Material Fact

Green On Red Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of works from diverse contemporary practitioners. We also welcome for the first time to the gallery, the work of Swiss artist Silvia Bächli, whose work is renowned for its daring economy and modesty.

The title Material Fact seeks to convey as much a mood and an attitude as it does the phenomenon of the physical manifestation of an idea. The exhibition seeks to highlight the ways certain practices today draw attention, in inventive and playful ways, to the manner in which an idea or a set of principles manifest themselves and become physical. The physical characteristics, the manner of presentation, the mode of presence of the artwork is integral to its meaning. While this may sound like an obvious, tautologically true statement, it is remarkable how Gerard Byrne stretches the possibility of meaning in the shifting, ever-honing making and re-presenting of his works. This is most rewardingly encountered in his project A Case Study: Loch Ness (some possibilities and problems) 2001-2011 (2011), where his photographs, photograms, projections, etc. are presented as if they were museological evidence of the “absent subject’s” (the monster’s) existence. He describes how they are at once analog and analogy.

It defies description how, with just the subtlest of marks and manual gestures using ink, charcoal, oil pastel and/or gouache on paper, Silvia Bächli draws attention to the shadows of things rather than the things themselves. The drawing installations of Silvia Bächli can have such a reassuring and affirming sense of our own existence when she focuses on the tiny details or the edge of things. Through the tactility of means and result, what was two-dimensional becomes sculptural; image becomes object. Bächli herself states:

The drawings are like sculptures, looming to various extents into the space in which we move. Their white walls, the space, are an inseparable part of the image field. *

Paul Doran’s continues to make paintings that defy easy description or instantaneous apprehension. Paintings like Tail Chaser, made with wood, fabric, acrylic paint, staples and screws, see a return to an extreme physicality in Doran's work where the raw material is drawn not just from the studio floor but also his domestic and personal environment. The elements are barely contained within the frame. The frame it's self is a key part, in fact, of the composition but does not stop the work continuing beyond the painted rectangle with jagged, rough hewn, angular extensions.

Dennis McNulty’s new sculptural works are a materialisation of information, they bring into sculptural form what started off as a consideration of digital and Internet search engines and their instruction codes. In the work, The future of search, an algorithm is used to translate text to engraving, written language to object. The construction of the two floor pieces, People say that Altavista is the best and The first time someone ever asked me if I had an e-mail address, is based upon the packaging of two books that were ordered online by McNulty. He comments on the idea of the artist being a producer of ideas rather than things by referring to the 1923 artwork, Construction in Enamel 2 by László Moholy-Nagy, where Moholy had this piece made at an enamel factory by describing it over the telephone. **

* Interview with Hans Rudolf Reust, Porto, 2007 ** http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=78747

Material Fact
Silvia Bächli, Gerard Byrne, Paul Doran, Dennis McNulty