Wakefield-based artist Zoë Carlon’s solo exhibition of new paintings at South Parade in East London is playful and evocative. I felt the paintings call to me, inviting me into a series of intimate scenes, into the interior spaces of an imagination wandering in solitude. I didn’t feel I belonged in these places, but that I was being allowed temporary access for an encounter.
Where and When You Are coincides with the publication of a selection of photographs taken by Carlon, Photographs 2020-2023. These represent a key part of her practice and process. They are mostly peopleless, other than a hand holding a phone, the back of a lone bus passenger or the faint reflection of the artist in a window. They show an acute observation of mundane scenes, asking us to reconsider what we are looking at.
The paintings shown here were made as a series for the exhibition. The curation gives liberal space to each of the works and, by being hung in such a way that there is a small gap and shadow between the wall and work, attention is drawn to the aluminium support and its physical depth as well as the nature of its flat surface and its relationship with the paint, held within crisp corners and edges. Carlon makes the deliberate choice of using aluminium largely because the surface is resistant and does not absorb the paint, such that she does not feel she is having to fight against it. This allows a certain honesty; all the paint is visible above the surface, which also allows a clearer application of layers and for the fullness of the paint, its stroke, colour and texture, to sit there and remain visible.
In the accompanying text, Carlon writes of attention and the monetisation of attention in the present day. She suggests there is a pressure to be quick, responsive and continually productive, and writes that the ‘slow unfolding of the paintings in their viewing is an invitation to take time.’ With a certain stepping back and with the creation of a receptive space we might become aware of things previously unnoticed. Attentive to the object in its environment, Carlon facilitates an exchange, allowing the object to speak.
The harnessing of attention and making this active and tangible appears fundamental in this series of works. The noun ‘attention’ originates from the Latin verb attendere meaning ‘to attend’ or ‘to stretch toward’, from ad (‘to/ towards’) and tendere (‘stretch’). In its origins then, this word indicates an extension outwards, a reaching towards some object in order to be really there in its presence. The Oxford English Dictionary’s primary definition says it means the ‘earnest direction of mind’, suggesting that the ‘stretch toward’, from mind to object, contains something purposeful and ordered about it; it is not wandering or by chance. Carlon’s paintings, however, do seem to capture scenes by chance; fleeting moments that have been grasped by a freer or more open gaze, receptive too to the space that enables an encounter with objects. To be attentive is also to be receptive. The words that frequently accompany ‘attention’ imply exchange, giving and taking, arriving and leaving: as a currency (to pay attention), as a possession (to have, give, lose), as unpredictable, elusive and impersonal (to catch, draw, come to). Attention is a possession and a payment; it is an elusive thing that has to be caught. It is always a movement between, a process, a loss as something else is won.
This exchange is intercepted by Carlon, with bustling brushstrokes that catch and anticipate movement. Each of the works here are void of people but depict spaces for people or contain evidence of the previous presence of people: seats, windows, flowers in pots or vases. They also seem to await the future presence of people, with this sense of waiting emphasised by the mark-making that plays between control and release. It reminds me of the feeling of being the last to leave a theatre auditorium, when no one remains on-stage and no one remains to look at the stage, but the props are still there, poised. In the accompanying exhibition text, Carlon asks what happens when the paintings are left alone in the studio, contemplating them as objects waiting to move and grow in themselves.
Our position of observation and participation in these paintings varies. Sometimes we are situated on the interior side of windows, on the inside looking out – such as where we see from the perspective of the driver of a car. Elsewhere, a curtain is held aside to allow us to look inside at a series of tables. There is, in several of the works, a pointed ambiguity as to where the viewer is positioned and where the frame of the scene is located, but in each case it seems we are within the painting.
