And to that Sea Return

The ultimate power of the exhibition, I think, started with this central tension, which reappeared in many guises.

The works were divided broadly into four groups: pen-and-ink drawings, large pastels, altered photographic prints, and composite lithographs. They fed into each other, each informed by and understood (partly) through the others, and informing and elucidating them in turn. So, for instance, a single miniscule dot from one of the pointillist fields in the drawings was photographed, enlarged 2000 times and printed as a giant shape floating in white space, in which Penn drew new miniscule dots. And so on.

The traditional exhibition display - framed works hung on white walls - in this way became a postmodern game that was neither coy nor cloying, something more like the intricate playfulness of a writer like David Mitchell than the pained self-consciousness of John Barth.

The pervasive dots and flecks took the viewer back to the pioneering work of Georges Seurat in the latter part of the nineteenth century, with its focus on the mechanics of seeing. But today it also has to bring to mind the pixels of the digital revolution. This twin pull, back to the artistic experimentation at the beginning of the last century and into the binary heart of our own age, is another one of the odd tensions that charge the exhibition – tensions not so much irresolvable as not asking to be resolved.

Another was the tension between representational and abstract elements. The works featured a combination of the two and often blurred the lines between them. So the rendering of a star field as photographed from the Hubble telescope (in the tiny Quaoar) is entirely indistinguishable from the exhaustive, textured pointillism Penn uses to fill outlined shapes in other compositions.

Most of the works were connected by two visual leitmotifs — a shape and a figure. The shape looks a bit like a three-step staircase and it popped up all over the place — filled with wrinkles and dots in the arrangement of 33 lithographs (titled and to that sea return); twice in the drawing ,one second of time equals just over 300 000km of space; and it is even the shape of one part of the pastel titled Intersect 1.

Penn encountered this shape while reading about the Hubble telescope. One of the four cameras on the orbiting telescope is more powerful than the others, so in order to make its images match up with the others, they have to be shrunk by the scientists at NASA. This means that the final composite photographs take this irregular form.

Then, two large square pastel drawings replicated images sent back from the telescope. The colours Penn used in these velvet-textured arrangements mimic the colour of the enhanced digital images released by NASA: deeps red, violent and pinks in the one (Quaoar Enhanced) and shades of blue and grey in the other (Sena Enhanced).

The use of the staircase shape and the enhanced photographic images gives rise to an important doubling of meaning: the works themselves are objects to be looked at, explored, deciphered, and at the same time they allude to the process and depict the results of an ambitious exercise in looking at, exploring, seeking to understand.

Certainly, since the advent of photography many painters have worked from photographs and they have therefore all, to a greater or lesser extent, spoken about the camera in their works. On one level Penn’s drawings must be included in this category, but unlike a painting of, say, a tree, or even a speeding train (that keeps the blurring effect from the source photograph) many of Penn’s images, such as Quaoar Enhanced, depict things that will most likely never be seen with the naked eye. Until we start living our Star Trek fantasies, blurry photographs such as these will be all we ever see of Quaoar.

And what do such images mean to the human eye? Not much, if we mean to the eye alone. But when we look at them we are given the chance to see, with a simple jump of the imagination, something else: we see ourselves in a new light, and size. And then the moment is gone. It is towards that stark yet ephemeral moment that these works seem to guide us.

The second visual leitmotif is a human figure – the bald and bearded man who has appeared in so much of Penn’s output to date.

Penn explains how the artistic trajectory that culminated in this exhibition had its starting point in a moment of peculiar recognition 'eight or nine years ago'. He had taken some photographs of his father doing 'domestic things, like sitting down in a couch, or putting on his shirt, or putting on his socks... and what I began to recognise in those photographs were memories of my grandfather, his father'.

Working in a darkroom, enlarging the images, zooming into them, he tried to locate what it was in the 'particular tilt of the head, the particular gesture' that had led to that pang of recognition. Eventually he went so far into the photographs that he found himself staring into what he called 'fields of grain' that 'could look like the universe, millions of stars, or like some kind of representation of genes'.

'So I was going into these images to get to something extremely intimate, suddenly everything opened up, the view opened into the vastness of space, also as ungraspable as that instant, that inherited gesture. Zooming in, and extracting, and all that, suddenly I found myself looking at the universe'.

The tensions in the exhibition – abstract and representational; general and particular; our bodies and the stars – dissolve because deep enough, far enough, close enough, any search for some kind of answers about ourselves and the universe bring us to what Alexander Pope calls 'the sea of matter', from which everything arises and into which everything returns.

What distinguishes Penn’s pointillism from that of his Post-Impressionist forebears is that it is not about 'seeing' so much as it about 'looking', and more specifically, 'looking for'. As such it is a fundamentally optimistic artistic response to what Robert Hughes has called 'the endgame rhetoric of deconstruction'. 'and to that sea return' showed an artist asking the child’s questions, the big questions, and then rendering, in patient, redolent detail, the endeavour to answer them.