Plinth

Annely Juda’s programme has long been dedicated to constructivist, concrete, and system-based works of art. Minimal interventions can sometimes get a bad rap for being impenetrable or for appearing so simple that ‘my child could do that’ (I’d like to see them try…), but done well, they can also be mesmerising. I once had a bit of a ‘moment’ whilst engrossed in a work by Alan Charlton at Annely Juda. I was trying to figure out why unprimed canvas combined with primed canvas was really setting me off, and whether or not I could and recreate this in the studio. My intense engagement with Alan was abruptly interrupted by an unfamiliar man trying to tell me how they were made. Moment over, I swiftly moved on…

The latest show at Annely Juda is by François Morellet, a French artist who died in 2016 at the age of 90. In keeping with the gallery’s programme, Morellet abandoned the image early on in his career and turned to abstraction in support of minimal aesthetics, dictated by chance and mathematical calculations.

The show includes works made of fluorescent tubes, canvases that lift away from the wall, painted panels of drawn lines and screen-printed surfaces of thin black lines that seem to fall in front of the white surface like the needles of a pine. Call me a traditionalist, but I was disappointed to learn that many of the works are screen-printed and not painted by hand. There is something about the hand acting as machine that has always presented such humanity within minimal aesthetics. The slight wobble of the line from a lapse in concentration that leads to mistakes, obliterated but seen, is what gives the work sparkle.

The works that use fluorescent lighting interest me the least. After Duchamp signed ‘R Mutt’ onto a urinal in 1917 anything existing in the world as object or material joined the ranks of oil paint, clay, photography, print, etc, as means to make art. But like any medium, the artist's use of it must be transformative. To use something that has not been used before is not interesting in itself, it’s still what you do with it that matters. Morellet began using fluorescent tubes in the early 1960’s, around the same time Dan Flavin had his ‘light bulb’ moment, but whereas Flavin takes advantage of the nature of his medium through his use of colour, placement, and its reaching effect into the architecture it inhabits, Morellet’s light works just seem to say… Look! I’m using fluorescent light tubes!

However, there is one room in the exhibition that feels like a complete exorcism of an idea. Three works each hold a wall in a side room. A square pristine white canvas is rotated to have its points to the floor and ceiling. The edges of the canvas are black. On the middle wall two canvases seem to wrestle themselves from the wall as they attempt to shudder the black marks from their surface, which perfectly chart the limits of their dimensions. Shadow is a great friend to this work. Its presence as tone, shape, and maker of depth, elevates the piece into the category of ‘artwork that repeats on the mind after you have left the gallery’. A rare occurrence in my book.

A badly filled hole is an unfortunate but enjoyable remnant of an adjustment during install. It is impossible not to notice the histories of the hang when the work is as minimal as this. Any slight blip in the white expanse locates the eye.

The third wall in this room appears to have caught the black edges of the canvas on the opposite wall as the frame appears to have broken in two as it hit the wall. Such well hung rooms are rewarding, they are simultaneously surprising and yet make sense.

Whatever the impetus, art of minimal aesthetics can be challenging in terms of engagement. The idea submitted by the artist can appear so complete, so confident and so proficient, that as viewers, we may feel very little space has been left for our own interpretation. But if done well, the economy of means should bring us in, rather than keep us out. When so little is expressed in terms of mark and gesture, what is committed must be exceedingly succinct in terms of the concept it conveys. The repetition of mark or form cannot be a pattern, it must be philosophy. Not a surface covered but an idea mapped out. From simplicity comes complexity.

Order is something many of us deeply crave. To make sense of the world, to file, to categorise, to find comfort in a system we have created and chosen to be a part of, rather than adhere to one enforced upon us. These are the artworks the artist has chosen to make.

We are surrounded by systems, the bricks of the floor, the slates on a fence, the buttons on the keyboard, the uniform lines of text it punches out. To recreate artworks of systems is surprisingly close to our everyday, and in contrast to the current trend for banally whimsical, figurative oil painting, it is refreshing to see the universal truth of the concrete routine.

By Rose Davey