I have reviewed exhibitions of Alan Rankle’s works a couple of times now, previously I was struck by
how Rankle’s work seemed to really resonate with the spaces of display, particularly in St Barnabas
House when his contemporary take brought their eighteenth century spaces to life. Indeed, Art
Bermondsey Project Space is also resident in a beautiful Georgian house but, in this instance, the
building has no part to play, the gallery provides bare, white wall spaces allowing no conversation
and acting to display Rankle’s solo show of contemporary pieces standing alone.

The show is in three rooms, starting with the main room which you enter from street, a painting
from 2014, Untitled XIX (Herne), sits tucked away in the corner but open to the street view. I like
this painting, it’s not for sale in the show and must be an old favourite, it’s a landscape but, as is the
artist’s practise, it’s more and less than that. Over the scene of a tree overhanging a stream, Rankle
has daubed, smeared and thrown great gashes of paint in black, white and yellow oils. The result is
disruptive and delicate at the same time. Rankle’s black smudge at the top of the painting flows like
tracery giving the image a sense of fragility that is somehow faintly reminiscent of Japanese
landscape art.
Moving into one of the smaller rooms, Rankle’s motif of the stag makes its appearance in many of
the images in here. The artist’s concern with the stag connects to his interest in classical painting,
which often featured the notion of the stag as the hunted beast. Not unexpectedly, Rankle takes the
iconography of the stag as hunted, magnificent beast and upturns it to portray contemporary issues.
As Judy Parkinson comments in the press release, in trying to position Rankle in the contemporary
cannon, she has described him as a ‘landscape conceptualist’, this is reasonable, expect landscape
but in a multifarious way. Take, for instance, Untitled Painting, XI (Herne), 2015, a stag brought
down, has he been hunted, or is he just crossing a stream? Either way, he is neither comfortable,
nor happy, are we meant to read that as a metaphor for contemporary existence, does Rankle’s
comment on classical landscape and notions of tradition also suggest a falling or breakdown in
contemporary society? I’ll leave that thought with you.
Opposite this painting is a set of four much smaller canvases which seem to be a departure from the
other works in the exhibition. In a quite different palette, the series, From Cereste, made in 2016,
has been created in tones of dark golds, black and greys, including gold leaf. They are much more
abstract than his conceptual landscapes, yes, there is a sense of a meeting of land and sky but these
works are much more formless as Rankle interacts with the paint itself leaving behind the physical
structures of the landscape. I really liked the departures that the artist has made here, it feels like a
new development, very small scale, I was particularly drawn to Cereste II, Rankle has used gold leaf
intensely here but beneath it, he shows us the ground, red, peeping through the breaks in the leaf,
once again, we have Rankle working with layering, the multifaceted, glittering gold on the surface,
blood red underneath.

I really enjoyed this showcasing of Alan Rankle, the artist, standing solo and fully on display. As the
press release indicates, as an artist working in the traditional medium of oils he might seem not to
be derived from the provocative nature of Beuys and Keifer but, as can be seen, his is a disruptive
approach that actually comments of the traditions of his medium and what truly comes across is a
balance between traditional techniques and contemporary concerns that leave the viewer intrigued.
I’m fascinated by the departure shown in Cereste, it’ll be interesting to watch how these develop.