James Fisher & Phil Goss
28 June – 7 August 2024
After-Image by James Fisher and Phil Goss is on show at Vivienne Roberts Projects, London.
The exhibition explores an overarching theme of imagined landscape in an installation that features canvases, paintings on paper and panel, monotypes, ceramics and sculpture.
Fisher and Goss share affinities. Both draw on multiple references outside themselves to construct their own discrete imaginative spaces. Their images present places of the mind – conjectured worlds – where reality coincides with motifs taken from art, literature, music and manga.
Both artists work in sequences or series, employing a back and forth approach in which a painted canvas or wooden support acts as the template for ghosted iterations. The paintings, like poetry, combine abstract and representational elements, to become the visual equivalents for thoughts.
Fisher’s ostensibly bucolic scenes mesh reality with pictorial details from different eras and cultures. His images combine landscape schematics from Rajput and Persian miniatures, Japanese print and kigurumi characters, that are worked over gold grounds and decorative fabrics which he lays down on the surfaces of canvas or wooden supports. Executed in a vivid palette that is reminiscent of the virtual world of computer games, his paintings carry a heightened sense of atmosphere in which the shifting panoramas of figures, pattern and lustre leave ambiguous undercurrents.
Goss investigates the resonance of a single image, unpacking its potential readings through a sequence of process led manoeuvres. Prompted by a line of poetry or a film still, he begins work from observational drawings that are developed as carved woodblock prints. Multiple impressions enable him to calibrate an emotional charge through shifts in tone or texture. Ultimately he chooses a single impression and returns to the wooden matrix, using it as the basis to make a new painting in which echoes of his cut mark-making remain imbedded.
After-Image is co-curated by Emma Hill and Vivienne Roberts.
Vivienne Roberts Projects
The Bindery, 53 Hatton Garden, London EC1N 8HN
www.viviennerobertsprojects.com
(Open Tuesday – Friday, 11-5pm and by appointment)
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