Rufus Newell’s debut solo show, Hercules and His Club, is bursting with energy. The recipient of the Joan Day Painting Bursary, Newell has created a rich and engaging body of work, with generous lashings of colour using oil bars, oil paint and pastels. The result is a series of new and reworked drawings and paintings, neatly brought together in South Square’s intimate gallery spaces. Creating drawings in both 2D and 3D, Newell combines materials to create layered surfaces that are full of emotional depth and pictorial complexity. Each time he returns to a particular piece, adding layers and colours and a density of materials, a new story is created. In this way, each work contains traces of his explorative working method.
Many of the works exude colour and viscosity, however a large black and white line drawing, featuring a reclining figure clutching a large white vessel, takes up an entire wall. Placed in the final room, this simple, gestural drawing provides a respite from the colour and dense imagery that characterise the rest of the exhibition. Newell employs a kind of ‘pastel ferocity’, with dismembered limbs and severed heads featuring in many works, often positioned within a landscape. In one composition, the forearms of a pink and white musclebound figure are absent, while a number of amputated arms and legs lay against a heavy black background.
As the title of the exhibition suggests, Newell is influenced by the broken and often incomplete forms of classical Greek sculpture, and its mythological resonance.Whilst relatively traditional in medium and technique, the figurative nature of many of Newell’s works cleverly elude to the historical tradition of recording life and surroundings through drawing and painting. The viewer is invited to contemplate each work and its narrative relationship to the whole: the musclebound man takes a fighting stance but appears to be waiting on the side lines; the black-and-white figure reclines peacefully in a glade; six very distinct busts are arranged on a canvas as if in conversation; and four semi-reclined figures rest in a yellow grassy landscape. The guiding principles of his practice, to ‘reveal, create, record’, further explicate his desire to combine and layer the immediacy of the present with echoes of the distant past
Rufus Newell: Hercules and his Club is at South Square, Thornton, Bradford until 26 June 2016.
Installation photo by the author.
Abi Mitchell is a programmer and writer based in West Yorkshire.
Published 15.06.2016 by Lara Eggleton in Reviews
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