In 2000 an AHRB funded project entitled Proximity was presented at the Art Gallery & Museum, Kelvingrove, Glasgow. This exhibition was curated by the Keeper of Art - Hugh Stevenson. My own work was integrated within the permanent collection to encourage a temporary shift in the register of the historic paintings selected, these included major works by Giorgione, Israels and Faed.

In Painted Nearness


Suddenly and momentarily, an interference appears…
paintings, intimately housed and sited, are brought into collision and dialogue…

In Proximity, there are at first glance forced and unseemly conjunctures of materials and genres. Different displacements, enacted by a partial rehang, force the viewer into a process of refamiliarization of myth, code and location. Within each piece there is, initially, a discovery of layered image, or rather a frequency of images. It appears as if the painter has hesitated, impatiently moved on to render yet another event on top.

Then again, at a second look too much is somehow presented, or at least an ambiguity of different pictorial languages and a concocted temporality in regard to what is known as the historical canon of painting. The notion of calm permanence and silence in the collection is broken, and if not by noise as such, by a form of insinuation. A crack opens, and a tear unexpectedly addresses what is meticulously looked over.

Sections of paintings or visual representations as they are historically known, and currently reinvented, are closely layered, side by side, rather than beneath and above. The contemporary painted and printed layers speak not so much of a distinct foreground and background, as an attempt to align the two. Together with the older works, they carry a proposition of contemporaneity, of an urgent contiguity manifested through time and matter. Akin to an ephemeral cinematic projection there is not an actual sedimentation of images, but rather an implied sense of narrative, concurrently held in our collective and individual memory.

Stephen Boyd’s recreated surfaces signify a distanced approach which has not so much to do with seduction in the manner of mastery and almost seamless mimicry found in the tradition of master and a disciple…

However this deliberate ‘nullity’ is what is expressive. The discrepancy of the mirroring brings us nearer the vulnerable content of these co-assembled juxtapositions. The flat paint is animated and held by varnish, as if the epidermis of wrinkled, ageing skin. An imitative, gestural covering over, that performs out the facture of the past, and gives the illusion of the ‘long gone’, which might be easy not to acknowledge or be bothered with.

Perhaps this smoothing over or suppression of a sudden impulse to act and answer to another, is the indicative trace, ‘too late’, of a responsive upheaval. A comparable inertia where the sentient body is a susceptible receptor, may equally occur while wallowing within the museum as when 

hearing the meditated daily news. The painted and constructed interventions are disruptive within the museological context, yet another interaction in a long log of previous additions and lacerations, subtractions and preservations. Here the works are carefully and respectfully held and maintained, yet estranged by its altered context, by ambiguity, and a revisitation only enabled by a permissive and collaborative process.

In detail – an arrow in a posed stomach, a bullet delivered by a neighbour, a cut made into canvas on the order of a queen… A head is later retrieved and now hangs in its former place in golden and splendid isolation yet temporarily encased and protected. Does it sound incoherent and unlikely? The chain of events takes on the appearance of haphazardly cut filmic sequence, yet it is actual.

In Proximity. There is an evocation and an enticement, if not incitement, to awaken reverberations between past and present. Here, vulnerably, in the immediate nearness between an initially naked and unwritten canvas and the corresponding fragility of historically lodged works of art, an ambivalent moment and, perhaps a disclosure often withheld by a material drape of paint.

Dr. Åsa Andersson