Paul Noble/Jeremy Deadman
28 August - 26 September 1999
A lot of people think Paul Noble is strange; not because he is strange, but because much of his work is without precedent and referent. In the verbiage currencies of art it's usually a moot point as to what extent an artist should become synonymous with their work. But, since producing the 'Nobson Newtown' drawings at the Chisenhale Gallery in 1998, Paul Noble has spawned a metonymy of sizeableness, and a mantle as one of the most efficacious artists around. Sometimes the thing about his work is finding it difficult to know what to say about it; whilst being simultaneously absorbed by it. For this exhibition with Jeremy Deadman, as a kind of dialectic, he is showing two onanist paintings made before 'Nobson' - one of friends, one of family - that are entirely indifferent to 'Nobson', from an entirely different facet of Noble, but obliquely, quite similarly exacting.
Jeremy Deadman's use of evocative matter, with one exception, is managed in a far more surreptitious manner; not through subterfuge but a subtle subversion of expectation. The depictions of his ideas comes through a diffusive membrane, wry and disconcerting - as opposed to Noble's use of alacrity and discountenance. For his part in this coupling, Jeremy Deadman has abducted and utilised second hand talk and learn musical children's toys, distorting the original sound tracks and their sanguine intentions. He installs his own performed voice-over, following a narration of more questionable realism and suggests an alternative notion of indoctrination, or one of more plausible adult correlation. With these are two transistor radios, locked in intransigent verbal conflict, one a male voice the other a female one.