‘Three Tables’ (2024) gives a sense of the theatrical and contemplates the framing of painted space: a curtain falls across the foreground and a series of three tables recede into the background in careful perspective. In contrast with the circular tables and folds of the falling cloth of the curtain, the straight line of some kind of frame cuts across the left, gesturing towards the edges of the painting itself. The brushstrokes dance about the surface in an impressionistic evocation of movement and light. This is perhaps the result of attentive consideration of the brushstroke’s direction, as well as the hard surface of the aluminium that allows the paint to flow. There is also an attention to texture through pattern, with the thin lines of the patterned curtain contrasting with the suggestion of tiles in a freer stroke. In parts, the surface is completely obscured by paint; in others, the lines of the brush are visible, strokes crossing each other, creating a mesh of texture where parts of the aluminium show through.
A consideration of frames and framing is also apparent in ‘Two Windows’ (2024), which places the viewer in an ambiguous position: it is uncertain which of the two windows looks to the outside, or if one is a reflection. In the foreground is a window frame which looks onto a green plant, a large dark space with dappled light and glimpses of green, and then a distant second window which looks onto what could be a tree and birdfeeder in very small detail. The space could be a series of windows whose function has been turned inside-out, enclosing an ambiguously interior or exterior space. In ‘Entrance’ (2024), the space is also ambiguous: it could depict a window, mirror or door, and these might all exchange roles. There is a subtle resemblance in the work to the space of Manet’s ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergères’ (1882), perhaps evoked by the sense there may be a mirror, a dining space of some kind, and by the more abstract circular shapes which could be lights or architectural forms. A broader and looser brushstroke behind two of the frames gesture back to the materiality of painting.
‘Deck Lounge’ (2024) presents another peculiar space, depicting the interior of a cruise ship, and appears to be painted in two parts: an upper part with straight and sharp lines marking the windows and wall, and a contrasting part below with curved armchairs and an uneven sloping table, perhaps drawing attention to its place on the oscillating floor of a ship. These two parts might belong to separate worlds, pushed together in the manner of a collage. This emphasises its strangeness, this interior space out at sea, which is on the one hand motionless but also on the cusp of movement. This setting is included in Photographs 2020-2023, showing us that the strange space is indeed real and that Carlon’s painting observes, frames and holds its subtle strangeness effectively, offering it out to us.
Another work capturing spaces that have been forced together is ‘Commute’ (2024). The outside trees, grass and sky are evoked in quick, sketch-like brushstrokes, whilst the interior of the car, its driving wheel and dashboard are portrayed with sharp distinctiveness. The painting ‘Sweet Peas’ (2024) has an affinity with the trees of ‘Commute’, with the flowers depicted with a looser hand and containing few strokes. Of this piece, Carlon writes: ‘Sweet peas from the garden in a jar on the table didn’t warrant over work. In that attempt to harness a fleeting moment the paint was put down quickly, areas of the aluminium surface left to contribute to the forms. It could only have happened though because of the others before it.’ This suggests a dependency and continuity in this series of works, where one follows the other and the spaces and objects of the paintings are also in dialogue. The idea that the paint might imitate and capture the brevity of a passing instant might encourage us to look at the other works as fleeting too, even when a scene looks more permanent than flowers in a jar.
This reflects upon the nature of our attention, which perhaps only lives in a mediatory space between person and object, never belonging to either. In his book Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Maurice Merleau-Ponty gives a sense of this confusing nature, suggesting that attention works in a direction that is somehow cyclical, writing that it is the ‘function which reveals [unperceived sensations] as a searchlight shows up objects pre-existing in the darkness’. Attention is a process, a movement. The object already exists, but the word, the paint, the light, the attention, brings it to consciousness, which then becomes aware of the previous reach for the object, the process by which the mind became aware of it. The act of painting is itself inevitably an act of attention.
Carlon’s framed observations play in the ambiguous space of attention as process, offering strange but true scenes that appear in frontier zones, held out to our own attention to unfold before us. The painted spaces await movement; they await our active participation.
Gertrude Gibbons is a writer based in York and London.
Zoë Carlon: Where and When You Are is on at South Parade, London, from 3 October to 9 November 2024.
This review is supported by South Parade.
Published 04.11.2024 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews
1,720 words
