Beschreibung:

GRID COMPOSITION John Kingerlee (b.1936)
Signature: signed in monogram and and dated [2003] lower right Medium: oil on board Dimensions: 32 by 43cm., 12.5 by 17in. Kingerlee began making grids in December 1998 while on a visit to the hill of Tara in County Meath, seat of the high kings of Ireland. The presence underground of so much buried history and power must... t have impressed him, not least because it provided him with an archaeological equivalent for the accumulated strata of his oil paintings. By adapting this unusual technique to suit the format of a grid, Kingerlee made the evolution of the painting more apparent and allowed the passage of time itself to be an integral part of the picture. When one looks at a grid painting one is not experiencing a picture in the singular, but rather the evidence of as many as fifty or more, piled one on top of the other. The grids are made by shaping the pigment into rectangles which are set out in rows, standing proud against neutral backgrounds. The linear matrix, which is imposed at the beginning of the painting process, has its origins in the early Cubist work of Picasso and Braque. Kingerlee particularly likes Braque’s description of his close collaboration with Picasso as being “like two mountaineers roped together”. To create a grid the artist lays his colours on with brushes initially, working from strong bright tints through to more muted shades: “the canvases become more and more subtle as they progress. A lot of white has gone into them and the very bright colours become no more than delicate traces. I really like the subtlety of reduced colour”. In the later stages the method of application switches to a combination of palette knife work and stippling with a decorator’s brush held vertically above the painting, which is laid flat on a workbench: “I am trying to build up a plaque, a raised textured surface. As each coat is added each plaque is more enriched, more and more figurative – landscapes, animals, buildings; sometimes the obvious image isn’t there – sometimes abstract – never a pure accident. The minute it seems a pure accident it’s no longer that but has become a conscious choice”. In Grid Composition the thirty plaques are endowed with great textural, tonal and chromatic variation. The treatment of the pigment ranges from encrusted, dry and granular (where sand has been added for extra texture) through to creamy, viscous and smooth, where one layer has been allowed to blend with another of a different colour. The plaques with more definite outlines stand proud of the surface, whilst the paler, more subtle ones start to dissolve into each other and into the background. A near musical rhythm is set up across the picture, as we explore the look and feel of each miniature landscape or ‘window’ and the part it plays in the whole. By frustrating our expectations of shape-repetition, the artist slows down our ‘reading’ of the image, making us move visually through this terrain as if it were a real landscape of rocks, turf, sea and sky. The artist regards the grid cells as miniature pictures, teetering on the brink between nature and abstraction, but always with a sense of being placed in three-dimensional space. It is as if the myriad components of the windswept Beara Peninsula (Kingerlee’s home) were distilled into a series of epiphanies or essences, and then reassembled in pictorial form. In these remarkable grids of Kingerlee’s both the means and the end seem to be without parallel in contemporary painting. Jonathan Benington, Bath, August 200 more