Suspension at the Phoenix Gallery, Exeter

‘Suspension’, the current exhibition at the Phoenix Gallery, Exeter, sees a maturing of work by the duo Simon Haddock and Stuart Chubb. An explosive formation lures us in, part temple, part labyrinth, part magic portal. Seemingly precarious in its configuration, like a three-dimensional Russian modernist montage, Viewer consists of thin wooden walls upon which stand further sheets of wood that overlap, hang and balance horizontally, then grow vertically up in a wooden landscape construction site, barely visible from the gallery floor. Wood juts and looms, creating a space that is at once confusing and arresting it its disarray. It is interactive, but gives no clear sense of where we should begin our explorations. At every turn our impression is framed by windows teasingly opening out at every level. Teasingly, because our experience of the piece separates the physical and the visual, our physical entrance is at once invited and blocked, our visual involvement authorized and restricted. Our engagement is playful. We crouch, peek, tip-toe, look through, crane. It is fragmented, denied a sweeping view except perhaps at the gateway on the other side of the ‘portal’ (access to which is frustratingly denied). Here we happen upon the suggestion of a reconstruction of the artists’ studio where further ‘discarded’ wood and images lie scattered. Is it the studio or is it a mental picture of the process of art making, where disjointed elements and experiences are appropriated, rejected and then rearranged into some kind of narrative?

Viewer

The wall text informs us that the artists are working predominantly with the debris of ‘false walls’ from temporary exhibitions, amassed and reconfigured. These discarded supports, within which art has previously been hung, projected or framed, define the spatial structure of our viewing experience within a gallery. Haddock and Chubb deconstruct and reconstruct, subvert and embellish such physical demarcations. And yet the narrative they present is hardly complete: just in case we have not noticed, they leave the G-clamps for all to see. Is it in the process of making or dismantling? (If postmodernism has taught us anything, it is to question such ‘false’ distinctions). This is surely the point. The reincarnation of fragments from now unidentifiable exhibitions can never be complete, as more shows go up and others are replaced. Ghosts of art that these sheets of wood previously housed haunt the current work, distant memories of art now evolving into something other. Haddock and Chubb’s rendering is pared down by their palette, limited to MDF laid bare, punctuated by black and white emulsion paint, slapped on. Colour is sparse, with an isolated slab of red or grey leaning here and there. It is an element of the piece which is left unexplored and seems at odds with its more lighthearted tackling of space.

Seeding (left wall) and Cadence

By contrast colour, in Haddock’s solo paintings, is activated, threatening to erupt from the surface in an explosion of trails, clouds, smudges and shadows. His work sways between a bewildering, almost violent bombardment of form and colour, and a more open landscape of looser touch and restricted palette. In Cadence, lurid painted bars clash and expand across and out from the surface in ultra- and anti-perspective, as scaffolding around which scatterings of textured marks jostle. However, on a backdrop of diaphanous yellow wash there emerges a dissonance between the romantic and the mechanical, the spectral and the sci-fi, a kind of dream-like/nightmarish construction. In another guise, Haddock’s approach is less urgent, more spacious, overtly suggestive of natural forms and rhythms. Meandering in its trajectory, Seeding builds up texture through layers of overlapping, almost translucent masked washes, exposing previous layers of drawn black scribbles. Haddock’s process is tantalizingly revealed in painterly form (as in its sculptural sister across the hall). Where he has built up pigment, the viewer is invited mentally to unmake, scrape back, an archaeology of spectatorship. The cloud of dust, birds or whatever else it might be, hovers suggestively above the scene as neither one thing nor another or both. You decide.

The painting and sculptural installation work closely together (despite the disruptive division of the gallery hallway). Structural forms are echoed, the constructive process made manifest, their connection, intimate. Beginning our viewing journey with the paintings, as we move into Haddock and Chubb’s collaborative work, we have the sense of moving into alluringly unauthorized territory. We zoom into a painting, beyond the finished product on display, and into a work in progress. It is revealing, laid bare, its ludic serendipity celebrated. Its dependence on a trail of artistic precedence is honest without a claustrophobic sense of knowingness. I am left wondering how constructive a more overt stylistic breach between their two approaches might be, and how much a loosening of the currently unified aesthetic, by pushing the very nature of the collaborative, might lead to even richer realms.