John Armleder
Simon Lee, London, UK
John Armleder, ‘Scrambled and Poached’ installation shot, Simon Lee (2008)
John Armleder is known for collapsing the perceived distinctions between distinct methods of display. Manipulating the exhibition space to create a logic of equivalents – in which a design object achieves significance equal to a painting or found object – his new show at Simon Lee relies on the careful juxtaposition of elements and a purely formal interest in the question of framing.
Armleder works with a range of elements for the show – wall paintings; individual drip- and pour-canvases; trademark furniture pieces – that are arranged to create a series of unexpected visual relationships. For example, the graphic, mechanical repetition of the wall paintings is strikingly juxtaposed with the organic form of the drip and pour paintings. Multiple frames also appear in the gallery, each of which alter and suggest different ways of seeing. This layering attains a particular complexity in the sole furniture work in the exhibition, Sunny side up (FS) (2008). Set against a wall painting featuring a repeated spider graphic, a canvas – bisected into blocks of red and blue – is viewed through the slats of a wood recliner that is set before the two paintings. The effect is one of multiple cuts across the canvas, a perennial process of division and fragmentation.
This ‘dwindling’ of space seems to be a kind of formal rebuttal of context. While the deliberate manipulation of the exhibition space implicitly refers to an established art historical language and convention, Armleder is equally interested in the fragile and arbitrary nature of signification. This is probably most evident in the particularity of Armleder’s titles: the exhibition title, ‘Scrambled and Poached’, is as good a description as any of the way in which linguistic meaning is formed. Many of the titles in the show are themselves formed from a process of free association – a wall painting is titled after a nearby restaurant, or formulated from the initials of a gallerist – and have the playful logic of dreams.
From this perspective, the manner in which Armleder organizes the gallery space seems to have as much to do with chance as it does deliberation. One of the most startling works in the exhibition is Biotite (2008), a canvas featuring a geometric design of gold eggs, set against a wall painting of a matching ovoid pattern. The sudden alignment of visual language produces an odd sense of order and meaning, and also a kind of grace. But that grace is achieved precisely out of the scrambling of languages elsewhere in the gallery – in yet another final case of cannily drawn contrast.
Katie Kitamura
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