12 April - 12 May 2002
One would be forgiven if, on first encountering Gary Simmonds' work, you took the large vibrant paintings to be concerned solely with aspects of colour that relate both to high modernism and mass production hues of the same period. But it is a relationship with what has past, rather than the period itself, that is key. Come closer and see that the charming decoration, of what might be elaborate wallpaper, break down into constituent stars. These ornamental motifs evolve from and are created by a process where the artist repeatedly drags paint with a squeegee from the outside in, smearing the factory colours, which become somehow tawdry and fatigued.
The colours of Simmonds' pieces have become darker and have the gentle resonance of objects incorporated into dreams, which you come across again when awake. The new works use a deep or black ground, from which the gloss of pastel smears hover like apparitions - asterisk marks to a lost footnote. They are paintings from which all the figurative action has been removed; it is left for the remaining mundane details to attempt to pronounce the facts.
Simmonds calls up memories without fixing them in a psychological framework so that they can participate in the balance of the painting.He conjures up the shadows of memories, in a way reminiscent of our sense of smell: we have none of the normal aspects of detail, yet the impression is precise and clear. The work carries a huge amount of 'baggage'. Simmonds has evoked all the complexity of the unfulfilled in the childlike simplicity of his process and it is this ambivalent emotional charge that drives the systematic production of the work.
The large scale of the work promises safe entry with no key. We are free to examine their emptiness and our elliptical personalities and we are presented with a vision of ordered dysfunction. The paintings division into panels recalls the heyday of the religious subject and all the weight incumbent on that. But Gary Simmonds shies away from being a 'Painter'. His methods seem an attempt to reduce his presence, yet they outline him all the more.
