TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU SAW AND WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS

Looking at Piers Alsop’s and Grant Foster’s work is like reading the descriptive passages in a story.  In description, the forward motion of narrative is suspended; we linger on details, drawn as much to the luminous quality of something as to its dark and unknowable other side.   We might understand this descriptive mode that characterises the artists’ work as a kind of ‘looking with’ rather than ‘at’ the world.  It is a way of looking that doesn’t seek to marshal disparate elements into a linear narrative or consistent meaning, but one driven by curiosity and shaped by a humility of seeing the world as something to draw close to while knowing it is always something that we can never fully know or indeed comprehensively describe. One senses in their work a desire to be close by, and return again and again to, a scene, object or memory.    This is what gives their work a peculiar quality of intimacy.

 

But this intimacy isn’t all warmth and ease. It is shaded by a sense of unfamiliarity. The experience is like contemplating an ancient artefact or tale: we recognise some things, like love, pain and the apparently unchangeable habits of eating and drinking from a story told 2,000 years ago, and yet these worlds remain ungraspably strange. In the artists’ work, it is as if we encounter a visual language that is just out of reach where something has been lost in translation over time.  We see, for example, in Alsop’s Civil Twighlight (2024), how he describes familiar things as if articulated with some foreign tongue. Look at the flower: it appears somehow desperately yellow and frantically optimistic, startled by its own appearance against the shadowy background and the ominous outline of a thumbs up. Or we may see in Foster’s paintings of little animals and the back of a child’s head, (Mouse, Child, Lust, all 2024), a particular quality of line that seems reminiscent of another age; 1950s England perhaps, one that longed for innocence and games on hot summer days, but which was also haunted by unease and dissatisfaction. Looking at Alsop’s and Foster’s works is like listening to a tune we thought we knew only we hear it limned by faint harmonics and some strange and distant roar.

 

In Middlemarch, George Elliot observed that we too often armour ourselves against the intensity of the world around us. ‘The quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity’, she writes.  She suggests that we do so because were we to fully submit to the world in all its profound mystery we may not be able to bear it: ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’[1]   When Alsop notes that he tries to reach for  a sense of  ‘loud silences’ in his works, perhaps he, like Elliot, is trying to offer the viewer at least just a glimpse of this unbearable mystery in the familiar.[2] Seeking to introduce ‘weight and ambiguity’ in his works, he creates a mood that is ‘like obelisks that seem significant and pregnant with meaning, but we don’t know exactly what that is.’  Foster also reaches for ‘Ambiguity (but not meaninglessness)’, attempting to give the viewer the space to not know, to find not non-sense, but no one sense.  For both artists this ambiguity is at the heart of making the work, where rather than corralling painting into preconceived form, they follow it ending up with ‘something I have never imagined as a result of trying to preserve some part of it’ (Alsop). The ambiguity is also part of viewing the work, where we enter into an ‘interlinking chain of questions’ (Foster) rather than being offered coherent answers and fixed symbols.  

 

This ambiguous atmosphere is found in even what is most familiar to the artists.  Apparently simple memories and images are shadowed by some darker, stranger undercurrent. Family members, children’s illustrations, memories of a particular place are not remembered and pictured with bright lucidity but coloured with both humour and melancholy, as if at the heart of what is remembered there is at once the joy of its remembrance and the pain of its loss, a spectre of longing that haunts what might seem innocent or known. See for example Will’s retrospective at the breakfast table (2024), a deliberately bombastic title which pictures Alsop’s memory of his father, the famed architect Will Alsop, ‘sitting in his white shirt at the table in the flat I grew up in. He always sat in the same place.’ The little maquettes are miniature versions of his father’s buildings made from cigarette packets and lighters.  As Alsop explains: ‘being a committed smoker, the running joke in my family was that all his designs were derived from differing arrangements of B&H packets and Bic lighters.’ This army of buildings forms a delicate defence system around the boiled egg and toast, like a kind of medieval village stranded on a linen moon. Affectionate and humorous, the painting both celebrates his father’s work and, as Alsop notes, ‘playfully minimis[es] his/and more broadly the notion of achievements.’  It is a work that reaches back to the tradition of the still life and memento mori, a reminder of the banality of creaturely habit and the inevitable passing of life and work. 

