Luke Frost
Tate St Ives, St Ives, UK
Luke Frost, Supervolts no. 1 (2008), courtesy of the artist
Luke Frost’s curiously alluring paintings are austerely reductive, minimal and hard-edged. Indeed, they evince an aesthetic more consonant with his grandfather Sir Terry Frost’s generation than with his young contemporaries. Comprising saturated fields of colour intersected by vertical bands, Frost’s works on canvas and aluminium are ostensibly indebted to Barnett Newman’s zip paintings. Closer inspection reveals these bands – or ‘volts’ to use Frost’s term – to be composed of several thinner, variegated stripes, often with only the slightest variations in hue.
Volts no. 20 (all works 2008) is a large horizontal rectangle of intense red. It is bisected by a vertical volt containing a pair of blue and mauve bands running either side of two slightly differently coloured red bands. Frost’s paintings draw you in with their optical buzz, but his colours, built up from a dozen or so layers of acrylic paint, are unpleasantly synthetic. Unlike Newman’s rich, resonant palette of earthy, organic hues, Frost’s intense, artificial chroma sets up a dichotomy of attraction and repulsion that resists resolution.
Frost’s studio, Number 5 Porthmeor Studios. Photo: Simon Cook
The work in this modest exhibition at Tate St Ives is the result of a year-long residency in the neighboring Porthmeor Studios, for which Frost occupied the historic Studio Number 5 – previously used by Borlase Smart, Ben Nicholson and Patrick Heron. For the past five years the museum’s Artist Residency programme has played host to several young artists, including Ged Quinn, Kerstin Kartscher and Jonty Lees, offering them exclusive use of the ramshackle, weather-beaten studio along with a hefty stipend to encourage the production of new work that raises the scale of ambition in their practice.
A notable development emerging from Frost’s residency has been his aluminium corner pieces, several of which are included here. Consisting of two equally sized rectangular panels welded at right angles, Volts no. 21 hangs flush in the corner of the gallery. Painted with an intense, seductive shade of electric blue, the work has a striking red volt running through its centre. Moving closer, the expansive field of blue starts to envelop you, although any illusion of depth is interrupted by the volt, which returns your eye repeatedly to the work’s impeccably flat surface.
Installation view. © Marcus Leith and Andrew Dunkley, Tate Photography
Seriality is explored in the two Supervolts triptychs shown here, where letterbox-shaped canvases with volts running through their centres are hung in vertical configurations recalling Donald Judd’s stacks. Here Frost has positioned two Supervolts close together, creating a stack of six panels, but this strategy seems overbearing and out of place. More successful is the large Volts no. 18.3, hanging opposite: a quiescent ashen square with red volts running down either edge. Staring into its expansive monochromatic plane you let your eyes relax and your focus drift until one of its bright red volts jolts you from your reverie. The colours are no less artificial but Frost’s combination here is far more satisfying.
Significantly, not one of Tate St Ives’ galleries is larger than any of the spaces in Porthmeor Studios; the setting in which Frost’s work is displayed implies a replication of the conditions of its production. But the hang feels claustrophobic and the paintings jostle for attention. Far worse than this though are the incongruous grey lines on the floor intended to deter visitors from touching the works. The formal similarity of these lines to Frost’s geometry sets up an unfortunate visual relationship which you can’t help but read as part of the work.
Unsurprisingly, Tate’s decision to award Frost with this residency has been locally contentious ‒ although considering his artistic pedigree, accusations of nepotism will probably always plague this artist’s career. More germane however is the issue of the work itself. Despite their technical proficiency its hard to see how Frost’s paintings move beyond the formal evocation of a past art historical moment. ‘Why do this look now?’ asks Matthew Collings in his catalogue essay; it’s a question that neither he or Frost seem able to provide any convincing answers to.
David Trigg
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