About the exhibition
I got to know James Freeman during a period of time when I was doing a certain amount of front of house work at the fairs, mostly with the Transistor Project, and as a result of numerous conversations, we started to work together on occasional projects, including exhibiting work at the London Book Fair, and putting together this two man show, TouchScreen, at James’ Upper Street gallery in Islington.
His decision to juxtapose the work with Matt Small's highly textured paintings made for a combination that I think worked really well. There’s something compelling about combining two really quite dissimilar elements in a single space that allows each of them to spark off the other, to good effect.
It’s testimony to the gallery’s convincing curatorial approach that the show was featured as one of Mutual Art’s 10 exhibitions to see - you can view the feature on Mutual Art here ⟶
Work in situ
TouchScreen
Foreword by James Freeman, February 2014
Look around you in a public place, and almost everyone will be somewhere else, lost in their own virtual otherwhere. This is the digital future: absent communication.
TouchScreen sets out to look at that gap we fall into between the physical and the virtual, using the work of two very different artists: Matthew Small, a painter of raw tactile portraits of urban youth, and Chuck Elliott, a digital artist who gives structure and colour to the digital ether. Somewhere in between is where we spend an increasing part of our lives - somewhere between touch and the screen.
Chuck Elliot’s digital paintings have a slickness and glow that is as enticing as a next gen smartphone. Chuck starts from a base of logical algorithms, and develops exquisite, lyrical patternings that glow in a myriad of vivid colours. A bit like music turned into light, his paintings have a hypnotic quality that somehow reflects how emotive technology has become a part of our daily lives. The impulse to connect, the desire to grab the phone and touch the screen: Chuck’s paintings are like the urge to slide into cyberspace.
Link to associated works
