FOS' The Watchmaker at Max Wigram

The word ‘Storage’ printed on the door of the gallery establishes the concept of a warehouse for the new series of work by FOS, otherwise known as the Danish artist, Thomas Paulsen. Predicated on the notion that the arena for exhibiting, promoting and selling art has moved from the commercial gallery to the art fair, FOS has turned the Max Wigram gallery into a transitional holding facility.  We are entering a physical space whose raison d’etre has apparently been made redundant by market forces.

Through the entrance, on the right, a vitrine of antique pocket watches implies the site of a pawnbroker or museum store.  The cultural and functional status of these objects is wholly disrupted in such an ambivalent physical site.

Visitors then pass up a ramp into a room panelled with cheap, painted wood. Objects here resemble artworks embodying various historic and stylistic concerns. A geometric relief appears to be made of cut and polished marble mounted in a brass frame but is actually shaped out of moulded salt. While employing the formal language of modernism, this piece eludes value, beyond the visual joke. Along the same wall hangs another vitrine contains a ‘primitive’mask, a biomorphic relief and a series of stacked cubes. Again, reference to art history is explicit.

The signature work ‘stored’ here is the ‘Watchmaker’ an awkward assemblage of cast botanical branches and geometric abstract heads mashing together styles, material, process and form. This strategic disorientation is again quite entertaining but ultimately rather dissatisfying. Such critique of commodification is well established but feels contrived and clumsy here.

Most problematic is a meandering film shown on a screen whose rear support becomes a sculptural presence in it’s own right. Made in Svarlbard within the arctic circle, the film follows a solitary hunter with a gun slung over his shoulder heading out into a snowy, wilderness. Sometimes, shots appear of supermarkets and other urban sites. A soundtrack of a narrator’s voice further disrupts integration.

Within this installation masquerading as a group of disconnected art works randomly trapped together in transit to another destination, there is little sense here of a genuine critical position being taken. FOS adopts a witty premise for his exhibition and it is adroitly mounted. However, there is little of theoretical or formal interest to take away from this stage set.

Peter Doig at Michael Werner

Peter Doig’s new paintings reassert a consistent interest in distanced observation, whether using his naked eye or found images. Now working like a Caribbean flaneur in Trinidad, Doig’s new series leads the viewer through tropical tableaux of beaches, swimming pools, a cricket game and sea caves. Intense, hot colours seep through and down the canvas. Hazy heat permeates scenes of entertainment and sultry relaxation. These narratives resemble both the photographic souvenir and folkloristic invention.

Two paintings illustrate the scene of a solitary figure, languidly strolling in a towel on the far side of  a swimming pool, head bowed in private contemplation. At one end, a pairof feet are being propelled forward into the water by a dive from a board. Hard architectural edges jut horizontally into the frame’s foreground. ‘In Walking Figure by Pool’, distant Palm trees glow candy pink at the end of the day. ‘Cricket Painting’ sets up a game by the shore, as beached waves envelop the players. We see the white ball bowled mid-air against the orange sand below plump leaves resembling fruits. A small, setting sun moving behind a mountain doubles as the eye of a bird flying across the mouth of a cave, in which a rocking boat carries a dozing man in a pink hat through the water. Doig paints island life as a condition of sleepy hedonism, employing motifs reminiscent of Gauguin’s quest in Polynesia.

One painting grounds this tropical reverie by returning the viewer at the end of the exhibition to Trinidad’s place at the crossroads of historic trade, the enforced dislocation of people and regional power struggles. ‘Painting For Wall Painters’ depicts a mural located outside a bar that illustrates the West Indies’ multiple histories through the flags of post-colonial Afro-Caribbean flags. They are unnamed and require identification, including that of the United States made more elusive with the stars and stripes removed. At the edge of this multi-cultural street art is the Lion of Juddah stamped on the wall, in itself a Rastafarian act of appropriation, demonstrating the pervasive hybridity of the West Indian street.

Doig’s paintings are irresistibly seductive, but for all his undeniable, aesthetic achievement, what permeates the imagination is that gap in the work between sight and comprehension, these uncanny encounters that seem to be evaporating in the humidity before our eyes.

Adam Pendleton's 'I'll Be Your' at Pace, London

Refuting rationality or narrative, Adam Pendleton incorporates cultural artefacts that he quotes and reconfigures within his work. This is a strategy he calls ‘Black Dada’ which is taken from Amiri Barak’s poem 1964 poem ‘Black Dada Nihilismus’. In the gallery, natural light picks out letters, diagonals and patterns silkscreened in glossier ink laid over matt black on canvas.   Two letters ‘A’ sit at 90 degrees to each other, separated by the thrust of a diagonal stripe, which cuts the image into opposing trianglar shapes with cropped ends. In the ‘Black Dada’ paintings he refers to Sol LeWitt’s Open Cube sculptures so that the pictures adopt graphic fragments from pre-existing cultural systems.

