Alvaro Barrington, Mandy El-Sayegh, Rachel Jones, Dona Nelson A Focus on Painting

12 September—21 October 2020

Ely House, London

A Focus on Painting, curated by Julia Peyton-Jones, the gallery’s Senior Global Director: Special Projects, features four artists from different generations and at different points in their careers: Alvaro Barrington, Mandy El-Sayegh, Rachel Jones and Dona Nelson.

There has been a recent upsurge of exhibitions focusing on artists for whom painting is their preferred medium and this show presents the work of four painters, both established and emerging, who explore the medium in different ways. With materials ranging from yarn to newsprint to poured colour, the processes these artists use and the forms of their final works are compellingly diverse. Mandy El-Sayegh and Rachel Jones explore what appears to be abstraction, however at its core is an investigation of the human body and the formation of identity, while Alvaro Barrington and Dona Nelson play with form and materials not usually associated with painting.

Alvaro Barrington

For this exhibition, Alvaro Barrington has created a series that engages with his relationship to the history of painting. He references the linear concept of the gallery’s hallway and the line as a tool of making that, in Barrington’s works, evokes both a physical journey as well as the intersecting strands formed through the action of weaving.

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I wanted to make a part of my practice the idea that I'm just learning, that I'm just growing. All the time I'm looking and looking ... and letting other people's ideas be part of how I live.

— Alvaro Barrington

In Three Americans and an Italian met on Montego Bay, 2020, Barrington references the American abstractionists Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Barnett Newman (1905-1970) and Agnes Martin (1912-2004), while the Italian is Alberto Burri (1915-1995). The work's title is a play on the hackneyed joke format of 'three men walk into a bar…', but reimagined as a mythical meeting between these artists in Montego Bay, Jamaica - a signifier of Barrington's heritage. His use of burlap is linked both to Caribbean cacao sacks and Burri's burlap paintings, as well as the associated Arte Povera movement. The whorls of bleached lines evoke Pollock's drip painting technique, while the vertical division is a nod to Newman's 'zip' paintings. The sewn lines of black thread that frame the work pay homage to Martin's use of the line and the grid, motifs to which Barrington repeatedly returns.

Alvaro Barrington

Three Americans and an Italian met on Montego Bay, 2020

Mixed media on burlap paper

98 x 100.1 x 5.1cm (38.6 x 39.4 x 2 in)

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In Dries Sept 2020, 2020, Barrington explores the intersections between fashion and fine art, referencing the Belgian designer Dries van Noten in a series of small-scale paintings that evoke the colour palette of his Fall 2020 menswear collection. Separated and contained within individual frames handmade by the artist, these become an emphatic meditation on each of the six different colour values, which are nonetheless inflected by the surrounding colours in the sequence. Strung in a line like jewels on a chain or ellipses in a sentence, there is a particular tempo to the arrangement of the individual works and the colour relationships they establish. In addition to referencing the world of fashion, this work is related to Barrington's ongoing exploration of the 'logic' found within other artists' works, which he adapts to and reinterprets in his own.

Alvaro Barrington

Dries Sept 2020, 2020

Mixed media on burlap paper in artist frame

21.6 x 27.9 cm (8.5 x 11 in) each

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Mandy El-Sayegh

Mandy El-Sayegh's installation, which includes a 'rug' on the specially laid latex floor, investigates the possibilities of materials and language through the layering of found images and text. El-Sayegh is fascinated by the grid and this, together with her family history, is at the heart of her work.

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I’m interested in the erasure of meaning, or the accumulation of meaning through a layering system.

— Mandy El-Sayegh

Mandy El-Sayegh presents an immersive installation that transforms the gallery's interior through a dense layering of her newsprint collage on the latex floor, overlaid with her Redaction Rug and surrounded by wall-hung paintings. In these works, El-Sayegh explores the production and circulation of images and texts, and the subjectivity of their interpretation, with a focus on language and the body.

In her Net-grid paintings, El-Sayegh overlays silkscreen prints combining personal memorabilia, found objects and linguistic elements with hand-painted grids to consider the proliferation of materials and information, as well as the structures that contain them. The painted grids function to simultaneously contain and obscure information. They suggest the cultural and linguistic dislocation experienced in an unfamiliar context or system, whereby fragments of information with no immediate associations are transformed through the illusion of unity.

