I first recall seeing what you could broadly call ‘Persian Miniatures’ when I was installing a show in Dammam, KSA. I still go back and forth to install artwork there. It’s an important place to me, for many reasons.

When I told people I was going to the Middle East to work I was met with a typical response, laced with prejudice and an underlying sense of Western superiority. In spite of more global cultural exposure, this remains. To me it was an opportunity to see art to which I would not ordinarily have access. The discovery of the miniatures was a part of this.

The miniatures are deceitfully tricky: the ornately painted borders seem to exist only for themselves – a skilful patterning and rendering of cloth butting up against wonky angles and lack of reliably straight lines. The flattening-out of perspective brought to mind dried flowers pressed in the pages of an old book. They elicit a joy for drawing, for looking, for seeing and trying to replicate things, especially natural objects. Above all, I liked the idea that these are a collaboration between skilled artisans: the guy who would do the flowers perhaps working on one border with the pattern guy waiting next to him, and the lad who draws the trousers sitting in the corner.

They were intended as illuminations for manuscripts, drawn and painted just to be bound and kept hidden; stacked on darkened shelves with the pages slowly discolouring from the edges inwards. At first I thought them unsophisticated, but I realised quickly that this wasn’t the case. They had been excised from manuscripts, mounted and framed for a gallery, but that didn’t mute their narrative, even if you had to work harder to understand it.

They also felt proletarian, in spite of the subject matter of historical moments: battles, conflicts, celebrations of stature and the rise of great figures (I’ve always disliked the idea of the heroic or the Saviour in art).

JUXTAPOSITIONS, CONTEXTS, AND ENQUIRIES

Frivolously, perhaps, I thought that it would be fun to copy them, but in doing so also to represent scenes of the life and people I was working with. That new art horizon was in its own way a kind of battle or land-grab; the importation of a cultural idea that was unrelated to its environment, and often in contradiction to it. These contradictions are the foundation of these drawings. At what point does celebration become appropriation? And does that really matter if you’re borrowing an aesthetic from an ironic culture that elevates Jeff Koons’ disco rabbits to an obscene value quite unrelated to their physical or artistic merit?

My drawings are essentially juxtapositions of environments, subjects and objects. They are about things that shouldn’t be there, and are an enquiry as to why they are. They are about the oil-and-water effect of cultural tension that can only exist in certain quarters, the navigation of new territories, politically, culturally and artistically. Mostly they are love stories; for a place, an idea and for people. They are narrative works that speak of moments soon lost to time, much like a page removed from a book and shorn from its original context.

There is heroism in them, but like all the best heroes they are the unwitting and unwilling, the smaller voices that don’t vie for attention but instead pass by without fanfare, making life more bearable by existing, rather than by a leading example.

Mark Spelman’s exhibition You Weren’t There is showing at Project 78 Gallery, Norman Road until 25 July

Mark Spelman says that his exhibition is a conversation between him, a destitute drunk he saw in Elephant & Castle, and the ghost of William Hogarth who was sitting next to him as he slowly drove a van to Stockwell. He also says it’s about getting fat.

Everyone has heard of The Rake’s Progress. The story of a man’s inexorable decline from the power of inherited wealth and virtue. The ‘rake’ is unable to live up to any sense of moral responsibility and descends through gambling, alcohol and promiscuity into ruin.

Mark Spelman provides us with a contemporary update of Hogarth’s much lauded series of paintings in the exhibition The Weight’s Progress at Project 78 gallery. His works are more sympathetic to the rake’s plight than the originals. There is a sense that the circumstances that lead to the character’s demise are very much out of his control – the drawings are underpinned by a creeping inevitability that culminates in the final drawing Fuck It or The Bathos. 

CREDIT: Adam Jones

It is rare to see an exhibition that so deftly and simultaneously packs a punch; both through each individual work and also by an overarching idea that is lucidly pushed through the whole concept and format of the show itself.

Most of the original work is ornately and expensively framed – this in itself generates a kind of cultural and class-based dissonance. Why are images that look as if they could have been published in mass-produced newspapers framed in a way that befits The National Gallery? Cleverly this question acutely addresses the institutional hierarchies and the bumptiousness of today’s Art world.

In 1734 Hogarth was instrumental in the establishment of the Engravers Act. This legislation enabled engravers to retain the copyright of their work and immediately led to Hogarth producing a series of eight etchings that became The Rake’s Progress. Spelman sees this as a radical moment in the history of Art. In one instant, previously unaffordable artwork was made reproducible and more widely available. The Weight’s Progress pays homage
to this and by doing so is a deeply political exhibition. This political aspect adds weight to the helplessness of the central character. It begs the question – when will this insanity stop?  

Whilst the central eight ‘paintings’ are ostentatiously framed and presented in a bespoke and exquisitely made cherry wood cabinet, there are also a series of drawings from the originals that the gallery will photocopy, stamp and give away to visitors for a small donation. What a brilliant and magnanimous idea! And what a way to muse on the idea of the interplay between the original versus the facsimile. 

CREDIT: Mark Spelman

Mark Spelman’s first encounter with the lesser-known works of Hogarth’s oeuvre happened when he was working as a volunteer at the Cartoon Museum in London around fifteen years ago. Already a die-hard fan of Steve Bell and MAC (Stan McMurtry), he was less aware of what he describes as the more radical engravings of Hogarth.

William Hogarth’s work is often considered as the early precursor of modern-day satirical cartoons. Mark Spelman adds that “Cartooning has always been a means to prick pomposity, and the best way, and the most British way, is to take the piss.” 

Mark tells me that “cartooning has the ability to describe the human condition in a very honest and truthful way”. We discuss the way in which many of the hapless protagonists in cartoons from Charlie Brown through to Andy Capp share the same bemused and baffled expressions. Mark says this makes the idiom more direct and accessible. “Some high Art can alienate, and arguably doesn’t have the same level of empathy as a good cartoon”. This idea definitely runs through all the work in this show. Steeped in pathos, the images speak to you directly without having been sieved through the rarefied rules of so-called contemporary Art. Having said that – and ironically – the whole show itself ‘works’ as a contemporary piece of installation art. It’s clever that is.

• The Weight’s Progress by Mark Spelman runs until the 8 October. For more information visit project78gallery.com