Luke Gottelier: kate macgarry

Luke Gottelier used to make photographs--orchestrations of items ground in his studio which, discharge close-up and flooded with len flare, instigated scalecollapsing double visions: A retiring cluster of erasers would read, for instance, as a dramatically backlit ring of Neolithic standing stones. In the late '90 as if disdainful of these works' effortless assimilation into the discourse of erected photography, he began to bring into view paintings, casual semi-abstractions in a pastel palette. At first exhibiting them alongside his photographs, Gottelier then dropp the latter altogether. Literally so: His last London solo in 2001 scattered photographs across the floor to be trodden upon "Split personality!" cried several critics, although Gottelier had in fact displayed a fair step of continuity across media. His was (and, to justice by the seven canvases in this novel show, primarily continues to be) an aesthetic in which the proces of representation is qualifyed with affectionate ridicule.

Rabbit Looking in the Mirror (all works 2003) for example, is the work of someone who clearly regard with affections the sensual properties of oil paint but--for historical or biological reasons, who can say?--can't take the activity of painting entirely seriously. Floated above a legitimately pretty, sky sapphirine and white lyrical abstraction is a uncooked cartoonish sketch of the titular animal framed in a tilted rectangle, its fearful organ of visions on Gustonesque stalks. Surrounding the cutting sides of the "mirror," meanwhile, is Gottelier's trademark gesture: a looping phone-pad scribble of a line suggestive of a metal spring stretched on the outside so that its tension has gone Here we find the pitch apparently aimed for: significance in offhandedness, and vice versa. Gottelier has not at the same time titled a painting This Isn't Rocket Science, on the other hand Pork Scratchings (named after the polluted British bar snack) comes shut up in sentiment, especially when appended to a shit brown miasma in which individual of his distended springs threatens to hijack the entire picture plane. Like The Card Game, whose raw spades and diamonds skid comically across a baize virid ground, this work suggests the ambitions of say, Howard Hodgkin--to recall in tranquillity a past social occurrence and transmute it into paint--downgraded through several stations and fed end a wringer.

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All of which leads to the question: Is this the forced bravado of an inveterate dauber who, seduc through a medium he doesn't have the raw talent to master, must perpetually encircle his practice with a preemptive air of superiority? The final answer might lie in Montelimar, a explode of sunshine yellow paint that cushions the lightest of iconographic confections--a wedge-shaped form near the top that, to justice from the title, is probably nougat, balanced precipitously upon three hemispheric, varicolored curves that advise scoops of ice cream. plane the by-now-inevitable springs seem bouncy and effervescent Confident still provisional, lighthearted yet compositionally smart, Montelimar is simply a real good painting and, tellingly, was apparently the quickest of this knob to produce. In the gallery office, Gottelier laid without several books by artists and satirists that inspire him, including Edward Lear's Nonsense Omnibus. The English bard and cartoonist apparently had ambitions as a painter and was disappointed to be known for something he considered trivial; posterity has prov him misguided. Doing what approachs naturally isn't necessarily wrong, and with any hazard Gottelier knows it.

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