5 July - 4 August 2002
In common with each other, Ewan Gibbs and Alessandro Raho use photographs as the basis of their practice. Both artists select contemporary images which refer to the traditional genres of landscape, portrait and still-life, and both augment the flat photographic image with a romantic intensity of labour. Gibbs's rigorous process of transforming a photograph into a drawing and Raho's enhancement of the colour image through painting are very different, though, resulting in works which respond to the reproducible, printed image in distinct ways.
Gibbs has always used circles, crosses, dots and dashes as the constituent marks of his drawings. Over the past five years, he has increasingly refined his mark-making into an extremely simple formula in which he methodically translates pixels of light and shade from a gridded-up photograph into diagonal black pen-marks on cream graph paper. In doing so, he has found a way of making the ancient practice of drawing look new. The regular dashes which make up his pictures openly display their debt to the conceptual filter of computer print technology. Every single square in the drawing contains a mark of varying and considered weight, meaning that the drawing's surface coverage is evenly democratic. This 'all over' treatment distances his drawings from traditional practice using line but connects them with the non-linear drawings of Seurat, for example, as an historical precedent. Gibbs's method allows him to make drawings of any subject he chooses built from subtle contrasts in tone. The original photographic image is both obscured and aestheticised by the grid's organisational structure which lends these city drawings a delicate, lace-like effect.
Raho's understanding of colour underpins his method of making paintings from photographs. Like mass-produced contemporary print which represents the spectrum using combinations of four differently coloured inks, Raho builds all of his paintings from different configurations of the primary colours: blue, red and yellow mixed with white. The current show includes two paintings of Cologne and Helsinki which are at one level linked by their intricate detail and formal architectural composition, but are more subtly underwritten by Raho's complex system of editing and enhancing the image by remaking it in paint. Whilst Gibbs's work distances the realism of the original image by breaking down and revealing its constituent elements, Raho's paintings augment both the illusionism and the richness of colour in the images he selects. Raho's method has more in common with the ameliorating capacity of digital manipulation, smoothing over or subtracting information from the original image to make it more perfect and more pleasing to the eye.
Catherine Wood
