34% PORK

Artists Rob Leech, Rachel Potts, Guy Bourner, Alexander Heaton

23.Feb.07 - 11.Mar.07
Fri-Sun 12-6

Private View, 22.Feb.07, 6-9 pm

Bartlett's Gallery
249-253 Cambridge Heath Rd
London E2 0EL
07791 803 193
Thirtyfour_percent_pork@yahoo.co.uk
Tube Bethnal Green, Hackney / Bethnal Green

Art about art and paintings about paint: there’s nothing new there. 34% Pork’s four young artists follow this almost unavoidable model, but without dedicating what they do to the well-known theories of decades gone by. The show’s title references ideas about the purity of paint, but treats them more as a backdrop than a framework. Exploring paint’s ability to mimic itself, the work sits between gaudy, stylish and thoughtful. Featuring 2 -dimensional work alongside liquid sculpture and velvet-lined boxes, the show brings paint away from the canvas, undermining the medium and celebrating it at the same time. 34% Pork is a serious salute to paint itself; as a material, as a device, as colour, as surface, and the spin-offs into cultural substance that it can bring about. It’s about enjoyment without irony, an interest in the world through paint.

Rob Leech’s work is gorgeous and excessive and knows it. His shamelessly pleasurable, seemingly solid floor-based blocks of fluid colour point to disco and minimalism, but most of all to the pleasure of looking. His impossible formations of huge, malleable brushstrokes appear to jump out from the surface they are stuck to, dissolving ideas of a fixed space and a fixed state. Rob Leech was short-listed for the 2006 Celeste art prize.

Guy Bourner states “I am an artist, who makes paintings with no intention of picking up a brush or using a canvas. I conceptually engage with a painting’s history by examining the concerns and mannerisms of the painter.” He reflects these mannerisms and processes in a playfully literal sense, using the drips and leftovers of painting cast in bronze, manipulating colours, scenarios and characters into smart display-cases as paintings.

Alexander Heaton paints a flattened Evian landscape in hyper-reality, from a mixture of meticulously constructed HO scale model railway scenery and photo montages of romantic landscapes he has personally experienced. The work produced becomes more real than the actual place it depicts, mythologizing the recognisable with the fairytale.

Rachel Potts paints culturally loaded or familiar scenes, such as gallery interiors or iconic buildings, and distils them onto a surface. She ignores their romance or meaning and integrates them into sculptural boards as models of paintings. She treats pictures as pattern, using paint, translucent shine and felt pen to ‘colour-in’ space, finding a strange point just before kitsch.