Ex Colenso BBDO creative goes to the art side
Ex Colenso BBDO creative Alexander Bartleet is showcasing his work at his first solo exhibition “10,000 OBJECTS” at the Warwick Henderson Gallery in Parnell from March to April.
Although this is Alexander Bartleet’s first solo show since his graduation from AUT in 2007, he has already made an impact on the art scene as a finalist and winner in several art competitions.
Right at the start of his career he attained one of the most difficultgoals in contemporary art by developing an original, immediatelyrecognisable style. Bartleet is an assemblagist, but he could equallybe described as a painter, because paint is an essential element in hisproduction process. He works with found plastic fragments, and plasticsof different types are notoriously difficult to glue together.
His solution has been to accrete everything with acrylic gel and paint.In the process the individual forms are unified and appear to havesettled into the matrix like debris tramped into a muddy field.Bartleet’s illustrious European predecessors in this genre include JeanDubuffet, Daniel Spoerri and Armand Arman. They preserved the integrityof their assembled elements and did not seek, or achieve, any effectsbeyond the frame or box that contained the objects. Less illustriousprecedents include the huge accretions of Julian Schnabel which, inretrospect, can be seen as merely gratuitous, forced and affected.
InBartleet’s earliest works the obliterated forms were redefined byoverpainting in a dark colour and rubbing back, resulting in shadedcrevices and a timeworn appearance. These works operated outside theirrectangles, like a Jackson Pollock.
One felt that one was looking at snapshots of some enormouswasteland of human detritus, fragmented and scattered by a catastrophe- war, storm or nuclear blast. Bartleet moved rapidly on from thesemonochromatic beginnings by adding subtle touches of colour or dots, orby outlining the forms with thin black lines.
More recently he hasintroduced new colours into the monochromatic works and in other pieceshas repainted all the elements in different colours, at the same timeadding details alien to the original forms, turning the whole pictureinto a surreal smorgasbord. He has also ventured into sculpture.
Bartleetis a restless young artist who has, in only four years, invented enoughvariations on his original breakthrough concept to keep him going for along time. If any criticism can be levelled, it is that he has barelytouched on the possibilities of some of these variations before movingon to new ones.
In this exhibition he has restricted himself largely toworks that align closely with his original concept. The coagulatedelements are larger than in his 2007 work, operating almost as close-upsnapshots of those remarkable pieces. Bartleet has scaled things upfurther with his major wall-sized piece; remarkable for both itsrestraint and its complexity.
Scale is an element that the artist hasonly just begun to explore. For example, elements can be bigger orsmaller within rectangles that can themselves vary greatly in size.Other individual works in the exhibition hint at ideas that will nodoubt be further developed in the future.
Exhibition Preview: Tuesday 15th March 5.30 – 7.30
Exhibition Dates: 16th March 2011 – 9th April 2011
All inquiries contact Warwick Henderson on 09 309 7513.
3 Comments
You should do a whole room of objects!
yay Alex you are awesome!!
Wall tsunami