Matthew Cheale

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Understanding that painting is a philosophical enterprise has allowed me to explore the possibility of bringing into being other forms of material other than paint, in order to achieve an outcome of a concept without necessarily being purely visible; subjecting me to the question ‘How do we communicate ‘painting’ to those that are painters? The uncritical use of scientific categories to characterize an artistic attitude has been dangerous; the mere transposition of a scientific term in a philosophical or critical discourse requires a number of tests and cautious redefinition that would indicate whether the new usage is merely suggestive or metaphorical.

However, the use of scientific classifications has pushed the boundaries as to what my artwork can be; staging intimate, poetic and philosophical engagements with nature and cosmology. My artworks have engaged with the landscape and the surrounding space, as a physical entity and as an idea. I’ve attempted to create an expanded sense of reality beyond the purely visible, using a broad breadth of forms in the expanded field to bring together perceptions of the gallery place and the cosmic. I would like to further pursue critical debates in aesthetics, whereby terms such as “indeterminacy”, “statistical distribution”, “information,” “entropy,” seem to question the purity of philosophical discourse and relating these to philosophy and traditional aesthetics which have often relied on terms (such as “form” and “power”) which belong to physics, cosmology and the wider context ‘science’.

Mock-up Exhibition: Critical Reflections.

15.05.

acrylic, cotton.

Conrad Shawcross. Slow Arc Inside a Cube IV (2009)

Steel mesh, mechanical system, light, 1.2m x 1.2 m x 1.8m

Slow Arc Inside a Cube is inspired by a description by the scientist Dorothy Hodgekin responsible for working out the structure of pig insulin, a complex protein chain. Hogdekin did this by pioneering a technique called crystal Radiography, and compared the longitudinal process of extrapolating the dense protein cloud from reams of chromatographic grids to trying to work out the structure of a tree, from purely looking at its shadow. It is similar, of course, to Plato’s cave. The piece is a first in a series of works where a small but brilliant halogen light, on the end corner of a cube of mesh to its opposite side. The path it draws being not quite straight but slightly bowed. The piece is about a relationship between the moving point source of light, the cage, which is the only constant, and the changing shadow of this constant projected onto the walls of the space. It is a shadow of a cube, but it is not a silhouette but a shadow from within itself, maybe an inverse shadow is an effective way to describe it.

09.05.

Diffraction patterns in water.

projector, glass tank, water, oil, linen.

Can the use of space be a means to organize and regulate power?

If we are aware of these problems, when we encounter an artist who uses scientific terminology to define his artistic intentions we will not assume that the structures of his art are a reflection of the presumed structures of the real universe; rather, we will point out that the diffusion of certain notions in a cultural milieu has particularly influenced the artist in question, so that his art wants and has to be seen as the imaginative reaction, the structural metaphorization, of a certain vision of things (which science has made available to contemporary man). Given the context, my discussion here should not be seen as an ontological investigation but rather as a modest contribution to the history of ideas.

Umberto Eco. ‘The Open Work’.

Mechanical system on turntable (detail)

A turntable that rotates in time with beachy head lighthouse, one two second revolution every twenty seconds, playing the sound of waves along the lighthouse coastline. When performing,the perceptible movement of the needle corresponds to a flash of the lighthouse beam, the imperceptible sound corresponds to the darkness left by the vanishing light.

An interesting discussion is the criterion in which ‘is’ needed to judge the timer on my record player. The one two second revolution every twenty seconds is an open work in which its futility lies within the unit of representing time. How can time be represented? Two people can represent two seconds subconsciously in two perceptibly different ways and this unit becomes the final word which is infinitely measurable.

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