SALON (LONDON) presents - Secret

SALON (LONDON) presents - Secret

24 June, 2010
by: Tom Jeffreys

Tom Jeffreys is easily confused. This exhibition of work by Noemie Goudal doesn't much help matters.

It's funny sometimes what photographs can do. Etymologically, the photograph is written with light, and like writing (or language more generally) photography can conceal and obscure just as much as it clarifies or elucidates. The flash both lights and blinds.

There is something of this notion in 'Secret', an exhibition of work by Noemie Goudal, presented by Crystal Bennes of SALON (LONDON) in a strangely bi-polar old building on the Clerkenwell Road. Upstairs is a fairly conventional gallery space: big glass front opening onto the street, mostly white (the lights are odd though – as if borrowed from Hoare & Co. or something); but downstairs is like some kind of dilapidated institution. School, asylum, or prison – it's not clear, but it smells weird and works perfectly.

The split in the space echoes the two-fold nature of Goudal's work, which like the Law and the Lord, both giveth and taketh away. Her large-scale theatrically staged images are powerfully alluring. Crisply composed and dramatic, they drag you in with the promise of a story, and never quite give you one, or at least not one that makes much sense.

A waterfall flows, starkly serene through a forest. It's made from polythene. A wicker chair stands in a corner as a torrent of what looks like dirty white vermicelli spews forth. Is it hair? Brown and white eggs sit in boxes and on tables and across a dirty concrete floor – all upright, in some kind of shed or warehouse. Inside another old wooden shed, a folded photo of a bridge stretches out in front – the similarity of muted tones at first conceals the deception. Proud, vividly green and all alive, a palm tree is in fact made of scotch tape. The ground is layers of cardboard. A sense of flaking grandeur prevails – things are being built, but things are also falling apart. Age and time are very present.

I don't profess to know what's going on in these images. They don't even seem that weird at first – certainly not pushily so – but there's a definite feeling of something nigglingly uncertain. There's narrative, but you don't know where it leads; symbolism, but you can't know what it means. Expectations are thwarted and the eye continually tricked. Veils, curtains, light bulbs, those white ground-sheets they have in photographic studios – it's all very filmic, very studio-constructed. Multiple framing devices are at work at any one time, but here, thankfully, no wrinkled lip or sneer of cold conceptualism.

These are beautiful works, full of wonder in their own elaborate construction and dramatic lighting. They celebrate the hidden vitality of the inanimate, and, in so doing, leave one, not so much fearful of the uncanny, but with a sense of trepidation perhaps, a certain uncertainty that seems, still, to tingle.

SALON (LONDON) presents 'Secret' is at 97 Clerkenwell Road from 6th June to 6th July 2010.

Click here to see all London exhibitions.
Click here for things to do in London.

Return to Spoonfed's London Art homepage.

Tom Jeffreys