21st – 25th March, open daily 12 – 6pm
Private view 23rd March, 6 – 9pm
Fitzrovia Gallery is delighted to host Backscatter, an exhibition of works by Camberwell College of Arts students Matt Graysmith and Oliver Wade. On view are a selection of figurative painting created over the last two years by Graysmith and a series of unique silver gelatine hand prints by Wade. The exhibition has been brought together and is presented by the artists.
One painter and one photographer in their formative stages, this is an exhibition about friendship and relationships with our own past and present. In physics, ‘backscatter is the reflection of waves, signals and particles back to the direction from which they came’ (Wikipedia!). In these creative practices, backscatter is the reflection of personal memories onto new conversations, insights, and sensations. In two very different approaches to image making, Graysmith and Wade seek to recontextualise Britain and their relation to the land. In BACKSCATTER, the psychogeography of its culture with all its eccentricities runs like an open-ended theme, observed without further comment. The results are undoubtedly romantic and often melancholic.
Graysmith truly explores paint, treating it as clay as he moulds his pictures. Anyone familiar with Graysmith’s practice will have seen it solidify around an aesthetics inspired by folklore. Domestic interiors with figures rendered from awkward perspectives and framed by aphorisms have equal airs of innocence and scepticism. The paintings chart a collapse of faith into a greater sense of individualism, reflecting the artist’s upbringing in a religious environment. He presents us with messages such as ‘I have no reason to love you’ and ‘Jesus loves you but I am his favourite’. Amongst the work on show is also Pottery Canal, Raining, a departure from his narrative paintings with a monochrome background in muted yellow that extends across the frame and an inserted portrait in a painterly blue brushwork. Iconographic in its format, the painting is telling of Graysmith’s influences and concerns.
Wade’s photographs documenting vistas of urban landscapes and compromised cultural symbols reflect these interests. Architecture, religious iconography, and mundane objects form a language based in the postmodernist tradition of recycling ideas through a contemporary lens. Perspective, as in Graysmith’s painting, is often from an angle with the resulting image cropped in an uncelebratory manner. The subject is always obscure, as shown for example by a Madonna integrated into modern architecture or a feeble if heroic defense SAVE OUR COURTS woven into the net of a goal. These are observations of places with little or no reassurance. Shot on a 35 mm camera and realised as silver gelatin prints, these are unique works with surface tactility and a painterly presence.