News from the Front of Beyond
NICK PELLING & HELEN MURPHY review the exhibition, Succession, at the Kino Teatr in Norman Road
Radford in Mid-Flow
Have you ever felt like you were sort of fading away? Like Paul Simon: slip sliding away. Not just the fade of yesterday’s youthful bloom, but the shrivelling of individuality under the digital all-seeing eye. The current exhibition of works by the acclaimed artist Matthew Radford seems, at least in part, to be particularly and powerfully concerned with the way our identities are being dissolved just at the very same point that technology is monitoring every whim we breathe.
We met up with Radford on a lively opening night at the Kino – amid a suitably shapeshifting soundscape from Simon and the Pope. Radford has the look of an erudite art professor with hard-won knowledge from beyond. Beyond what? Hard to say. He will lazily be called ‘old school,’ in that he learned the painter’s art at Camberwell Art College in the seventies, in the days when people still cared about learning to draw the figure. However, he admits, it was a chance opportunity to work in New York in the later seventies that really opened up a new way of seeing.
PAINTING DIES EVERY OTHER WEEK
“It wasn’t part of a plan,” he says. “It was meant to be a week but it became 14 years.” New York in the later seventies and early eighties was both an exhilarating and alienating experience. Dangerous in many ways, but the art scene was shifting weirdly fast. Painters like Julian Schnabel were finding ways of slamming together the pop and the profound, injecting a little postmodern visual sarcasm onto canvas. Or even onto cheap velvet. Street art was busting through. To such an extent that critics kept pronouncing traditional painting to be dead. But, as Radford says, “it was dying every other week.” In fact, Radford played an important part in its resurrection, tapping into and shaping the extraordinary zeitgeist.
Part of the magnetism of Radford’s work lies in the way it invites so many modes of interpretation. At one level, large-scale entanglements of sketched-out human forms in his Land of Chalk series, for example, suggest urban crowds and perhaps the loss of identity the individual experiences in such a mass. Peter Ackroyd, friend and fellow Londonphile, thought that Radford was concerned with the strange “solitariness and mystery of the individual”, lost in the thronging aggregate. But it also feels like we, the viewers, are just mindlessly observing people. Viewer becomes surveillance camera. And here Radford’s work seems oddly prophetic, hinting at our present age of digital spies in every doorbell, laptop and dash-cam. It feels a bit like it somehow anticipates works such as Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, with its thesis that Big Tech is tracking very human desire and endlessly mulching it into consumer data. Radford’s big whited-out blurry painting, I Have Been Looking at the Machine, certainly has that dystopic twitch to it.
FILLING SPACE FOR A LIVING
But there is also something very painterly about his work. Something about pattern and design that doesn’t entirely need all the freight of profundity. The singular lino-cut version of Land of Chalk is a piece of black-and-white design perfection. Radford is a proper artist: someone who knows how to fill space in an interesting way. The very definition of an artist, after all.
At a time when there is almost a glut of art exhibitions in this town, Kino is succeeding in distinguishing itself as a gallery seeking to push beyond a circuit of local artists and weekenders. Certainly, Russell Baker and Olga Mamonova deserve great credit for curating such a brilliant exhibition. Radford is acclaimed on the international level but the paradox here is that this artist who had his epiphany in New York is now a citizen of St Leonards. “Sounds absurd, but not as different as you might think,” he muses. Nothing is as you might think with Radford.
The exhibition is on until 19 October. It is, to our way of thinking, something special, but go and see for yourself.
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