Richard Penn

Current Review(s)

And to that Sea Return

Richard Penn at Gallery AOP

When you walk into a gallery and find it filled with things you can imagine doing yourself there can seem, no matter what you know you are meant to think, to be some sort of trick involved. Take the doodles of some of the abstract expressionists, or even a piece like that bed of star English artist Tracey Emin. Whether it disgusts you or pleases you, you can see how she did it. You have a bed, you know where stains come from, etc.

Of course this is often not trickery at all but quite transparently the primary meaning of the work. This is the visual artist’s equivalent of Walt Whitman’s 'barbaric yawp'. These artists are singing the songs of themselves, and so, they seem to be saying, could you.

But then there is that other kind of gallery display. The kind where you walk in and realise quite quickly that this is not the sort of thing you could bash out yourself at home. It is the kind of work that stuns the air in the room with that mesmerising quality that has you leaning in to a sculpture, or walking in closer in to the wall in the case of a drawing, to find out 'how the artist did it'.

Richard Penn’s exhibition 'and to that sea return' was of this sort. And he specifically intended it to be. Penn said he wanted 'the mark-making to look impossible, to carry the analogy of the impossibility of the universe'. 'Our perception of things', he said, 'is so limited that most of what goes on is actually outside our perceptual capacity.'

Impossibility. A good place to start. When I approached the wall to take a closer look at one of his pen-and-ink drawings, a strange thing occurred. Though the drawings appeared coolly precise from afar, a close-up view revealed turbulent swarms of dots, chaotic, visceral, the pen pressed deep into the weave of the paper over and over again. What from the centre of the room looked humanly impossible now appeared impossibly human.

11 September 2010 - 02 October 2010

Listings(s)

Anaphora

Amy Watson, Maja Marx, Anthea Moys, Colleen Alborough, Francki Burger and Richard Penn at Michaelis Rosedale Gallery

An exhibition of work by seven MFA students from WITS university: Colleen Alborough, Francki Burger, Maja Marx, Anthea Moys, Richard Penn, Mary Wafer and Amy Watson.

28 July 2009 - 16 August 2009