The latest exhibition at the Rye Art Gallery, The Stillness After, featuring the work of Nick Archer and A Lincoln Taber, opens on Saturday 7 February.
Through urban and natural landscapes, both artists explore the themes of memory, loss, absence and isolation, decay and the passing of time. Though their styles express this in different ways, the exhibition is cleverly hung grouping works together to complement each other.
Nick Archer’s work in the show includes paintings of contrasting scale and techniques. His large canvases depicting small figures dwarfed by bright flowers and trees, are fairytale-like landscapes emerging from the layered paint. Building from a watery abstract base where rich colours bleed and merge, splatters of paint, gold leaf, glitter, spray paint and finer detail are added. In Eden, (2017), a small girl is surrounded by towering flowers. “In my work there is a slight darkness, I want to show a balance between the very beautiful and the dark, a sense of the sublime where we are so small, overwhelmed by nature.”
In his smaller pieces, Archer uses black and white photographs of Victorian portraits or childhood memories as inspiration, painting on copper, which gives the image a softness and smoothness, taking away the detail. He dilutes the paint from the surface using thinners thrown onto it or by sanding and applying paint stripper to show the copper underneath. The fading partial images are like memories fraying at the edges, a suggestion of time slipping away.
In a painting of a rose, one in a series of his paintings of flowers, the paint drips and the flower fades, a memento mori – transient beauty captured but a reminder that time does not stand still.
Nick’s painterly techniques create areas of colour and effects produced by chance, accidents out of which dream-like, imaginary scenes appear. A Lincoln Taber’s paintings are photo-real representations of urban and industrial landscapes or the overlooked corners of the concrete jungle – the forest of graffitied columns in a motorway flyover, dumped rusting cars and shipping containers, abandoned caravans, overflowing bins and water-stained, rust-bleeding concrete.
Taber’s paintings of motorways – Under M4 Viaduct Diptych (Orange Sky) and Under Spaghetti Junction – have a dystopian emptiness, devoid of people and movement, with the lines of road, crossing over and above each other, with strange toxic-orange skies “Spaghetti junction is a fantastic piece of engineering with a sinister edge. It reminds me of Piranesi’s prison etchings,” Taber says. These concrete structures along with Taber’s view of car parks and Brutalist housing estates, echo the settings in thrillers or post-apocalyptic films – sinister and unnerving.
In a series of paintings of nuclear power stations, built in remote and inaccessible areas, the power and potential danger of the nuclear threat is made ordinary by the picture postcard-bright colours of Taber’s view of Dungeness (Good Luck from Dungeness), the familiar outline hanging between the blue of sea and sky.
Beauty is found in the ordinariness of a mass of nettles, often ignored, with their vibrant green and spiky leaves, one nettle spot lit by the sun (Large Nettle). “I started painting them en plein air in the garden. Stanley Spencer is an influence – he has done paintings with them in.”
The exhibition runs from 7 February until 15 March at Rye Art Gallery. You can find out details and opening hours here.
Image Credits: Rye Art Gallery , Nick Archer/Rye Art Gallery , A Lincoln Taber/Rye Art Gallery .