Laurent Cahard: Poetic painting as a non-grammatical language analogous to music – ‘Synaesthesia (I): Abstract Painting as Visible Sound’ Opening at no format Thursday 31st May 2012 5pm – 9pm

Laurent Cahard: Poetic painting as a non-grammatical language analogous to music – ‘Synaesthesia (I): Abstract Painting as Visible Sound’ Opening at no format Thursday 31st May 2012 (5pm – 9pm)

The second exhibition in the cycle of exhibitions at the no format gallery on the themes of sublimity and synaesthesia is devoted to the work of the painter Laurent Cahard. The ‘germinative’ artistic process developed by Cahard involves his use of an ‘atmosphere’ of graphic ideas, emotions and feelings aroused within himself to mentally abstract a set of line and colour elements from the visible world, that he envisages as the set of configurations of elements of a ‘motif’ in a computer-generated sketch. Cahard then uses the processes of addition, removal and rotation of these elements to arrive at the final version of this sketched motif that functions as the starting point for the compositional process by which he paints a new version of this motif on the gridwork of canvas units of a painting. The elements of this painted motif have qualities of texture and colour that are absent from the sketched motif from which it is derived, thereby preventing this sketched motif from being an ‘original’ of this painted motif. The composition of the elements of a motif in a painting by Cahard is based both on pseudo-synaesthetic analogies with music, and on linguistic analogies that endow these elements with the status of a non-grammatical language analogous to music. Pseudo-synaesthetic musical analogies permit Cahard to break with the classical rules of composition associated with the making of mimetic illustrational paintings in which figurative objects occupy a pictorial space whose depth relies on artificial geometrical perspective. Like painters such as Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse, Cahard suppresses the spatial depth of artificial geometrical perspective in a painting in order to envisage a flattened tapestry-like pictorial space within which an observer can see melodic, harmonic and vibratory rhythmic tensions of motif elements. The ‘musical’ qualities of these painted elements deprives them of the representational function of mimetic illustration, while permitting such elements to possess the expressive function of linguistic signification of the motive attributes of the atmosphere of ideas, emotions and feelings used by Cahard to envisage the motif in the sketch from which this painting is derived. The theoretically unlimited nature of the germinative process by which Cahard actualises the potential variation of a motif, parallels the processes by which human potential is continually becoming actualised in contemporary human life.

Exhibition text Copyright 2012 Stephen Baycroft

Full info here: http://www.noformat.co.uk/#/laurent-cahard/4564902325

The 2012 exhibition programme for the ‘no-format’ gallery will include a series of exhibitions of visual artworks under the collective title ‘On Sublimity and Synaesthesia’. These exhibitions will explore art created in response to experience at the sublime limits of ordinary vision, and how the limits between the physical senses can be transcended by synaesthetic processes in the brain which enable non-visual data to contribute to the creation, experience and knowledge of visual artworks. Each exhibition in this series will give one in-house artist the opportunity to exhibit a selection of his/her visual artworks, and to work in conjunction with the freelance writer Stephen Baycroft (author of a biography of the artist Ken Currie entitled The Mask of Being, 2001, and currently completing a book on the relationships between the art of the Greek dramatist Aeschylus, the American poet T.S. Eliot and the Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon), to produce an artistic statement in which this artist places his/her work in the context of Western art history and philosophical aesthetics.

Full programme here: http://www.noformat.co.uk/#/on-sublimity-and-synaesthesia/4560456650

Second Floor Studios & Arts Open Studios Thursday Night Opening – Open all weekend 11am – 6pm

CANTEEN – SFSA’s new social enterprise arts cafe!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CANTEEN – SFSA’s Social Enterprise Arts Café – Opens Monday 14th May

CANTEEN is a Social Enterprise Arts Café run by Second Floor Studios & Arts and is a provision for SFSA and Thames Barrier Print Studio members, their colleagues, clients and guests – Opening Monday 14th May.

CANTEEN supports SFSA funding programmes with no less than 50% of its profits financially supporting SFSA Education and Outreach programmes, Community Engagement Projects, CPD for members and Internships.

Your support for CANTEEN is greatly appreciated – thank you.

 

 

Thames Barrier Print Studio – Video Tour now online!

Thames Barrier Print Studio – a new spacious professional open access print studio based on the south bank of the Thames down by the Barrier available for experienced printmakers and anyone wanting to learn. Part of Second Floor Studios & Arts, TBPS –  all about print!

New TBPS video tour now online here: http://www.thamesbarrier-printstudio.co.uk/#

Thames Barrier Print Studio – One of London’s largest open access fine art print studios –  facilities and services for experienced printmakers to practice screenprinting on paper and textiles, intaglio, relief, plate litho, letterpress and digital – as a keyholder or an open access member.

 

 

 

Never Promised Pound Land – Opening Night at no format 3/5/2012

Opening night – Never Promised Pound Land @ no format 3/5/2012.

Works by Ray Richardson, Cathie Pilkington, Mark Hampson.

Exhibition runs until 27th May – Open Thurs, Fri, Sat, Sun 11am – 5pm

Ray Richardson, Cathie Pilkington, Mark Hampson – no format 3/5/2012