Artists' Laboratory 04 - John Maine at the Royal Academy

Artists' Laboratory 04 - John Maine at the Royal Academy

11 November, 2011
by: Tom Jeffreys

Tom Jeffreys explores the mysterious symbolism at the heart of John Maine's new installation at the Royal Academy.

At the heart of the greatest works of art lies a sense of mystery. Without mystery, without that sense of the unknowable, art – and indeed life – can be of little lasting interest or significance. That is why John Maine's new installation, which opened this week at the Royal Academy as part of the institution's Artists' Laboratory series, has, at its centre, a void. It's a space that literalises the importance of mystery, but one that isn't so much empty, as full of diverse and unknowable symbolism.

The installation, entitled After Cosmati, consists of twenty tonnes of stone placed with painstaking precision in the Academy's elegant, high-ceilinged Weston Rooms. It's an impressive logistical feat, and the force of the initial impact, its suggestions of scale, is enough to take your breath away. But it's the mystery that sustains your interest, that keeps it lingering in the mind, that makes it such a hard work to put into words.

Formally, After Cosmati is very clever. Taped lines form a foundational grid on the gallery's parquet floor, whilst around the empty centre, four complementary structures play a kind of monumental chess game. There's a triple-toned granite 'vortex', a circular patterned granite disc, an unhewn lump of natural rock, and a complex polyhedron, which, if I'm correct, is technically a semi-truncated stellated icosidodecahedron. But I may be wrong. Closer to the gallery walls, swooping swathes of Clashach sandstone and altar-like oblongs provide a kind of frame, and create a sense of interior and exterior (emphasised by the positioning of polished surfaces); whilst a huge block of Brazilian blue granite provides power and height.

The result is a sort of self-sufficient landscape that teeters on the brink of the surreal. But it's a self-sufficiency that is paradoxically parasitic. As its title makes explicit, After Cosmati has been inspired by Westminster Abbey's remarkable Cosmati pavement. Despite featuring in Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, the pavement is one of this country's strangely overlooked treasures. Built in 1268 for Henry III, it's a mesmerically beautiful floor-work, featuring pieces of brightly coloured glass, porphyry and onyx, inlaid into Purbeck marble to form a pattern that utterly beguiles. Mangled and patched up over the years – by the likes of Christopher Wren and George Gilbert Scott – it's recently undergone a lengthy restoration process, one in which Maine was closely involved, and which has directly inspired this work at the Royal Academy.

For After Cosmati however, Maine is keen to avoid any singular reading. “I don't want to overlay this with spurious connections,” he says at the media view, and he certainly succeeds. Like the pavement, Maine's installation is rigorously geometric and rich with symbolism. It's certainly a response to the Pavement, in that there are clear formal echoes and some of the priorities are similar. One small granite shape, for example, appears to be a perfect cylinder, and yet on closer inspection its planed edges and subtly truncated corners emerge, in echo (perhaps) of the Abbey's own shapely columns. But it is never simply a linear translation.

For me, what is possibly most engaging about the work is Maine's sensitivity to the materiality of the stone itself. This is what clarifies the installation's debt to Cosmati and simultaneously marks it as Maine's own. Granite glitters knowingly; sandstone flows in layers across the floor. Like the medieval craftsmen behind Cosmati, Maine knows precisely when to intervene and when to leave well alone. The relationship between the natural and the 'man-made' (“negotiation” Maine calls it) is something that has developed over the course of the artist's career – from public structures in Weston-Super-Mare to his recent work on Green Park station – and it's a kind of knot that lies at the heart of After Cosmati.

Highly polished planes, crude marks from heavy quarry machinery, and lumps of unhewn rock form a complex interplay of surface that's exquisitely balanced. This subtlety in Maine's treatment thus goes further than a simple opposition between the man-made and the natural: even the most naturalistic rocks have been quarried by man, and even the most highly finessed finish is still that of a natural material – “Nature to advantage dress'd” as Pope put it.

In the end, and it's a mystery shared with fractals, After Cosmati (like Cosmati) is both a micro- and a macrocosm. Like geometry (or indeed meaning itself) it exists as a constant vacillation between foundational structure, and superimposed mode of understanding. After Cosmati is both. It is neither. And it is far, far more.

Artists' Laboratory 04 - John Maine is at the Royal Academy until 18th December 2011. Entry is free with a main galleries ticket.

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Tom Jeffreys