Flashback to an equivocal era

Review of Serendipity Paintings by Matthew Simpson at One Star Gallery

Mark-making was the hot topic of discussion among painters at the opening of Serendipity Paintings at One Star Gallery last night.

Exhibitor Matthew Simpson is one of the most thoughtful of the gallery’s stable of abstractionists.

Each of the 15 works in the exhibition is a study of brush strokes arranged in pictorial space.

Some paintings also include larger, blocked-in areas in regular or irregular arrangements across the canvas.

Simpson claims the brush strokes are random but admitted that he followed a logic. He doesn’t want to cover what’s underneath, he said, such as the blue ground in Chebka, (pictured above).

“I give myself some rules. I stick to the rules until I don’t. There’s a bit of play.”

In some paintings such as Atoll and Esker a grid dominates the structure but in others such as Geyser, pictured above, a more fuzzy logic asserts itself.

One of the most pleasurable aspects of Simpson’s work is the pure objectivity of it all.

The work is non-objective in the sense that it has no figurative elements but the objectivity comes from the attitude of the artist.

Simpson, when answering questions in front of Time Divide (pictured below), was talking about the difference between equivocal and unequivocal marks.

At a time when the notion of objectivity is constantly denied, these paintings seem to add to the debate.

Time Divide appears to have a mysterious presence at its centre, but the artist said he introduced a more definite line (unequivocal) around a looser (equivocal) one.

To the viewer, the painting seems to depict a poetic subjectivity of forgetfulness but Simpson is not making any such claims.

One fellow artist spoke of mindfulness as if the paintings were keeping a watch on viewers.

Another artist could detect a tantrum in some of the paintwork of Fjord.

There was also talk about a “temporal palimpset”, a reference to ancient parchments that have been scratched out.

Simpson says he works in sequences. A previous exhibition depicted four paintings in a series. This show is more discontinuous.

“You learn something from one painting you bring into the rest,” he said, although he limits the number he works on simultaneously to two or three.

He calls non-sequential paintings flashbacks. Time Divide is one such impressive example.

Serendipitous Paintings, Matthew Simpson, One Star Gallery, Until 31 May.