Two brilliant exhibitions explore the relationships between architecture, ideology and the aesthetics of the future. Tom Jeffreys compares them.
A similar narrative emerges from the works of Wieland Payer and Jan Kempenaers. Payer assumes the role of the gentleman traveller – one can imagine him, pith helmet on, servants in tow, hacking through exotic foliage – to take the viewer on voyages to strange, lost lands. But, emerging from the undergrowth, it's not ancient Aztec civilisations we come across, but cables, pylons and semi-dilapidated Modernist structures. Likewise, Kempenaers also takes us with him on a kind of journey – this time to the former Yugoslavia, and the nation's weird, abandoned Brutalist monuments known as Spomeniks.
Some of Kempenaers' incredible photography is currently on show as part of Back to the Future, the second exhibition at Breese Little in Clerkenwell, whilst Payer's drawings and lithographs form the backbone of Hoxton Art Gallery's exploration of Utopia. The overlap between the two exhibitions is striking. Both operate at the intersection between aesthetics and ideology, from where the aim is to explore what might be termed the retro-futurist tendency in contemporary art – the premise that we have to look back to look forward.
Back to the Future does this most explicitly, by foregrounding a process of splicing together. Rowena Hughes overlays found black and white photographs with abstract patterns to create a sense of codification – both concealing and revealing; Viktor Timofeev (fresh from a solo show at Hannah Barry) populates his bare, wireframe landscapes with elaborate robot creatures formed from rusting cars; and Jorge De la Garza presents a vitrine full of objects associated with the mysteries of different systems of thought – crystals, geometric shapes, inexplicable diagrams, photographs of an eclipse or a shooting star.
My favourite pieces though are the pencil drawings of Sam Griffin. Two of his works feature in the show – one a depiction of a Scottish bothy, the other a kind of remote research centre (half-shed, half geodesic dome). Both structures are represented in exquisitely painstaking detail, and surrounded by geometric borders that somehow imbue these otherwise unremarkable buildings with some kind of special symbolic force. In some ways, this serves to foreground art's own processes, as the act of representation bestows significance upon the thing represented. It also demonstrates the way in which architecture can quickly be imbued, for better or for worse, with the weight of ideology.
Back at Hoxton Art Gallery, Payer's depictions of Modernism overgrown share some of this view of architecture. But, as the title suggests, the exhibition also attempts to site the discussion within a larger historical context, by looking back to what might be termed an origin: Utopia, Thomas More's seminal text of 1516. The word itself hovers between interpretations – ευ-τοπος meaning good place; ου-τοπος meaning no place – and the works on show explore this ambiguity: ethereal photographic prints by James Bacchi-Andreoli; the polished futurism of David Jones' painting on aluminium; and Steven Dickie's dialogues between analogue and digital modes of perception.
But it's Payer who dominates the exhibition. Technically I think his style is better suited to the small scale – pastel and charcoal become too loose over anything much bigger than eighteen inches – but his images are consistently strong and lastingly memorable. Strange, imaginative landscapes are ingrained with multiple layers of reality – forests in the sky; a giant, towering tree; rocky plinths pointing into a sky that's criss-crossed with grey and yellow tracks; beams of yellow sunlight; strange cloud formations; a stellar rent across the sky.
Whereas Kempenaers' spomeniks serve as a bleak reminder of the violence of failed ideology, for Payer (whose vision allows him to revisit a similar concept from a projected, future time) there is a sense, not so much of regret, as awe. Both have their place in our thinking of the future.
Back to the Future is at Breese Little until 25th February 2012.
Utopia is at Hoxton Art Gallery until 1st March 2012.
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Image credits l-r: Wieland Payer, Hermitage carcoal and pastel on paper 2011; Jan Kempanaers, Spomenik 2006
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