Willoughby Gerrish is pleased to announce Terms and Conditions, the first exhibition of paintings by Alexander Massouras at Thirsk Hall Sculpture Garden. The exhibition will present a new series of paintings showing windows picked out by bright light: the window admits the light, which in turn describes the form of the window. These are the latest in a sequence of Massouras’s projects that translate aspects of photography—such as camera flare, or the chromatic range of C-Type prints—back into painting. In chemical photography, the light makes the image; here, Massouras makes that process manual, using highlights as the principal method of painterly description.
Leon Battista Alberti once described painting as a window: 'I inscribe a quadrangle of right angles, as large as I wish’, he wrote, ‘which is considered to be an open window through which I see what I want to paint'. Seeing 'what I want to paint' is an early and tantalising account of something between imagination and observation, full of circularity in describing the transition between one and the other. Where Massouras introduces blinds into the windows, that back-and-forth is given visual expression: sometimes it is the blind that is painted, sometimes the image through it. This process in turn gives form to the enduring conversation between abstraction and representation in con temporary painting. A painting is both a window and a wall, something looked through (for its image or its meaning) and looked at (as a flat surface covered with paint). The blinds and windows of Terms and Conditions express this dualism of surface and illusion.
ENGAGEMENT: ALEXANDER MASSOURAS
The ten years during which I have been closely following Alexander Massouras's paintings have brought many pleasing surprises, and the growing realisation that they were produced by an unusual sensibility. Contemplating his oeuvre has left two abiding impressions. The first is that his journey as an artist has been one of constant rethinking and exploration of his chosen media, so that it has been difficult to anticipate whether his newest productions will be freely painterly or concisely graphic, paintings or etchings. The second is that his pictures are invariably in a creative dialogue with photography, the medium that has disrupted, inspired and helped redefine art's parameters for the last two hundred years. Moreover, if I may propose a parallel with Francis Bacon, both he and Alexander Massouras succeeded in entirely subsuming – leaving behind – the photograph – the partly technical catalyst that triggered the images they painted. Terms and Conditions does not contain any of Massouras's etchings, but in those, too, he was working in a medium (and on paper) that was a precursor of photography, in their monochrome essence as well as their reproducibility.
The Flare paintings of 2013 engaged with a photographic phenomenon more usually associated with the era of 'chemical' photography – the halation that occurs when light overloads the image captured by the lens, blurring the edges of the forms. The 'octagonal aperture' of some of Alexander's titles similarly refers to the overlapping metal blades of the leaf shutters employed in traditional cameras. Lens flare was generally considered to be a fault to be avoided in photographs, but Alexander has embraced it as a virtue. He recently revisited the flare theme in two oil paintings, now radically scaled up and justifying the atavism. Octagonal Aperture (I) resembles a supercharged distillation of the light, tone, scale and palette in the late paintings of Turner, sharing the master's empyrean luminosity; Octagonal Aperture (II) dramatises the back-lit, jagged plant forms, diffusing them in unsettlingly blurred lateral movement.
Massouras's other recent work is diametrically opposed to the urgent, splashy brushstrokes of the Flare paintings, for it is articulated by precisely delineated flat planes of strongly saturated colour. The Apertures series (and Diving Platforms) have raised comparisons with the 'canvas as wall or window' dichotomy, for they can appear to be interrogating both characteristics simultaneously; certainly, they play with the notion of deep perspective translated on a single plane. To me, though, New Square (IV), for example, with its intensified Pompeian chromatics, registers most poignantly in a rather different dimension. The 'room' or inner space is ostensibly suffused with an excess of light; (in this case, and in the intriguing Perowne Street paintings, it is transmitted through blinds/shutters – another photographic visual pun?). Yet, like in West End, I interpret this, perhaps perversely, as a kind of realism, as a dream-like scene in deeply romantic twilight. Moreover, this putative realism is conveyed in only two colours, red ochre and a yellow that again recalls Turner, specifically the influence on him of Goethe's Theory of Colours, in which yellow is the first colour transmitted from light. Evidently, Massouras's new works resonate for me in a very personal way, evoking the atmosphere of rooms and windows I have gazed through in distant city evenings. This may not accord with numerous alternative readings, but since he is committed to exploring ambiguity – the virtually abstract East 95th Street (VII) is at once both serene and dynamic – Massouras's paintings will inevitably subvert any single interpretation, which is a significant aspect of their continuing fascination.
- Martin Harrison
