Rood Hall Studio
Bungay Road
Beccles NR34 8HE

Rotate: Logic Meets Absurdity

Founded in 2004, Outpost is an artist-run contemporary gallery space based in Norwich. When I heard that Outpost members were exhibiting at the Contemporary Art Society in London, I thought it the perfect opportunity for my premier article for Green Pebble.

For Rotate, Outpost has selected six artists: Helene Appel, Rob Filby, Neil Baker, Jacques Rogers, Karen Cunningham and Steve Bishop. All have a strong relationship with Outpost and were chosen to represent the broad spectrum of Outpost's exhibition programme.

Upon entering the space, it strikes me that if I view the grouping of work in my eye-line, as a single body, it gives the impression of an elaborate kinetic sculpture. In the background, a large, lit angle- poise lamp draped in white cloth entitled A Few Too Many Nights Too Long by Steve Bishop, resembles a priest baptizing a boy or perhaps something more sinister in view of recent media events. I imagine the light bulbs heating under the cloth setting them alight; this in turn tips the lamps - they roll across the floor into Jacques Roger’s precariously placed trio of corporate looking sculptures, one tipping the other like dominoes, striking Karen Cunningham’s carved stone wheel, rotating it across the floor into the column-like card sculpture by the same artist. The chain of events continues into the boardroom…

I discontinue this fantasy and turn immediately into the glass-walled boardroom where I’m confronted by a row of gouache on board paintings by Neil Baker. Like portrait shots of a board of directors, their cheesy grins have disappeared. In fact, their whole faces have disappeared, replaced instead with distorted abstractions.

Baker describes his work as ‘a practice of resistance’ - the work that leaves his studio is that which resists his attempts to practice. From what I can see they start out as pretty good abstract paintings. If he’d just left it there, they would still be pretty good abstract paintings, but a bit like lots of other abstract paintings. Instead, Baker pushes the image into an unexpected direction. He often puts obstacles in the way of his images by applying an element plucked randomly from a collection of heterogeneous source imagery comprising newspapers, magazines and other paraphernalia. I believe the process of painting as well as showing the changes in his decision are important to him. Baker records this in his work and leaves it there as a reference point. His paintings hold several tensions in balance between abstraction and figuration, sense and nonsense, and logic and absurdity.

My favourite piece of Baker’s has to be the rather muddy looking painting of a cloud on canvas. It has the most innocent and docile manga-style eyes plonked on the surface. It looks as though two different paintings were stacked face to face and left under direct sunlight so that one rubbed off onto the other. His work seems to inhabit disparate worlds of thought by conjoining elements that don't necessarily belong, it’s all part of the
constituency of his work, the consequence of which often charges the paintings with a sense of other worldliness.

In the centre of the room stands a sculpture by Jacques Rogers, The Descent of Halo. It comprises four objects, three of which have the appearance of a typical piece of corporate sculpture that you may find outside any number of merchant banks in a major city. Each is bent into a similar shape and executed in different media, steel, clear Perspex and hand painted in white. The sculptures subvert one another, the shiny and new are affected by the agency of the painted version which sits on a black plinth in a pool of water, mixed with a cocktail of Brute cologne, white wine and paint. The liquid will go rank after a time and stain the object above. The idea of decay growing on the sculpture while the others stand shiny and untouched, could relate to his practice. The catalogue tells me that Rogers’ work is interested in the notion of style, aesthetics, fashion and taste in relation to the fine art object.

The sculptures are accompanied by a fourth object, a rolled up woodcut print on cartridge paper of a man that looks like a punk. The image reminds me of Travis Bickle, the protagonist in the movie Taxi Driver, his punk Mohican hairstyle symbolised his descent into madness. The punk is certainly a pop cultural icon that has been adopted in a number of genres: punk fashion, punk rock, punk ideology, even punk visual art. The perception of punk iconography could refer to the punk movement drawing inspirations from several strains of modern art, of youth culture, of tribes borrowing ideas. We could view Roger’s work as a type of bricolage, a creation from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, this is certainly evident in his resourcefulness, placing a rolled print onto its side to transform it into a sculpture, or making an infinity pool out of booze and aftershave. However, I don't think Rogers would merely use what happens to be available, I think his work is carefully planned out.

The artist tells me his work is more about teenage angst and seems quite relieved that I didn't quite get the piece straight off. It’s his intention for the viewer to not quite get it. In fact, he would have failed at some point ‘if the meanings came out too easily’. Rogers’ practice is more concerned with how art objects can, should and might generate both myth and meaning. There’s no doubt Rogers has a great eye for design and composition; he knows how to create tension between objects. The sculptures are deliberately tactile to make the work desirable and appealing. In a way this makes the piece more accessible on the surface even if on closer inspection it’s not as accessible as we think.

Rotate is showing at The Contemporary Art Society in London until 17 September.

Nicolas Ruston is an artist, art director and visiting lecturer at Norwich University College of the Arts.

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