Stuart Pearson Wright - I Remember You at Riflemaker

Stuart Pearson Wright - I Remember You at Riflemaker

06 May, 2010
by: Tom Jeffreys

Funny and fascinating: Tom Jeffreys thoroughly enjoys Stuart Pearson Wright's new exhibition at Riflemaker.

Private Views at Riflemaker are always rather fun, if busy, affairs. I think perhaps it's the cramped little staircase that engenders a sense of shared enjoyment. And this evening – for the opening of the first part of Stuart Pearson Wright's latest solo show – the atmosphere it particularly entertaining. The gallery's walls have been stripped to reveal the old wooden panels, there's a folk band outside, entertaining and intriguing passers by, and Stuart – dapper in a dark brown suit – stands outside with his glamorous fiancée greeting all and sundry.

The whole atmosphere is reminiscent of a family-friendly night at the Bethnal Green Working Men's Club – all checked shirts, saddle shoes and retro '50s pizazz. But there's no hipster 'tude here – everyone's just having a nice time. In short, the vibe here is perfectly in keeping with Stuart's work. On display is a series of new works entitled I Remember You – most depict Stuart and/or his fiancée in a variety of guises – he's a cowboy, a sailor, a movie star, a banjo-player... (or is it a ukulele?). His works are fun and accessible but there's also something more slowly considered and involved at play.

The starting point for many of the works is old, found paintings that Stuart then paints figures into/onto. As the artist explained when I interviewed him a few weeks ago, the whole I Remember Me project really kicked off when he found a couple of paintings in an old shop in Arizona and then painted figures into them. He then bought works on eBay and from various junk shops – his fiancée even picked something up in Deptford Market for £4.

He was actually working on that one at the time we met: “I'm in the middle of painting a huge bear chasing a girl,” he said at the time. “She's screaming and running with a bear chasing her, smack in the foreground, and the horses in the background are totally oblivious to all this melodrama.” This work turns out to be one of my favourites in the exhibition. It's sort of silly – with this huge, gaping mawed bear, ahem, bearing down on a stereotypically shrieking damsel – but it also demands a closer, more careful, look. Because of the subtle contrast between the original painting and Stuart's highly realistic but also oddly askew, almost comical, characters, there's a distancing effect at play. As Stuart put it, “there's a striking incongruity between the one painted language and the other. The point is to draw attention to the process of representation itself.”

Combined with all the images of checked-shirted cowboys, posing black and white movie stars, and sternly bearded, pipe-smoking sailors, there's a concerted attempt to explore ideas around gender identity. And yet it's never camp; just sort of stagey. “I'm not trying to paint people,” Stuart  had said. “I'm trying to paint stage-flats of people in paintings, but really, really bloody good stage-flats – so convincing that you're like 'is that a person or a stage-flat?'”

What Stuart's work does is to draw attention to the unavoidable artificiality of the representational process. In so doing (and by choosing to portray such gender archetypes) he draws attention to the performative aspect of identity itself: self-definition is always an act both of declaration and invention. Importantly though, Stuart retains a sense of humour about it all – not in an aloof or wry or ironic way really, but with a feeling of warm and gentle amusement. Stuart's clearly enjoying himself. And, by the looks of things, so is everyone else in the gallery.

I Remember You is at Riflemaker until 26th June 2010.
The second part of the project – Maze – is open until 9th June 2010.
Stuart Pearson Wright has also produced a limited edition vinyl record of classic country songs.

Read the full interview with Stuart Pearson Wright.

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Tom Jeffreys