Paintings
EDWARD WALLACE
There is an element of fixation in all of Edward Wallace’s work. It is the fixation of an artist thoroughly absorbed by his craft and meticulously polishing the minutiae of his process. It is also a fixation with a single idea being explored on two-dimensional surfaces and in three-dimensional forms. The result of such singular focus and rigour is work that is repetitive in nature, and yet the presence of the artist is always felt – most notably as the magician with the wicked wit who has vanished in a cloud of smoke after conjuring brushstrokes from a canvas and holding them in mid-air. But Edward is also present in his paintings – in the residual colours seeping into the crevices left between monochromatic shapes. In these paintings Edward Wallace describes shapes with precision but behaves entirely intuitively towards decisions like colour and what diagrammatic figure will finally be formed. There is the sense of an artist working out his obsessions through the discipline of methodology, but that these desires are so deeply seeded that no amount of structure can fully nullify their presence on the canvas.
The works in this show are aimed at expanding the language of sculpture through the medium of painting by exploring the spatial realities that both are subject to. In several of Edward’s paintings the dominant figure is the triangle. These planes of colour advance and retreat, extend from the canvas to entrap you in the confines of their angularity and at once become two-dimensional again. These designs adhere to strict graphic conventions yet they take on a life of their own in the mind of the viewer – they could be a mapping of the constellations or an attempt to map a new horizon over that adumbration in the distance that exists as much in our imagination as it does in our field of vision. In fact Edward forces us to view his work in a new way by placing as many impediments as possible in the distance between the viewer and the artwork, further complicating an already challenging relationship. To develop this idea the artist has positioned his sculpture (brushstrokes cast in wax) in relation to the paintings so that the effect of their proximity disturbs the way in which the retina processes colour.
It could be said of every piece in this show, that it is at once a painting and a sculpture – that every work is ‘animated’. This is especially true of the sculptural painting ‘Untitled’ (2008) (wooden segments covered in black and white striped lycra and pieced together to form a square) a three-dimensional plateau that undulates and swarms depending on how the light falls upon it. Much of Edward’s early work dealt with his interest in animation. The challenge the artist has set himself is to reign in this world of illimitable possibilities by animating painting through sculpture. Edward’s casts of brushstrokes put one in mind of a claymation figure that has morphed from a single ball of plasticine or indeed the demonic mop-heads that were summoned by their master to do his bidding in Walt Disney’sThe Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Either way they are an aberration both in terms of their visual intrusiveness and their lack of precedent. The casts of these brushstrokes are like casts of the essence of Edward Wallace’s work – uncanny, unsettling, and undertaken with a great sense of dedication, by an artist with a great sense of humour.
