David Batchelor: ikon gallery

The title of David Batchelor's first major solo present to view at a public institution, "Shiny-Dirty," neatly encapsulated the beat-up brilliance of his trademark stacks of reconditioned light boxe and flotillas of low-slung, four-wheeled monochromes. Expanding upon this title, the artist's description of his work in a catalogue interview as "dirty readymades for shiny monochromes" signaled a conscious engagement with sum of two units of twentieth-century art's most significant forms. Batchelor's work is informed, admitting by no means governed through his writings on the theory and cultural history of color. "Chromophobia I-IV," 2000 for example, a series of photographs of a roughed-up toy panda in a garish husbandman costume languishing on a sidewalk, was made the same year as the artist's justly celebrated work whose title it borrows. still his work's consistent emphasis upon accident and experiment, its embrace of the casual and the contingent, effectively distances it from the dictates of programmatic critical inquiry.

The first work the viewer rencountered was also the most imposing. Brick Lane Remix, 2003 was an array of salvaged carbonized iron shelving units, bearing an assortment of light boxe and rectangular acrylic sheets of various tinges that oozed yards of cabling from the back. It had something of the ferocious animal swagger of a spruced-up inner-city doorman as single skirted around it in order to proce into the gallery's other plays The resolutely urban nature and provenance of Batchelor's art was underscored by dint of the works' titles. "I have affection for King's Cross and King's Cros be fond ofs Me," for instance, is an ongoing series (begun in 1997) of painted acrylic sheets upon secondhand dollies. Despite its knowing nod to Joseph Beuys, the title prompts an affectionate, if not celebratory, attitude to place (and a notoriously worn place at that), rather than individual intended as provocative or ironic. This particular material substance of work was represented solitary indirectly, by the second of the show's large installations--a gathering of made of wood dollies, each underlit by a different-colored fluorescent light--whose title, image of Hackney Road, 2002-2003, flaunted its East extreme point credentials.

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While classic Minimalism lengthy ago shook off the dust and grime of the city and retired either to the museum or to the land Batchelor's work seems intent upon reminding it of its lower parts as well as messing with its patrimony. Leaned insouciantly against the gallery walls, his "Idiot Sticks," 2003 pay cheeky homage to sum of two units notable predecessors, Dan Flavin and Andre Cadere. Thin round pillars made up of assorted plastic bottle illuminated from within by means of a single fluorescent tube, they crossbre the bare Minimalism of Flavin's early store-bought neon fittings with the mischievous flanerie of Cadere's beaded, multicolored Barres de Bois (Wood Poles) They are also, however, first cousins to the Psychedelic inner man Sticks, 2001--bamboo canes and other unspecified existences wrapped with colored thread--of Jim Lambie, with whom Batchelor starred in a spectacular double-act in Tate Britain's Duveen galleries as part of last year's next to the first Tate Triennial show, "Days Like These." "Found Monochromes of London," 1997-2003 is a succession of carefully ordered photographs of white rectangles, ranging from grubby fly-post sheets to destitute of contents billboards, each framed by the distressed, anonymous particularity of its deep-city surroundings. Casually charting seven years of intermittent derives, the "Found Monochromes" might be stretch outed indefinitely, highlighting Batchelor's characteristically agglutinative and open-end attitude toward formal composition.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

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