Mandy El-Sayegh

Net-Grid (my dad knows nothing), 2020

Oil and mixed media on linen with silkscreened collaged elements

235 x 225 cm (92 1/2 x 88 5/8 in)

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Installation view, A Focus on Painting at Thaddaeus Ropac London (2020)

The surface of Redaction Rug is both tactile and weathered, created using latex, newsprint, muslin and pigment, and layered with inked poetry. The piece began with a dust sheet, onto which two news articles were silkscreened; one concerning neoliberalism and the other sleep problems. Words are drawn out from these news articles and re-combined to create a 'bruise' poem - an archive of thoughts combinedwith ghosts of images. El-Sayegh refers to her collage process as 'suturing' and her use of latex evokes skin, so the metaphor of the body becomes a way of unifying and recontextualising these fragments.

Mandy El-Sayegh

Redaction Rug, 2020

Silkscreened ink and paper, cheesecloth, The Financial Times, wallpaper paste, latex

317 x 250 cm (124 3/4 x 98 3/8 in)

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Rachel Jones

Although Rachel Jones has eliminated any literal depiction of self or the body, her work is a continual exploration of form as an expression of abstract concepts. The barely discernible presence of a mouth or teeth act as signifiers for the body as a whole, rendered in a bold palette and rich textures.

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I try to use colour to describe black bodies. I want to translate all that lust for self-expression into a language that exists outside of words, and instead relates to seeing and feeling with your eyes.

—Rachel Jones

Rachel Jones presents a series of new paintings that explore the complexities of society’s readings of the Black body – how it is understood, how it is culturally reproduced, and the potential role of these representations in dismantling existing power structures. Jones’s presentation includes a number of large-scale hanging pieces alongside smaller works on unstretched canvas and paper pinned to the wall.

Jones is interested in creating images that explore the Black Interior, the depth of her own interiority and how, as a Black woman, it consists of an autonomous, imaginary, and multifaceted experience. This exploration of personal identity set against society’s readings (and representations) of Blackness throughout history has led Jones to develop a deeply personal approach to abstraction, whereby representation – particularly of Blackness and the Black body – is explored as both reinforcing existing power structures and as having the power to disrupt them.

Rachel Jones

A Slow Teething, 2022

Oil pastel, oil stick on canvas

186 x 264 cm (73.23 x 103.94 in)

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Rather than literally depicting the figures her work seeks to represent, Jones applies a form of critical interpretation to the language of painting, reconsidering both traditional and contemporary approaches to colour, form and motif. In response to these approaches, she explores self-expression as a bodily, visual and visceral experience, not only in the subject-matter of each piece but in the artist’s physical engagement with their production. Jones is interested in eliminating a literal depiction of self, instead focusing on a sense of self in relation to the sovereignty of her inner life and the expression of this through a kaleidoscopic palette and boldness of form.

Rachel Jones

A Slow Teething, 2022

Oil pastel, oil stick on canvas

155 x 190 cm (61.02 x 74.8 in)

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Dona Nelson

Dona Nelson allows chance to influence the final composition, working on both sides of the canvas so there is no ‘right side’ from which to view the finished painting. The final work is often exhibited on a stand, as opposed to hung on the wall, blurring the lines between painting and sculpture.

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It makes the mental, physical. It asserts vision through the body. You need more effort as a viewer. You cannot be passive.

—Dona Nelson

Throughout her career, Dona Nelson has created gestural abstract works that employ unorthodox materials, processes and formats to disrupt conventional ideas concerning painting, modes of display and ways of looking. Painting ‘en plein air’, the artist approaches the canvas as both a conduit and a ground, using buckets of paint and tools such as spatulas or high pressure hoses to work on her canvases. Nelson begins her two-sided paintings by throwing a net of gel-soaked cheesecloth onto the canvas, which dries to form linear grooves that direct the flow of the liquid acrylic that she pours on, before repeating the process and then removing or adding elements in turn. The direct pour of diluted acrylic paint acquires a new and unexpected appearance as it soaks through the canvas to the other side. As a result, one side of the painting often has a denser materiality, while the other takes on an illusionistic and imagistic quality.

Dona Nelson

Orangey, 2015

Acrylic and acrylic medium on canvas (two-sided)

210.8 x 198.1 cm (83 x 78 in)

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Ripped, layered and interwoven with painted string, Nelson's finished paintings bear testament to their production, retaining traces of the artist’s actions and the energetic, physical movements through which she produces each piece. Protruding cheesecloth, dense drips of paint and thickly woven string emerge and disappear into the canvas – the physical additions of the creative act – while torn edges and traces of cloth that has been removed take on a gestural absence – the creative act embodied in negative space. In By the Yard, 2016, the large, black-clad figure was modelled from life and is joined on the other side by a seated figure reading, a recurring motif in Nelson's work that was inspired by Paul Cézanne’s The Artist’s Father, Reading ‘L’Événement’ (1866).

Dona Nelson

By The Yard, 2016