About the exhibition
Current was my fourth show at the Catto Gallery in Hampstead. Over the past 7 or 8 years we’ve been putting together good sized solo shows of maybe twenty or thirty new works, every two or three years.
Catto are a hugely convincing gallery. They commission the shows, and totally accept the new body of work each time, no edits, no knock backs. It’s a lovely way to work, effectively each show is a double album of singles, album tracks, remixes and b sides. I hope we’ll continue, and achieve at least EMI's time honoured seven album deal.
For Current I drew a number of new circular studies including Oriel, Rubicon and Solaris, remastered Motorik in a new higher chroma variant, drew Lyric SV which effectively introduces a really loose new technique for articulating the geometry, and made Klint / reDux / jdrbnk as a 3 part study on plexiglass, with a colour system that radiates out from the core. Psyche D was also notable for it’s highly modulated artichoke like structure.
Work in situ
Current, new work by Chuck Elliott
Foreword by Tim Green
What’s the right way to describe a Chuck Elliott work of art? How best to explain the explosion of geometric ideas he commits to his fascinating geometric studies? Well, maybe not by thinking in visual terms at all. Rather, by perceiving them musically.
Chuck himself thinks so. He believes electronic music pioneers are addressing big fundamental questions about form, space and harmony. They are (literally) synthesisers. And so, in a way, is he. “There’s a bridge between the digital techniques I’m using, and the way contemporary sound has been sculpted,” he says. “I like the idea of contemporary abstraction as visually synonymous with the pace and dynamism of modern music.”
In his explanation, Chuck even namechecks the synthesiser that started it all off: the Moog Modular. This was the machine that inspired the mind expanding experimentation of Giorgio Moroder, Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream in the 1970s. It’s not hard to see the visual echoes of these sonic experiments in Chuck’s work.
Another reason Chuck cites the Moog Modular is the name. In this new collection, he is particularly keen to explore the broader idea of modularity. On one level this is obvious. Works such as Klint / reDux / kbrk are constructed of repeating modular motifs.
But Chuck takes the definition of modularity further. Specifically, he says each work can be seen as a modular component (a locus, as he describes it) within a larger whole – whether this ‘whole’ is the show, or the trajectory of his studio over the longer term. He says: “Each work is a single, particular component from a larger narrative. It’s a sequence of works along a path moving through time.”
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Link here to read the full text ⟶
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Tim Green, October 2017
Link to exhibited works