 

Grant too draws on fragments of memories of home and family. In Panspermia (2024) the two figures are based on a photograph from the 1960s of his mother and uncle as children dressed in their Sunday clothes. The large sweeps of white make it seem like we are looking at an image in the process of whiting out into nothing, while the spiral-eyed creature on the back of the painting gives the whole work a sense of some weird trip, where the starched whiteness of proper 1960s Englishness is warped into some frightening vision on the cusp of disappearing.   The colour white is not without certain racialised freighting. Afterall, both Grant’s mother and uncle had come to the UK from Trinidad and the artist recalls the complex relationship to all the dominant signifiers of England and Empire –– Enid Blyton, country walks, feeding swans in the park–– that his mother and uncle faced and negotiated. But as ever in Grant’s work, no one form, colour or reference predominates over the other, they are all mixed up and animated together, as if we were flicking back and forth the pages of a scrap book.  It is a visual reminder that power or indeed meaning can never be totalising; they can be dismembered and remembered into fractals of other senses and meanings. 

 

These shifting moods and colours give their work an atmospheric quality, where atmosphere has the paradoxical quality of being both palpably visceral and oddly elusive, associational and mysterious.  For example, in Alsop’s Memory Loss (2024), a cloaked figure stands or hides awkwardly behind a lamppost set against a furious and sulphurous sky that seems to congeal, bringing this distant space right into the foreground with its thick painterly texture.  Alsop’s work reminds us that atmosphere is not simply a static backdrop against which human activities unfold but is a dynamic force that we are deeply embedded within.  This sense of space and atmosphere is evoked, albeit claustrophobically, in Hunky Dory, where Alsop paints the mottled bluish, greenish white of  what is a reference to a plaster wall (perhaps thick with damp and moulding organic life) with black marks that are based on the fake beams of a mock Tudor house. It is a work that is at once a vision of sodden, suburban England and one that is surprising like a piece of canonical abstraction. In another work, Ghost (2023), he paints a no-nonsense bench of the kind a local authority would design against a landscape that is lit up as if by the headlights of a car, turning it into a swarm of colours, eerie and close, like the wallpaper in a Vuillard painting of an interior.    For Foster too,  painting has the capacity to play with the ambiguity of atmosphere.  In Then to Now (2012), he uses watercolour, a medium as aqueous as the faint memory it traces of two figures –– himself and his mother –– to suggest they are either emerging or disappearing into the white of the paper. And in the painting Circular Time (2024), we find a figure almost materialising or dematerialising, an amorphous body latent with either power or pathetic vulnerability. Atmospheric as a cloud, this creature is apparently suspended between boldness and inebriation, its enormous hand and dynamic swagger suggestive of either spectre or giant.

 

Ambiguity involves this state of suspension between states.  Suspension can be understood not so much as a pause as a stretching, as the word’s etymology implies. It disrupts a linear approach to time in the same way that passages of description do not so much drive narrative forward as draw it out, compelling readers to reflect on the quality of the text as much as its plot and meaning.  As the philosopher Lars Spuyboeck puts it, suspension is a state of ambiguity and indeterminacy, the ‘jump that has not yet landed.’[3]

 

It is no surprise then that the artists chose to title their exhibition with a line from the film Rear Window, directed by one of the great masters of suspension Alfred Hitchcock: ‘Tell me everything you saw and what you think it means’. Just before Grace Kelly delivers this line, she says, ‘Let us start from the beginning again’, told with a frisson of pleasure, as if the process of looking and describing is one that can never be done with, that the very suspense of not-knowing and not-seeing everything is one which she–– and we as audiences –- want to experience again and again, with no resolution and no end.   Afterall, if all is said and done, what more is there to see?  

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