusations of amateurism - Paul O'Kane April 1998.
Steven Dowson chooses to paint lowly things. But what today, through art's supposedly deconstructing, non-hierarchical eyes is lowly? Even prior to an enlightened comprehension of the arbitrary order of things, from Cubist collage, to Schwitters to Manzoni, the lowly has long been elevated by art to share a more urbane world. Nevertheless, Dowson seeks out the lowly and when he finds it, he paints it, but why?
Jim Shaw has recently promoted a re-evaluation of 'thrift-store' paintings and art journals have become excited by the 'outsider' arts of Henry Darger, Adolf Wolfli etc. These events reveal that art, though just as keen as capital to embrace-all, continues to find certain forms of art: non-western art, unskilled art, uninformed art, rejected and discarded art, the art of the 'mad' and the 'amateur', all other to itself and therefore, by implication, beneath itself or lowly. Dowson rescues and re-presents failed drawings by other artists, paints cheap fake flowers rather than real ones, and uses discarded, broken objects as supports to paint upon, but his technique is itself far from throwaway, in fact 'fine' is an apt word to describe his art, characterised as it is by a slender realism, a detailed, translucence and a slightly elongated vision of things, all rendered with painstaking care.
The painting of so-called trash disrupts established value systems. When Dowson expends the highly prized time of art decorating a broken office chair-back it is a belligerent gesture, but when the subject of his decoration is Ronald Macdonald proffering huge breasts like a bountiful Eastern goddess, the message becomes both an indictment of burgeoning super-capitalism and simultaneously asks where true power resides today. Those who currently hope to find alternatives to exploitation within various millennial mysticisms may be forced to acknowledge the ultimately mystic roots of capital itself, while those who thrive on rampant consumerism prey upon an audience eager to redeem itself by bingeing on irrationality-chic.
Art must maintain some alternative despite the fact that many artists have grown complicit with "no alternative" rhetoric. Even fashionable theory today comes superficially commodified and dressed in the hyperbole of the past as if afraid to challenge the contemporary world on its own terms. If the real Bataille, Baudelaire or Benjamin were writing today they would not be imitating their grandfather's speech patterns but prowling the mall and 'shopping city' challenging their skills to keep pace with lightning tongued media propaganda and destabilising the value system espoused by weekend supplements.
At this time, which future histories of British art could well label 'post-Sensational', when a previous generation of artists have been taxidermaly museified by the Royal Academy, the description 'amateurish' applied to a painter's output should remain pejorative only to those who remain ignorant of important shifts taking place within painting. Given that this last generation were supposedly made ready and equipped with an unprecedentedly 'professional' attitude to art production so as to tackle the hysterical consumerism of the late 1980s and, not only survive it but win, then current artists may be forgiven for promoting a compensatory sincerity and humility in their work, even if only to be easily identified as 'post-Sensational'.
The rush-to-power of the Sensation generation temporarily banished the sight of artists publicly struggling to master their art and gain the upper hand over a medium, yet no-one today working in this manner can be accused of backsliding into a less sophisticated past, nor of faux naiveté. The fact is that the overt strategies of the late 80s and early 90s now arrive with transparent and predictable motivations while a more oblique, unpredictable trajectory lies within a return to authorship speaking through an idiom arising from the discipline of a medium.
This shift, which has been partly sign-posted by opposing 'picture making' to 'painting' is exampled by the work of Elizabeth Peyton, Karen Kilimnik and the perverse traditionalism of John Currin. Currin's initial expositions involved taking on the oppression of the cliché and the challenge to create a new against the all-ironicising post-modern milieu. His success has been explained as the result of confronting and persisting with clichés of painting and not turning toward conceptual art for support as many Sensation generation painters did. The result is Currin's small, precarious, perverse, fence-sitting work which opens up far more critical space with it's skilled execution, surprising subject matter and irreverent use of traditional genres than Hirst, Martin, Hume, Harvey or Davenport ever achieved with their fame-sized gestures. But perhaps the emerging painter today enjoys a luxury those above couldn't afford, i.e we have adjusted our body-clocks and acclimatised to a radically new environment which we are now ready to engage with, whereas they did their best to deal with a violently breaking wave, ultimately creating only a defensive space through an arriere-garde action.
While a return to the process of carefully evolving a picture-maker's craft, hand-in-hand with a functioning political and philosophical position may produce accusations of 'amateurism', the bad-tasting legacies left by the stars of Sensation, e.g an increased scepticism of market motives and machinations, has resulted in a yearning for an art which can support the artist whole-heartedly, fundamentally, sincerely and substantially over a long term. Of course the 'amateur' is of interest today, as is the crafts person and all who take part in that broader 'general' economy which capitalism doesn't reach; that realm of moral and libidinal exchanges, of gifts, sharing, peer group sanctions and rewards all taking place at a social level unaccounted for by business or state, taking place at what could indeed be called an 'amateur' level where time is not money, but priceless.
Like the works of Michael Krebber, Dowson's paintings are imbued with a dichotomy between verticality and abjection, his line's emphasis, though vertical, seems ready to run downward like rain on windows. The contradiction he sets before us is of an artist intent on mastering a resilient craft against an impoverished backdrop. The baseness of his found supports asks the images painted on them to rescue them from their plight, but who will rescue who? Dowson seems to present a re-reading of Marx, critiqueing the object in terms of a non-adversarial universalism more akin to Whitman. Perhaps saluting Raymond Pettibon's honestly modest offerings he sympathises rather than empathises with objects while attempting to distance painting from capital and reconnect it to a world beyond in which all things also live.
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