Magnus Quaife
26 November to 23 December 2005
In the past 12 months Magnus Quaife has painted a series of watercolours of everyday objects: Polaroid snapshots, tickets, gift vouchers, book covers, adverts, press releases, postcards, rejection letters and scribbled notes. Snippets of self-mythologising and studio detritus hang alongside moments from mass media, throw away imagery and forgotten or fleeting thoughts, exposing a fascination with visual communication. The paintings have elements in common, each work is the same size as the image or object it represents and the paintings have similar dimensions. But the painterly approach varies from painting to painting as if Quaife has decided to treat each image on its own merit. The result is a variety of approaches that reference moments of watercolour history, be that as the medium of fine art, scientific documentation, as field sketch, or the medium elect of the hobby painter.
Alongside is a handful of playful abstract works created around self-imposed rules, each set invented for the creation of an individual work, suggesting a fascination with the idiomatic nature of painting itself. In ‘Graph’, for example, Quaife has created a diagram by painting spots, the position of which represent his preference for the colours in a newly bought set of watercolours and their size how much he feels he will use them. While the figurative paintings imply fragments of narratives that point outside of the work, these abstract works try to contain themselves and their ideas in their entirety. Yet all of Quaife’s paintings are punctuated by a fascination with painting itself: with painting as language; painting as translation; painting as currency; painting as an idea.
It is possible to look at this as a body of work full of contradictions, but the artist insists that this is where we should look for any meaning. Painting offers Quaife a way of understanding the proliferation of images and information that fills everyday life, and the relationship that he has to them.
Magnus Quaife (born 1975) lives and works in Manchester. He studied at Chelsea College of Art and Manchester Metropolitan University.
MAGNUS QUAIFE
SIMULATED HESITATION
The hound, for we cannot be sure if this is dog or wolf, stands centre page of both the painting and the scrap of newsprint that constitutes the painted image. The thin scattering of typography reveals to us that this is an almost, if not exact, painted duplicate of the original torn fragment. Its presumably wet nose points ostensibly towards the centre of the painted page and from here our gaze moves outwards through unclear details and crystalline painted marks towards the definitely rendered fibrous edge of a piece of newsprint and its indexical shadow.
The works presented in this exhibition exist between two forms of obstruction to creative toil. While acquiescence in tradition represents one form of blockage, the submission to external reality represents another form of oppression. Book covers, hand written notes, press releases, gift vouchers, Polaroids and the occasional rejection letter have all been faithfully reproduced. Between the prescribed curriculum of watercolour painting and the illusion of copied realism, sit the paintings we have before us.
The British philosopher David Hume believed that only the image, not abstract statement, could express the fluid, multilayered nature of experience. Certain paintings in this exhibition render the objects that they depict with a particular accuracy and excited, disjunctive order. As details they are a testimony to the eye’s direct contact with the thing it sees. They would appear to be attempts at faithful description.
Artistic accuracy aside, Untitled (gift voucher) is the watercolour that is most wedded to the original function of the 'object' that it now depicts. Painting enjoys a very particular kind of contract between itself and the viewer. An agreement that states that it is viewed differently from other painted surfaces most notably the wall that becomes its support. Standing before Untitled (gift voucher) and considering this special kind of demarcation we open quite particular networks of tensions between the object and its painted surrogate.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel ‘Bluebeard,’ ageing abstract expressionist Rabo Karabekian recounts the story of Dan Gregory who mocks his artistic ‘father’ Beskudnikov by painting a perfect counterfeit of a ruble which he then uses to buy a box of cigars. This work is not as pedantic in its precision. The red glare of the letters HMV and the iconic logo of His Master's Voice first draw ones attention to the transparent watercolour and its residual blemishes. In comparison to Untitled (press pass) which comes from a similar family of value holding pieces of paper, this image is painted flat. Unlike its embellished relative, no attempt has been made to suggest the quality of light that falls across its surface. However, with its serial number and the over-elaborate intricacies of its surface design an effort has been made to faithfully duplicate the visual qualities of the original. What is delivered to us is a strange clone. At once both an information saturated ‘definition’ of a HMV gift voucher and also at the same time a reminder of the work’s only existence as a phenomenon is as a faithfully painted description. This work brings us closer not to an image of particular illumination or vividness but to the question of the relationship between its physical appearance and the mind’s painted presentation of it.
The simulated hesitations, the deformation, the deliberate failure exactly to match the outline and colour, all draw attention to the effort of the artist. These paintings underline the difference between the series of studio ephemera depicted and the artist’s ability for distilling manifest harmonies out of them. This dialogue is not simply between the objects represented. These paintings exist as a tension between differing qualities. The language that these paintings employ, with its multiple possibilities, looks forward and back instead of progressing in an unending accumulation. The tour through the lexicon of watercolour painting does not express the object, but expresses and imitates the oscillation of attention between the various qualities of the object, and between them and the elements of the reaction of the person realising them.
In ‘Five Comments’ (1985) Sherrie Levine states “I like to think of my paintings as membranes permeable from both sides so there is an easy flow between the past and the future, between my history and yours.” These paintings force the viewer's attention to alternate between the elements of the harmony between an expression of a spine of a book and concurrently the problems of expressing it. These elements all remind the viewer that, no matter how faithful they find the series of objects associated with studio work, they are not representations, but presentations, the product of subjectivity. As paintings they are an analogy for the functioning which they contain, because it is in this functioning made mind, realised by someone in a conscious, willed expression or presentation of the world
Dean Hughes
Commissioned by The International 3 on the occassion of the exhibition Magnus Quaife 26th November - 23rd December 2005.
