HALFTONE

British artist Darren Almond (b. 1971) works in a variety of media including photography, film, installation, sculpture and painting. His diverse subjects deal with abstract ideas of time, space, history and memory and how these concepts relate and intersect. He examines the symbolic and emotional potential of objects, places and situations to produce works that have historical as well as personal resonance.

Almond’s work often begins with travel to remote locations that are motivated by specific political, cultural or geographical investigations. In the ‘Fullmoon’ photographs, a series that the artist begun in 1998, he photographed diverse landscapes in every continent of the world under moonlight, using long exposures, to create images that seem to uncannily replace night with day. Almond’s films deal with personal and political subjects. In Bearing, for example, he follows the daily trek of a sulphur miner in Indonesia, while in In the Between, he films the controversial high-altitude train line built from China to Tibet. In his sculptural work, Almond often materialises notions of time as both a real and imagined construction. His large-scale, wall-mounted flip clocks, for example, emphasise the passing of time with their amplified sound as well as the impossibility of its mechanical quantification.

‘In practice, the allure of Almond’s artwork transcends the overt splendour of the views. It transpires in the artist’s underlying method, which is aesthetically fuelled by the exploration of time. How might an artist, in this day and age, depict temporality? What are the methods and means for visually representing the notion and experience of time? The answer resides in Almond’s distinct and complementary practices, which involve time in various guises: retransmitted, distorted, delayed, real, subjective or frozen.’

V. Souben in Darren Almond: ...between here and the surface of the moon, FRAC Auvergne, 2011

The work of American abstract painter Jeff Elrod (b. 1966) is based on the combination and interweaving of digital and analogue practices. Working in large-scale formats, he uses basic editing programs like Photoshop or Illustrator and adopts their typical forms of digital imagery. Elrod then transposes these computer designs on canvas by using 'classical' techniques such as painting, drawing or spraying, sometimes even printing them directly onto the canvas. His works thereby capture a moment when analogue and digital production clash, connecting the profound history of painting, abstraction and digital movement. In a recent series of works, Elrod alienates initially computer-generated drawings into blurry, vague images that eliminate any coherence.

‘Elrod's technique has modified in the past decade as the tricks of Photoshop have evolved – color gradients, spray effects, and even the option of scanning a potential background scrap that he has found in his studio all now crop up in his large-scale works, compounding the complexity of transferring the image onto the canvas in his Sunset Park studio. Nevertheless, Elrod's mediation still happens with his use of the mouse between him and the machine.’

C. Bollen, in ‘The New Abstract: Jeff Elrod’, in Interview Magazine, 2014

The way in which Navid Nuur (b. 1976) relates to material, the space around him and his observations therein, can almost be regarded as devout. The attention for detail and the careful fine-tuning of the various elements of a work or exhibition make the audience part of an ‘inner’ world. In Nuur’s work - although very conceptual at first sight - a very personal visual problem becomes the central question. What Nuur has in common with the conceptual artists from the sixties is the relation between concept and form. Form for him however, is not necessarily the result of the idea, but materializes through a subjective program of requirements or rules in which intuition has the upper hand. He applies concepts that often relate to a temporary in-between state that places his work between the audience and an often abstract phenomenon, such as light, energy, air, or ‘rest space’. Nuur’s form-language and meaning are therefore principally purely process-oriented.

One of the most respected painters today, Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) constantly questions the methods and means of painting to raise a sense of awareness of the medium, which he aims to reinvent and to reshape, always in opposition to traditional hierarchies. Albert Oehlen has been continually colliding various styles, orders or mediums since the 80’s, expanding the notion of painting to ‘what he wants to see’.

‘Albert Oehlen long ago constructed the possibility of his own painting. Yet at the beginning the road seemed not merely a narrow alley, it looked like a dead end. What then? Give up and turn back? Or take a hammer and drive a tunnel through the solid amorphous mass before him? Albert Oehlen was one of the very few to take up that hammer. And when he started he struck mighty blows. It was in materials, expression, history and genre – in everything his immediate predecessors had progressively demolished with their hammers – that Oehlen stated his determination not to give in. His possibility of painting had to be built from the foundations. No gratuitous transgressions, no irony or cynicism – even if it is true that some used these terms to disparage his efforts to be free of artistic propriety. Instead Oehlen went looking where nobody else did, plunging into the piles of detritus abandoned by the wayside of an era. Then a final task remained: that of interweaving painting as history with the position of the painter and with the society out of which both painting and painter emerge in order to reflect on it.’

