July 3-27, 2013

Andrew Gutteridge’s latest work continues his poetic play with perception. Building on his last solo show, A Linear Collection, at Shifted Gallery 2009 in which the artist departed from a rigorously limited palette to embrace colour and a variety of folded surfaces, the artist now presents us with confidently executed meditations on perception and colour.

For this show Gutteridge has coaxed his canvas over variously jointed and augmented stretchers to intervene with the traditional two-dimensional surface of the painter. In doing so the canvas is emphasized as object, a form to be encountered. The forms have slight twists, folds and bulges. Which give the artist licence to play with perceptual distortion. Across these playful surfaces the artist deploys a series of vertical coloured lines that dip and sway.

Gutteridge likes to set rules for each canvas and then merrily discard them. The colours seem to be limited to red, grey, white and black, or sometimes grey, red, white and blue. But just as the colour range becomes settled to the eye there is a bounce of an orange or a blue, which rather than jarring, lifts the colour range to a hum.

Gutteridge masters this play of colour working from a paint manufactures colour card. With colours such as auburn lights, domino and tinker he can work a red or a white through nuances of tone and hue giving the surfaces depth and complexity which other minimalist inspired works could not manage.

The lines are of varying width and are in no perceivable order. Areas of matt surface are broken with the occasional use of gloss paint applied to a high sheen so the surfaces at times reflect light and at others draw the eye to closer examination. This play across the canvas is enhanced by the twists and bulges, which ask the viewer to draw nearer, to stand close and watch the way the light and the colour change from moment to moment. What one is left with is a sense of pure optical pleasure.

 

Text by Deb Bain-King
Video interview thanks to Chantal Wynter of  Wynter Projects  © 2013