Tom Jeffreys visits the studio of John Stark ahead of his solo show at Charlie Smith London.
For me, great art, like great literature, is demanding. It demands close and careful attention, pushing you to make sense of it, but also always withdrawing, refusing to divulge its secrets. This is how I feel about the works of John Stark, who has his second solo show, Apiculture, opening at Charlie Smith London this October. After showing with the gallery at London Art Fair back in 2008, Stark's first full solo exhibition launched Charlie Smith's permanent space on Old Street in 2009, but it was only in 2010, at a Charlie Smith group show, that I first came across Stark's work in the flesh – a darkly troubling piece entitled Fear Eats the Soul, densely packed with crazed characters and strange unreadable symbolism.
Visiting John in his Hackney studio and seeing his most recent works, it's clear his practice has changed, not so much dramatically, but certainly noticeably. “The progression,” John tells me over a cup of tea, “definitely comes from within the work.” It's a two-fold move: firstly in terms of style – which has become even flatter, slicker and more highly varnished; and secondly in terms of the subject matter of the works, which are less dramatically dark, and now more gently unsettling.
Clearly much of the change comes from a refinement of the artist's own practice, but there's also a host of external influences at play. Strange medieval landscapes are reminiscent of John Martin, but “more picturesque”; there's elements of Minimalist sculpture (Donald Judd in particular); tinges of photorealism and Glenn Brown (“an early influence”); echoes of M Night Shyamalan's The Village; and all manner of architectural epochs – from medieval stone skeps to public shopping centre art, via the Panorama Theatre built in Leicester Square in the 1800s.
In addition, for the first time, Stark is exhibiting work that goes beyond painting. As the hand of the artist is increasingly effaced in the application of the paint, Stark has pushed his practice outwards – “exploded” is the word he uses more than once – to now include a range of sculptural elements; mainly beehive-like structures. These pick out elements from the paintings, and bring them, judderingly, from Stark's strange, timeless, ruined, neverworld right into the gallery (or studio) of the real. There's something akin to that moment in Nightmare on Elm Street where Tina wakes up from what she perceives to be a dream, only to find four razor cuts in her nightgown. These structures prevent the apparently unreal from being boxed off and forgotten about. There is, as John puts it, “a slippage”.
These beehives form the narrative crux of the exhibition, and lend a new “conceptual cohesion” to John's work. Under the title of Apiculture, the works trace the ritual undertakings of a series of strange figures, like a cult of bee-keepers, anonymous under brightly coloured hoods and black face-masks. These bees, for John, are “a really nice open metaphor, that can be read in so many different ways. All through the history of literature and art, the beehive has been cited as an example of utopian society, of a selfless existence. Do these hives represent the world? An idealised world? Art, even? Are the keepers the artists, producing the art, or the collectors harvesting the art?” Importantly, these possibilities are kept delicately open.
And Stark is an expert at this – exploiting both the power of symbolism and its inherent limitations. As titles like In Times of Exactness and Uncertainty suggest, there's a painstaking balance between information and secrecy. As John puts it, “information is depicted in detail and is very specific, and yet... it's sort of everything and nothing at the same time.” Through a host of abstract logos, compositional patterns, repeated motifs and codes of colour, “you can see a whole language developing,” John says. “Shapes, forms, colours – it's just a series of shapes if you break the paintings down: circles, squares, triangles and hexagons.” This, combined with the fact that under the surface of the paintings are all manner of mistakes and alternative compositions – “If you X-rayed them you'd see a lot of weird stuff in there!” – gives a sense of the cryptic and occult not simply to the subject matter of the works but to the very works themselves.
This interest in codification stems directly from John's desire to confront the issue of religion. It's something that comes with the territory: “Being a painter and dealing with historical painting, you have to somehow deal with these ideas of religion and the spiritual, so I guess I see these narratives replacing the old ones.” So alongside a triptych is a portrait of one of the bee-keepers, whose pose, hands together in what looks like prayer, is taken from classic depictions of the Madonna. But here, he bears the brand of his profession, and the vivid orange protective gloves of his profession. As John puts it, “the idea of work, or daily ritual, is one way of filling in the void, giving people meaning.”
But for the bee-keepers, stuck in a static representation, their daily toil never bears fruit. This work then is both what gives them meaning, and an apparently futile activity. It's akin perhaps to the reading of symbolism – a task that is always thwarted in advance by the necessary opacity of the symbol. A bit like reading art, you might say. These are fascinating works, that retain Stark's innate ability to beguile. But the longer you look, the less you know, and the more naggingly intriguing they become.
John Stark - Apiculture is at Charlie Smith London from 7th October to 12th November 2011.
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