A. Pontégnie, The history of abstraction seemed to be finished in Albert Oehlen, Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2011

The work of Ida Tursic (b. 1974) and Wilfried Mille (b. 1974) expresses a deep engagement with today's forms of image representation. Found in magazines and the enormous data pool of the internet, anonymous pictorial material is being transformed into the traditional domain of painting. Obscene pornography, film scenes of burning houses, landscapes as well as mere abstract and geometrical elements – the subjects depicted illustrate the common overload of image production circulating through present media. Often alienated by overlapping layers of paint or interrupted by various patterns these paintings deal with the manipulation, re-utilisation and disappearance of images.

‘Something in the painting of Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille makes us beautiful, and turns us into worthy onlookers. Herein lies the 'intangible' part of the oeuvre of Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille. It is in the nature and making of this relationship which links us to it. And if this painting leaves plenty of room for tangible things, but does not assign them any place in particular, this is because its project is elsewhere: in the on-going quest for ways of expressing this intangible part which alone sets works of art apart from ordinary things, and makes a distinction between pictures and paintings.’

É. Troncy, ‘This Painting’ in Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille. Decade, Les presses du réel, 2011

A central tenet of Christopher Wool’s (b. 1955) practice is the very process of painting itself. This has been explored and developed since his early years through reducing form and colour, as well as experimenting with different painting styles and reproduction techniques, such as silkscreen or pattern rollers, overlaying and erasing, covering or obscuring with paint, and adding layers on top. The range of techniques Wool has used over the years makes reference to the processes and gestures that have marked contemporary art history. The artist's complex work encourages the viewer to reflect on the physical qualities of paint and various modes of reproduction, while honing an awareness of painting procedures and the essential elements of the medium: colour, form and line.

‘Christopher Wool’s paintings seem to capture visual urban experience, carved out of a moment for the duration of an artwork – an artwork that coverts the structures of experience into the structures of painting. Non-specific moments and impressions are lifted out of context and fixed into details of a painting that, unlike graffiti, conveys the speed and concentration of its origin only when it is contemplated over a measure of time in an art space. The dynamic of the picture’s conception becomes, very gradually, the dynamite of the thought it contains. Thought pictures.’

F. Meschede, ‘The Nothingness before nothing’ in Christopher Wool, Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2007

Toby Ziegler (b. 1972) brings together motifs derived from a wide range of sources, including photographs of the Freud family, Spanish still-life paintings, Dutch Old Masters and Nineteenth Century landscape paintings. He uses the computer to generate new forms and pictorial spaces, playing with facetted structures for his sculptures and manipulating layers of pattern for his two dimensional works. The physical realisation of these digital forms allows mistakes and idiosyncrasies to creep into the rigorous schematic process and to erase the clear distinction between figuration and abstraction. Toby Ziegler revels in the slippage between the virtual and the actual, and furthermore in the very physical acts of decomposing, distorting, and damaging the materials. While Ziegler provides the viewer with some access to follow his path he intentionally leaves room for personal interpretation.

‘As a process, the enlargement of pixelated, discoloured images seems almost automatic in Ziegler – as if no new voice could be imparted to an image before it had passed through a singular neutralising filter. [...] The metal ensures a very specific form of paint adhesion and drying; it retains the trace of every brushstroke, whose nuances stand out at each transition. [...] Yet these operations would mean nothing without a further process, one that comes into effect after the first layer of paint has been painstakingly laid down. Of course, it is thought through from the start with the aid of a computer used to elaborate the composition. This second stage can be perceived as a kind of sabotage – though without it the painting would not be complete. Ziegler now sprays the painting, authoritatively superimposing a pattern over the motif.’

J.M. Gallais, in Toby Ziegler: Borderline Something, Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2013