23 March–21 April 2012
Private view:
22 March 7–9pm
2 Omega Place, Kings Cross London
All Visual Arts are proud to present their first solo show by British artist Reece Jones. Staged across the 5000 square foot warehouse in Kings Cross, Control Test represents the culmination of a series of works developed over the past two years.
Jones creates charcoal drawings on an unusually large scale. Essentially process based, they are developed using a system of application and erasure. Building up multiple layers only to systematically erode them using glass papers. Responding to the new-found nuances of surface, tonality and description created by this aggressive intervention, he then re-builds the images only to repeat the process until ‘resolution’.
Elements of the current exhibition were first shown at the Triumph Gallery in Moscow in June 2010 and the title for the show refers to the recurring motif of a ‘blank’ rectilinear screen that appears throughout the work. This negative space inhabits a series of shifting landscapes operating as a ‘constant’ or ‘control element’ against which these ever changing topographies are measured. The screens may also be considered to be postmodern monuments, light sources and formal devices whose characteristics dictate the composition and resonance of the works.
Reference points are many and varied and explore the highly charged territory that exists between cinema, landscape and interventional art. References to film (Stanley Kubrick, Andrei Tarkovsky), photography (Hiroshi Sugimoto), Land Art (Michael Helzer, Robert Smithson, James Turrell) and abstraction (Kazimir Malevich, Mark Rothko) contrast with the more inspirational vision of the Romantic Sublime.
Sampling vistas and themes from American ‘frontiersmen’ such as Kensitt, Church and Ansel Adams, Jones’ constant erosion and re-imposition of surface builds images that are both authoritative and temporal. The collision of stark compositional geometry with invented, organic landscapes challenge what we understand to be ‘actual’ to create instead a hybrid space caught between the real and the imagined.
“For want of a better description I am engaged in making process drawings that develop over time. I am effectively pushing dust around and desperately trying to retain these pure spaces in the midst of all this activity. I love it when the drawing starts to take a different path from the one I had intended. It’s to do with impermanence and fragility and my own personal struggle with that.”—Reece Jones
For “Control Test” enquiries please contact Camilla Cole
www.allvisualarts.org
ccole@allvisualarts.org
+ 44 (0)20 7843 0412
Reece Jones was born in 1976 in Gaberone, Botswana and lives and works in London. He has exhibited extensively internationally, including Polemically Small, Torrance Art Museum and Garboushian Gallery, Los Angeles (2011), Control Test, Triumph Gallery, Moscow (2010), Nowhere Is Here, Drawing Room London & Fruehsorge Contemporary Drawings, Berlin (2008), Maji Yabai! (Fuckin’ Brilliant!), Tokyo Wonder Site, Tokyo (2005), Sympathetic Nerve, Capsule, New York (2004). He co founded the Rockwell Project Space, London in 2003 and is a lecturer in Fine Art at City and Guilds of London Art School.
All Visual Arts is a hybrid arts enterprise founded by art expert Joe La Placa and Mike Platt in October 2008. AVA’s goal is to build a major collection of contemporary art by representing and commissioning new work by the today’s most exciting international developing artists
