JUDY PARKINSON AXIS : LONDON MILANO
FABRICCA DEL VAPORE, MILAN DECEMBER 2017 – MARCH 2018

Andrea Vento former Director of Cultural Promotion in the city of Milan invited
Alan Rankle to curate an exhibition of artists from Britain to launch his sensational
new project space Tracce di Vapore at the Arts Centre Fabbrica del Vapore.

Alan Rankle as artist curator conjures up unanticipated revelations and multi layered
connections, while musing on the very definition of the work, indeed the duty, of the
fine artist. This curatorial role allows Rankle to reject any previous exhibition
rulebook and use his own practice as a starting point to declare an entirely personal
and, it must be said, emotional approach. Rankle demonstrates here how much he
relishes special and open-minded engagements with artists of all ages, methods and
messages. He has a wide network of artist friends and collectors and a unique ability
to appreciate his peers. And here we are privileged to view at first hand his
generosity of spirit as a fine artist, and to make sometimes strange and unexpected
connections, with more than a few contradictions and shocks. This is an exhibition
curated with the heart of an artist. This exhibition is an environmental manifesto;
one of dark discovery that starts in the light, delves into nightmare territory, before
concluding with brightness in the future - we hope.

To provide the element of randomness associated with his own painting
collaborations Rankle asked Claudia De Grandi an artist with an academic
background in Transnational Art to co-curate the project and work closely on
the selection of artists who’s works interacting in the gallery would provide a
subtly volatile and thought provoking collective. As the inaugural exhibition at
Trecce di Vapore Axis: London Milano 2017 also provides a considered choice of
some of the most crucial art currently on the London scene.

It begins with an optimistic prelude as humankind lives in peace in the natural world.
Opening the show is Matthew Radford’s exquisitely rendered Rose, a singularly
untainted and ostensibly innocent work by an artist known for his razor sharp
commentaries on urban life. Walter & Zoniel’s intense searchings and revelations of
the vastness of the nature they inhabit, and its essence to the infinite possibilities for
expansion, and the sublime nature of life and the human condition. A visionary
canvas by the young artist Rebecca Youssefi provides a figurative, hope filled, focal
point in the room. Claudia De Grandi’s serene colour field canvases swoop into
infinite, infinitesimal voids, while Rankle’s own contribution, a large diptych of a
seemingly pastoral scene becomes on closer inspection a pointer to the panic
searing across the natural environment.

Step away from the natural world, further into the dream state towards the hard
margins of the urban. Where is the sun? What have we done?
Here are Matthew Radford’s gridded and abstracted figurative paintings as
snapshots of a continuous, busy world of human activity. Often his works are
cityscapes and urban landscapes populated by apparently focused and intently

hurrying figures. In a recent energetic series of studies he has turned to illustrating
the crazy condition of supermarket shelves, liberating the classic still life from stasis.
In Stephen Newton’s paintings one feels the disturbed presence of an infinitely
despairing narrator in the uncomfortably desolate world of a claustrophobic stage
set. Newton has been described by the renowned New York critic and philosopher
Donald Kuspit as “one of the best painters painting in the world today” who may
well be right. Should we worry?

Step further down the rabbit hole and it gets dark, really dark.
Oska Lappin’s latest work Scary Amerika, a narrative told in mixed media woodcuts
and poetry, is a direct response to the perceived mendacity and misogyny in the
White House. Featuring her usual congregation of wildly drawn, off the wall
characters, memories of a less horrific country are informed by naked hippy mothers
and beatnik fathers, postpunk youth ‘fast-forwarded like Brigadoon into an
increasingly evident dystopian future’.

Cat Roissetter distresses, disfigures, blots, scratches, abandons her paper then
scoops it up from dust filled corners. Her images likewise are removed with scalpel
precision from the safety of context and her neurotic observations allow the images
to degenerate. The viewer makes a visitation to a long abandoned house, vainly
looking for clues to the once happy world that time has erased. Everything is lost,
but what horror is there to discover in the opacity?

Plenty it would seem. In Jake and Dinos Chapman’s finely worked etching The Birth
of Ideas multifarious forms of fantastical embryonic forms, swarms of miniscule
insects and entrails float unmoored through space. This work sees the Chapmans at
their most extreme and complex.

Charlotte Snook deals with different darknesses and re-imaginings. Her works hark
back to the 17 th century and come up to date with her refrains chasing each other,
mutating and exposing fresh human vulnerabilities.
Rankle brings a longtime collaborator Kirsten Reynolds back to Milan. While she
paints with light and plays with long exposures, her epic images are dark and
cavernous with alarming visceral resonance and immediacy.
Catherine Balet’s photographs lead us emerging from the dark blinking in that nether
stage between sleep and wakefulness, unsure where we are, with familiar ghostly
compositions and historic, but strangely modern tableaus lit with computer screens
and cellphones as we revert to our selfie centred present.

Tim Craven brings us back to the beauty of the natural world with his explorations
into how painting and photography relate to each other through his musings on
romantic images of trees with their spatial dramas, abstract shapes and dynamic
verticals.

 

All those unassailable subjects that formed our world view in our youth; geography,
history, economics, are now being reshaped. Uncertainties besiege the future.
Listen to the beating heart of the artist.