DAVID GLEDHILL |
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Information The central theme of my work is the shared experience of the urban and suburban scene. I work from my own photographic source material and found images in an attempt to communicate the familiarity of certain aspects of the built environment. This familiarity may relate to conditions of light, or particular kinds of buildings, interiors and architectural sites that trigger associations. By focussing on the means by which our sense of place is articulated, I am hoping to project a critical distancing from some of the forces that shape our thinking as individuals and as a community.
City as Lament The Paintings of David Gledhill It is impossible to think of David Gledhill’s cityscapes as anything but profoundly alive. But how can they seem so alive when they are so emptied of the living? Where are the fleshly denizens of these overpoweringly recognizable delineations of the actual? Nowhere, exactly nowhere, that’s the point. In fact, they could hardly have been there in the first place and yet the curtains have just been drawn, the blinds lowered and the allotment tacitly drones their names. Houses, gardens, hotels and shops, here they all are at their most quotidian. Here too, the fruitless forgotten corners that normally pass well below the radar: a plug in a hallway, a gate, a back-alley, the gaping letterbox entrance to a carpark, a sign. For these paintings are not concerned with the dream-palaces, but with the banal, inconsequential, workaday containers, the machines in which a small portion of the species goes about its ordinary business. Of course, these are paintings of photographs; that’s to say they are images of images of reality: the photographic act has already transformed an undistinguished moment. By the time it has passed through this painter’s imagination, undergone the purifying strictures of design, glazes, light-effects, hauntings, the layering of the obsession, the motif is no longer available to the viewer as the messenger of an insignificant location. Even so, its emptiness is continually evoked in what I can only describe as a lament for its demise. The resonance of this lament, although silent, is far-reaching: it penetrates what the viewer approaches as an uncomplicatedly referential “given” such as a building or a street, creating an impermeable barrier within a painted surface which might have appeared, initially, to be entirely transparent. I say “silent” and one of the most astonishing things about these pictures is the depth of the silence that emanates from them. It’s as if, for the artist, at the moment when the shutter clicked, there was nothing left in the world but that. This is not the silence of the pregnant pause, as in the poetic theatre of Edward Hopper; nor is it the rational silence of enigma, as deployed in de Chirico’s ritualistic choreographies. It’s a silence absolute, single and monumental; the silence, I’m tempted to say, of Last Things. The paradox is that this art cannot help elevating its subjects into the stream of form, meaning, history, and of course, that’s a betrayal of the fatelessness these places commemorate. Nevertheless, it's a betrayal that a true art, almost in spite of itself, is endlessly fated to effect. It’s this betrayal, born of the medium itself, the essentializing rhetoric of an aesthetic system, which opens up a poignancy in these pictures, gives them their troublingly seductive power. Once seen, really seen, there’s no shaking them off - they become a part of your perceptual apparatus and throb in your mind like some new form of mortal - or immortal knowledge. Lyndon Davies
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