In another series, ‘System of Display, Pendleton silkscreens photographs of Pablo Picasso’s ‘primitive’ paintings exhibited at Documenta onto plexiglass and mirror. Form, context and source are translated across time and medium into new, self-sufficient objects. In a separate work, ‘Black Dada’ disconnected lines of text, some appropriated and some written by Pendleton, flow like a stream of consciousness across the creased and smudged support. Letters taken from the phrase ‘Black Dada’, a newspaper image of an unidentified man and blocks of geometric ink randomly float across the sequence of words referring to Sol LeWitt, art history and sexual desire.

Arguably the most convincing work ,‘Larry Hinton (white)’, comprises three panels that reproduce an old promotional photograph of an actor whose agent’s and photographer’s details are stamped in the corner, connecting it to a pre-existing functionality. The performer’s face is hung on the wall but two adjoining planks of irregular size sit stranded on the floor. Combining familiar elements of a billboard, casting headshot and publicity still, Larry’s pose is both cocky and debonair in his three piece suit, resonant of 1970s ‘Blaxploitation’ films.

Pendleton’s concept of ‘Black Dada’ does not appear to carry much intellectual coherence but instead employs an historic strategy of dislocation and reconfiguration. History surges forward into his work but leaves us awash in imagery and text that feels drained of signification beyond loose association. The work employs a tradition of anarchic sampling, but loses discernible satirical urgency or relevance on the way.  

Elgreen and Dragset's Harvest at Victoria Miro

Within an attic located up a steep flight of stairs, Elgreen and Dragset have made a faithful impression of a hayloft with tools hanging along the wall such as a harness, rake and scythe.  From a distance the timber structure of this imaginary barn spells out ‘kunst’, connecting the artifice of a working farm to art and the imagination. This blurring of boundaries sets up an entertaining enquiry into the realm of fantasy and expectation. On an opposing low wall the model of a boy sits looking down to the gallery below with his back to the tableau, while a resin vulture perches overhead. This menacing creature is named the ‘critic’ as a well-aimed barb at the expense of the media.

A darker theme is introduced by a miniature house placed on a rocking chair, titled ‘Home is the Place You Left. The reassuring environment of a farm with all its associations of nurture, fertility and abundance gradually acquires a gothic character arising out of these parodic props.  This uncanny set first establishes reassurance, and then undermines the apparent rural charm. Above a barn door, a stag’s antlers sprout from a head that is less skeletal than resiliently fleshy. An empty birdbox asserts the absence of life itself.

Continuing the Harvest theme below on the ground floor, the artists exhibit a project that sources layers of wall paint stripped from museums with techniques developed to preserve frescoes. Attached to framed canvasses, these fragments have been diligently removed from sites in Europe and the US and assume the monochromatic insistence of Minimalist painting. Tones range from bleached white to beige and textures vary from one ‘donor’ institution to the next. Their sizes are inconsistent as are the distances between each work, aping natural contrasts within public collections, and yet each banal surface of domestic paint shares formal origins and qualities.

Elgreen and Dragset’s hayloft introduces a nuanced psychic space of memory, discovery and potential trauma. The series of ‘paintings’ collected from and named after individual museums archly satirises Minimal seriality and institutional authority but this playfulness cannot compensate for a frustrating absence of enduring perceptual or conceptual weight.

Guillermo Kuitca at Hauser and Wirth

By taking architectural floorplans from the first, published encyclopaedia as a source for seven large scale works made of graphite and acrylic, Guillermo Kuitca sets up an enquiry into the processes and history of organizing knowledge. Encyclopaedias exhibit the best impulses of human curiosity but also carry inherent doubt and contingency . Kuitca’s large and impressive canvases appear to scatter original drawings of neo-classical buildings into intricate fragments as if we are observing a puzzle being re-assembled on a floor. While aspects of ‘Encylopedie VII’ remains coherent and identifiably reproduced from an original, printed plate, other areas of the image appear to be in a state of chaotic collapse. ‘Untitled’, 2010 is a  work almost measuring 2 by 4 metres and  occupies a room to itself, but unlike the other pieces in the series, this image is taken to the edge of legibility. Details are so atomised that the original source becomes elusive.

There is a familiar, contemporary technique here of digital imaging because these fragments are so confidently severed from each other as if Kuitca had applied ‘desktop’ strategies to manipulate copies. These enlarged and altered architectural plates, retrieved from history, extend Kuitca’s ongoing interest in epistemology, which he locates within the impulse to collate comprehensive information together .

In an adjoining gallery, the artist was exhibiting untitled paintings that extend the same theme within a contrasting formal style. These canvases mimic the painterly, analytic brushwork of cubist painting and yet originate in unidentified maps. Like the scattered architectural plates, these paintings reconfigure pictorial facts. However, these abstract paintings almost lose any power of communication except for lines of paint in red and yellow that may suggest roads or landmarks on a map. The viewer is left with a series of painterly marks that conflate analytic description with instinctual expression. Our bearings are lost as we are left with implied information within images seemingly driven by subjectivity.

Kuitca’s works inspired by the invention of the enclycopaedia brilliantly opens up a post-modern dialogue around meaning and authority, but the reconfigured maps are overly conceptual and are left adrift in a deep gap between invention and quotation so that they feel contrived and inert.