Constructure

Simon Haddock and Matthew Swift

15 January – 13 February 2010

Opening Thursday 14 January 6-9pm

Standpoint is proud to present ‘Constructure’: a sideways look at ideas of construction, fragmentation and illusion. Simon Haddock and Matthew Swift’s visual language shares a desire for complex integration and constructivist rigour that is also very alive to a playful and experiential sense of the city: its forms, solidities and speeds. While being a world away from the dogmatic thrusts and parries of Futurism, their work carries a similar sense of possibility, or architectural ‘becoming’.

The title of the show plays on Structuralism’s idea of the complex system of interrelated parts, and also constructivist theory’s ‘accommodation and assimilation’: the idea the individual builds structures of meaning or understanding that co-exist and interrelate rather than replace one another. The paintings and sculptural installations that Haddock and Swift make are indeed complex: they orchestrate sometimes awkward differences in both material and form, creating causative fields and linear tangles of not-quite-narrative drive.

Simon Haddock

Simon Haddock’s new paintings condense the energy and tempo of different places, to re-present them, not through mimesis, but through memory and accumulation. Working for the first time on canvas, his mark making becomes more spontaneous and exuberant. The signature, routed forms from his work on solid surfaces as illusory cuts and fissures, and compete with physical holes drilled into the flesh of the work.

Haddock keeps his architectural calligraphies in a state of constant flux, his paintings balance the impulse to contain and comprehend against the desire to surrender to fleeting dissolution. The points of departure for Haddock’s work are largely subsumed by energetic rays and spatial games; yet the ‘space’ of his work clearly echoes a world of out of town shopping centres, multi-storey car parks and luminous motorway signage; internalised as a kind of science fiction of the everyday. His work plays on a mythology of modern experience that is opened up and yet ambiguous. It is the translation of experience that interests him: the explosiveness of a life that is framed by modernity - not the clean facade, but a shifting reality of heightened disquiet.

Simon Haddock is a graduate of the RA. He has shown with Paton, Zwemmer and Vertigo Galleries. More recently he has shown at Exeter Phoenix and The Studio Glenda Cinquegrana, Milan. He also makes installations in collaboration with sculptor Stuart Chubb: they showed Daedalus at Standpoint in 2008 (Into the Fold).

Matthew Swift

Matthew Swift uses photographic images as starting points for three-dimensional constructions.  The photographs are selected for their formal qualities, images that suggest a pivotal point between a record of reality and the starting point for something more abstract.  The geometric fragmentation of a grey pavement spotted with blotches of chewing gum strangely conveys a subdued beauty.  A discarded metal gate, painted in primary colours, situated behind a mesh fence, plays with ideas of grids, layering, repetition and pattern. 

Swift’s is a deft language of collage-installation with a painterly sensitivity to colour. His works respond to the architectural features and furniture of the space they inhabit. Where the photographs are taken and what they are of also deeply affect how the work develops, grows and is given meaning.  The fragmented pavement was taken outside Kings Cross station, across which thousands of people walk every day. For Standpoint he creates a large new piece, linking this photograph, which has at its heart a metal manhole cover, via a built, rickety pier-like structure, constructed of triangles and acute/oblique angles that reflect its divisions, and finally arrive at a real, albeit painted over, manhole cover in the floor of the gallery. Other pieces occupy the gallery throughout its rooms: a viral architecture, emerging from significant details and oddities that the Standpoint gallery space is so full of.

Matthew Swift graduated from Central/St Martins in 1989 with a degree in theatre design and from New York University with a MFA in 1999. He was a Florence Trust resident from 2007-8. His solo show Interrupted Spaces was at Madame Lillies in May 2009. He has also had several solo shows in Australia.

Contact Fiona MacDonald: 0207 739 4921 / standpointgallery@btconnect.com

Standpoint Gallery, 45 Coronet Street, London N1 6HD

Wednesday – Saturday, 12-6pm

Tube: Old Street, Exit 2 (Northern Line – Bank Branch)

Buses: 55, 67, 149, 242, 243