Young Contemporaries at Alan Cristea

Young Contemporaries at Alan Cristea

29 January, 2009
by: Katuschka

There was a strange, brisk charge of tension in the air at Alan Cristea during their show Young Contemporaries 2009. I'm pretty sure that if I'd stuck around long enough someone would have whipped out an inflatable pool filled with gouache and dinged a massive gong. Then a bikini-clad bitch fight of epic cultural proportions would've commenced for the cheering punters, with trash talk like 'Your work makes Rolf Harris look like Michelangelo bee-yatch', and a healthy dose of finger snapping, head bobbing and 'Yo mamas'.

Well, if that's the curator's idea of bringing in a buck in these belt-tightening times then more power to him. Stranger things have been done in the name of art.

However, if that wasn't the curator's intention then the placement of two of the artists' work seemed a little off-kilter. I present for you the damning evidence… Exhibit A: Eilidh Young has compiled photopolymer (read, fancy type of photograph) stills from Fellini's 8½ which have been framed and placed in sequence on the gallery wall. So far so good: what 8½ lacked in entertainment, it more than made up for in modernist good looks and tearjerking R.E.M videos.

But wait, things get uglier… Exhibit B: On the opposite wall, exhibited in the exact same style, Marie Harnett takes film stills and reproduces them as hyper-realist pencil drawings on a piece of paper mere centimetres wide. The scale is retina-rapingly small and I had to get so close to see the slightest pencil stroke that I was misting up the glass.

This is a good example of the artistic pull between intention and talent. Undoubtedly Young is a very talented artist and this installation represents a small portion of her portfolio, and to laud photo-realism in a business where the unimaginable is brought to life would be naïve. However when you compare a framed film still with something you can't quite believe has been created by hand, Young's work is left looking somewhat ineffective. Seems like a paintbrushes at dawn affair to me.

Less controversially featured were the huge, yet intricate drawings of Kate Atkin, which examine the structure, natural detail and form of collapsed wood cabins and rotting tree trunks. Her work seems to leap off the frame and has a distinctive seventies flavour with the aesthetic of mock-wood hostess trolleys. I'm the kind of person who looks at a piece and wonders how it would look hanging at  home, and I couldn't stop thinking of orange shag piles and be-afroed men. Nathalie Guinamard's collages of rooms with no structure also had a retro feel, with floating staircases leading to nowhere, walls which disappear into nothing and airbourne furniture. Her work seems to hint at unhappy home lives and how we are emotionally anchored down by our possessions and environment.

Altogether, the exhibition is an interesting combination of works with elaborate detail and narrative structure by a collection of highly promising artists. The selected works seem to be a departure from all four artists' usual style and Young would perhaps be better suited displaying one of her hand drawn pieces, or exhibiting the featured work with similarly conceptual artists. Nonetheless a smart show, filled with painstakingly rendered work.

I look forward to similarly provocative shows in future. Neil Buchanan vs the Chapman Brothers anyone? It's On!!!

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Katuschka