PETER MACDONALD
codecs
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PETER MACDONALD codecs EXHIBITION: OCTOBER 15TH - NOVEMBER 5TH, 2010
sims reed gallery The Economist Building 30 Bury Street London SW1Y 6AU Tel. +44 (0) 207 930 5111 Fax +44 (0) 207 930 1555 gallery@simsreed.com www.gallery.simsreed.com
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
www.edelassanti.com art@edelassanti.com
FOREWORD Peter Macdonald produces beautifully rendered, intricate drawings that must be directly experienced. They shift and move with the viewer. At varying distances the colours merge, resolve, disperse and change. The fixed, deathly eye of the camera therefore stills them beyond recognition and it is a pleasure to see art works that defy the assumed authority of photography and demand instead, the physicality of the perceptual process. In the flesh these works gently pulse and flicker; like your eye does, as radio waves do, as electromagnetic waves flow - as your mind flows, with quantum leaps, in and out of resolution. The artist has a keen, if peripatetic interest in science and in Codecs the drawings employ images culled from the world of science - satellite recovery missions, Mars colonisation simulations, radiotelescopy and Eddington's 1919 observation of a solar eclipse. Drawing upon the ether of media representations and photography, these works are produced directly from the artist's imagination. Earlier work depicted elaborate, apparently specific landscapes that were nonetheless totally invented. Like those landscapes, these images see the free play of imagination and elaboration harnessed to an extraordinarily controlled technique. Using pigmented inks the artist draws a complex image before then overdrawing on the result. These wavering horizontal and diagonal lines are produced with a five-nibbed stave pen designed for the hand writing of music scores. This sonic connection retains a synaesthesic echo in the subtle rhythms and shifting staccato of the works. Drawn in varied hues, these lines create differing interference patterns over the image. The result is televisual but of a very specific type of transmission. The patterns recall the now superseded scan lines and static once visible on old black and white analogue televisions. As digital signals replace this technology, the analogue field of electromagnetic emanations that we bathe within, will also become less visible. These images thus capture a mode of seeing that is fading but which remains crucial. It is also remarkable that they manage to evoke those physical but invisible washes that normally cannot be pictured - sound, electromagnetic fields, emotional registers. This scientific imagery itself seems to examine the process of seeing and of understanding. Throughout the images there are scenes of measurement, investigation and observation. Scientists, like artists, not only look out at the world but they engage with it materially to find meaning and knowledge. Standing as sentinels, the images of radio telescopes and radar receivers are akin to the figure of the artist or scientist. Quietly sitting, recording, deciphering and retransmitting information from one form into another and thereby making it visible. Often too, science and art regards phenomena - like electromagnetic flows, structures of feeling - which are palpable but generally unseen, or overlooked. Both scientists and 4
artists look out at the world, interact with it and find practical means to share their hard won understandings. Both confront the overwhelming, mind-boggling mysteries of quotidian existence with a far-fetched determination to comprehend it all. Against the odds, this regularly yields up results that shift and shape our comprehension of the world. Revealing mysteries, making visible the unseen - this also sounds like religion. It is no accident that several titles allude to the religious - Artefact, John the Divine, Supplicant. These works also play with science's apparent similarity with religion. Indeed both employ ritualized methodologies and observances with a mutually shared fundamental purpose: each respectively seeks to establish objectivity in the construction and constitution of our universe. Religious ritual reinforces faith through repeated and strict observance of prescribed behaviours, as does science. There is a fundamental difference here though. In science what is sought through the ritual-like and continued repetition of experiment is to make certain there is no anomaly. So too for religion. In religion however, such aberrations are heresies to be purged in order to preserve belief; in science, they are not condemned but embraced as something that must shift the paradigm to result in new insights. One results in unshakable mystical certainty, the other in an empirical certainty that is always provisional. Not unlike the late Impressionist moment of Pointillism, these images are made from discontinuous marks that resolve at particular distances to become forms. Here Macdonald shifts from dots to lines, however, as in Pointillism, the effect is to cause colours to remix at varying distances. Because of this variation of effect subject to distance, the viewer's body is gently activated and incorporated into the magnetic field of the work. The viewer is subtly moved to reposition themselves in the space before the work. As they do so, their perceptions are subject to quantum shifts - between detail and panorama, information and noise. The works create their own pulse, as sure and steady as bleeps from a radar receiver that sound back and forth, drawing forward, sending away. “The fluctuation between image and noise, readability and illegibility is something I see as a metaphor for learning,� says the artist. These shifts between states - between knowing and unknowing - can be understood as issues of resolution. In imaging, resolution is the point in distance, or scale, at which the dots or pixels of an image are no longer visible but coalesce into form. In the parlance of artists, on the other hand, resolution is that moment when a work or a problem finally resolves itself and declares itself finished Both these resolutions are not final, however - they are not answers, but solutions. They are as provisional and open ended as the postulations of science. These works play with both senses of the word resolution. In their very materiality, along with their imagery, these drawings are themselves an enquiry into the point at which noise becomes information. The point at which the oscillation between strict, mechanical application of technique within the free play of imagination can reveal and picture the world. The conclusion is not a picture of certainty, but of continued, intense enquiry. Stephen Haley 2010 5
Ziggurat
Ink on board, 2010 50.9 x 76.1 cm 6
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X-Band
Ink on board, 2010 50.9 x 76.1 cm 8
Supplicant
Ink on board, 2010 50.9 x 76.1 cm 9
John the Divine
Ink on board, 2010 50.9 x 76 cm 10
Ether
Ink on board, 2010 51 x 76 cm 11
Sentinels
Ink on board, 2010 50.9 x 76.1 cm 12
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Interpolate Black Metal
Ink on paper, mounted on board, 2010 163 x 224.1 cm 16
(detail shown overleaf) 17
On the Mountain
Ink on board, 2010 81.4 x 101.7 cm 18
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Neophytes
Ink on board, 2010 81.5 x 101.7 cm 20
Receiver
Ink on board, 2010 81.4 x 101.6 cm 21
Principe
Ink on board, 2010 81.5 x 101.7 cm 22
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Artefact
Ink on paper, 2010 26.3 x 36.2 cm
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Mountain Temple
Ink on paper, 2010 26.2 x 36.1 cm
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PETER MACDONALD BIOGRAPHY Born 1972 BA(Hons) Fine Art University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne Lives and works in London SOLO SHOWS 2008 Strange Attractors, Museum 52, London 2003 New Drawings, Andrew Mummery project space SELECTED GROUP SHOWS 2010 2009 2008 2007
Mondi Colour Holidays, Edel Assanti Project Space, London Works on Paper, Museum 52, London Topographica, Turnpike Gallery, Manchester Foreground/Background, Elemanta, Dubai Drawing Breath, 10 Years of the Jerwood Drawing Prize, NAS, Sydney 2006 Assemblage 1, Museum 52, London Motion on Paper, Ben Brown Fine Arts, London 2005 Wonderings, 47 Gt.Eastern St., London Drawing 200, The Drawing Room, London Jerwood Drawing Prize, various venues UK 2004 Light, Earth & the Nature of Things, Galerie Wit, Netherlands
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