Roundup #18: New on the Network this week...

By Laura McLean-Ferris

All change. New president elect of the United States, New Year, new artreview.com, and now some new work for you to look at. A couple of paintings have caught my eye this week, first these from Brighton-based artist Joshua Uvieghara, who uses domestic decorating materials such as house paint and cable as elements in his paintings.


Joshua Uvieghara, Tectonic Trace, 2008, oil & household paint on board

These homely materials find a contrast in paintings that recall natural effects, such as the one above. In Tectonic Trace there is an organic crackling effect at the top and bottom, which, it seems from the title, attempts to evoke the splintering of the earth's tectonic plates. The scene appears to lie somewhere between abstraction and figuration – it’s possible to imagine, for example, that we are under the ground, caught in a crevasse, like the poor climber from Touching the Void. Or we might be looking from above into the bowels of the earth, or out through a cave. The pea soup green in the middle, with glowingly creamy stripes, is somewhat confusingly a mixture of sea, sky and nothing. The void indeed.

Uvieghara writes on his profile page that he is interested in the idea that painting is a distillation of 'the visual flood' of imagery around us. He also gets a touch of the Richard Princes with this painting on a car bonnet:


Joshua Uvieghara, Nebulustastic, 2007, coaxial cable and household paint on car bonnet

He manages to make those whites appear very bright using the bluish colours around them. This garish painting seems to convey celestial phenomena and the industrial space flight aspirations of civilisation. The use of home spun materials and the borrowing of Prince's macho-ist aesthetic adds a bit of humour too.

Different celestial bodies, and something kind of ooh, now, from Jasmine Ronel, an artist based in Israel. This mixed media collage/painting centres around a kind of vintage comic book sex scene (or solo sex scene?) on tarpaulin. It's difficult to tell what those blue shapes are in the sky, but they look to be some kind of heavenly Bucky ball, lit by a glowing fragment of what appears to be another speech bubble in the top left hand corner.


Jasmine Ronel, OOH, 2001

Ronel's work on her profile page is executed in a large number of media and styles. In contrast to the first image, this next painted scene, titled The Shade, sets an altogether more sombre tone.


Jasmine Ronel, The Shade, 1998

Ronel clearly wants us to focus on the chintzy box of tissues on the table, which, together with the old fashioned chair, bring to mind age, loneliness and outdated-ness. The cloying shade of pink on the walls, which recalls the false comfort of hospital waiting rooms, together with the tissue box, the dark material thrown over the chair on the left (a funerary jacket, a dust cover) suggest, death, mourning and loss.

Similar themes are also explored by photographer John O'Hare, an artist fascinated by abandoned buildings.


Work by John O'Hare

In many of the images on O'Hare's profile page, it appears that abandoned furniture has grown an extra skin of painted colour, like the fresh lick of pink on the chair in the image above, which, together with the recently hung material on the wall, gives a confused sense of abandonment.

O'Hare studied at John Moores University in Liverpool, and is a member of artist-run space Wolstenholme Projects, where he has an exhibition this month: reflections on the passing of a spectacular event.


Work by John O'Hare

It's difficult to discern which elements of these scenes are found in situ and which are 'installed'. In the image above, the television appears faked. The lines on the cracking screen are too perfect, too cardboard, too Patrick Caulfield. The entire image here is a very seventies set of brown, camel and cream.

I found these last two images by Carmen Calvo, on the profile page of a Spanish print firm, Polígrafa Obra Gráfica, which, we are told, has been running 1961, working with artists on print work.


Carmen Calvo, después infancia

In this image of some kind of huge jolly feast in mirror image, the childish colours blot the children's faces like black eyes, or future markers, while the ghosts of soldiers, proceeding in an unspecified war, go about their business behind the scenes. Calvo's own website, with an exhibition history that reads back to 1969 is here.


Work by Carmen Calvo

This image is a little reminiscent of John Baldessari, using hot, schoolyard primaries to great effect, blotched on an old fashioned wedding portrait. The eyes that have also been added everywhere lend the impression that we are looking at the image from far in the future. We can see or know the outcome of this marriage in a way that these frozen family facsimiles, expressions hidden, never can.