About the exhibition
I've been working with Freeny Yianni and Close Ltd since about 2011 I think, and it's been a fantastic journey. Recently she's had the opportunity to programme regular events at the Brewhouse Gallery in Taunton, close to her adopted home in Somerset, and so as an associate of her project, I relished the chance to put on a substantial show of works in the main gallery, alongside a series of print works in the cafe and bar areas.
Amazingly, we also managed to coincide the opening night with an incredible performance by the Akram Khan Dance Company, perhaps the most exciting contemporary troupe working in the UK today.
Days later the Coronavirus struck, and the show closed unexpectedly, with a second brief opening later in the summer as the virus relented for a short while.
It's always a joy to work with Freeny. She brings a supremely focused understanding of how to underhang a space for maximum effect, that I'm in awe of. If you believe, and you should, that a folio of work is always improved by removing the weakest piece, then Freeny's approach to installation will appeal to you. She has a clarity of view that is really rare in a world where space is always at a premium, and the temptation to pack in too much content permeates our lives at every turn.
I'd recommend a visit to Close Ltd, her project space in Hatch Beauchamp, it'll remind you why you fell in love with the arts in the first place.
Work in situ
Modular Locus, a solo show at the Brewhouse Gallery
Chuck Elliott has selected a little over twenty works to be exhibited at the Brewhouse Gallery in Taunton, in conjunction with the launch of his new book 12. The selection encompasses many of the more intriguing works to come out of his studio over the past twelve years.
Initially based in London’s Soho, Chuck moved his studio to Bristol in 2005 and has been working full time on his sublime studies in liquid geometry ever since. He enjoys a reputation as one of the UK’s foremost digital printmakers and has exhibited works in over 200 shows and events both in the UK and internationally.
Chuck Elliott produces works that hover between traditional printmaking, contemporary abstract photography, and the digital realm. Using the latest systems based drawing tools, he draws, sculpts, and refines works that are concerned with the most fundamental building blocks available to the artist; colour, line, form, and light.
Eschewing direct representation in favour of a more poetic approach, pieces are drawn from scratch, initially by hand, and later on screen, before being returned to the material world as large format laser exposed C-type photographic prints.
More recently he has also been experimenting with inked editions on paper, which offer an interesting counterpoint to the darkroom techniques involved in camera less photographic printmaking.
Works vary from fairly minimal studies to more complex sculptural drawings, taking inspiration from music, architecture, design, and nature as the basis for explorations into line, colour, and form.
Clearly informed by the C20th works of Naum Gabo, Renzo Piano, Kandinsky, Bridget Riley or Missoni; amongst many others who have worked with colour and abstraction as key components of their practice; Chuck nevertheless maintains that his works are figured by a love of maths, and in that sense take inspiration from number systems and the way maths defines and generates growth in the natural world all around us, and forms the basis for studies that move almost kinetically across the picture plane.
Through his work Chuck Elliott is reinterpreting the essence of abstract fine art printmaking for the digital age.
Pure logical progression.
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Curated by Freeny Yianni and Close Ltd, in association with The Brewhouse.
In conversation with Freeny Yianni, March 2020
FY Tell us a bit about your approach to your work. How would you describe it? What are you looking for in a subject? How has your style developed, and what matters to you?
CE The digital offers a host of revolutionary options, many of which revolve around the idea of the edit, and the remix. Effectively you can draw, colour and model, and then refine, edit and remix, to arrive at images that simply weren’t possible to create before the digital revolution.
I like the idea that the work is made using contemporary tools, and I love the ability it gives me to fine-tune and nuance the images. To my mind, if art is about anything at all, and that is debatable, it should at least speak of and about its own time.
Ultimately I see the pieces as visual poems, riffing on the most basic of elements, line, colour, light and form. They’re open to individual interpretation of course, it’s said that art exists in the space between the work and the viewer and that it is, therefore, critical to leave enough space in that gap for the art to come alive. In that sense, it may be the viewer who activates the work in that moment of engagement, in their imagination, not the artists.
What matters to me is the total journey. I’m interested in the passage of time, the lived arc of the artist’s life, my life. For many years I saw this as an almost mythological construct, in part because of the way art history encourages us to view the artist as seer. But of course, that is not the case. What the artist does do, that is unusual within our society I think, is remove themselves from the mainstream world of work, and instead spend time exploring ideas around making, as a day to day practice, with all that entails…. read more…
Link to exhibited works
