Commuters travelling
escalators
at a tube station. The view
from a deserted upstairs landing to the tall stairway below. Two vacant shoe lasts cross their metal feet.
A weather
buoy at
sea; an empty
suburban street
- both becalmed under blue skies. A lawn-mower
pushed purposefully by a man over unseen grass.
The connection between these episodes needs be nothing more than
that they all occur as miniature scenes in a recent painting by
Jeffrey Dennis. Well wrought and intermittently eventful, they
defy a sequence and seem largely untroubled by a theme. Two elements
threaten to impose coherence on this ensemble of enigmas: the
first is the litany of events as recited by the onlooker; the
title, the
Emigrant Returned, is the second. Releasing nebulous notions of absence
and journeying, both putative catalysts trigger this anthology
of disparate elements to detonate at intervals like air-bursts
in the viewer's imagination. But neither succeed in denting the
word-retarding allusiveness of Dennis's imagery which is unusually
good and deserving of similes.
For all the beguiling colour, richness and charm of his work,
Dennis creates some of the most unsettling paintings around. Alongside
a poet's unmistaking eye for chord-striking detail, he displays
an evocative wistfulness the targets the awkward, compromised
and unconquerable that make up human life. Tempered by the generous
deployment of Ealingesque humour, Dennis attempts neither to celebrate
the chore and tragedy of everyday nor to transcend it, but just
to acknowledge it. He achieves this with originality and a humanity
rare to contemporary painting.
While he depicts scenes with figurative imagery, Dennis avoids
the conventions of a narrative painting. In place of a story line,
he takes different routes to a world where meaning appears to
be obscured. North
and East
employs blistering economy of means. A small painting from 1992,
it includes two distinct scenes or vignettes. On the left a man
walks with a child (his family?) to the curb of an urban street.
Across a stretch of open territory that is the picture's surface
is the second view where the massive glazed gable-end of a station
shed rises above the deserted slip road to some lock-ups beneath
the railway arches. In this case the title fuels rather than dispels
the mystery of this conjunction.
In Dennis's larger paintings, visual material spills from the
proliferation of these tiny, unmatched scenes. As if to underline
their disparity, viewpoints change, scales vary and space is constantly
interrupted, juggling near and far. In their enchanting, mind-drifting
reluctance to loiter around one idea, Dennis's pictures can project
an image of the world as a source of diversions. Events are heavily
shaded into an ambiguity that leads to confusion and bewilderment
- are they memories of the past or scoops into the present? Fantasy
or reality? Comic capery or heroics of the absurd?
As unexpected as the array of images is the strangeness of their
setting, an effervescence of bubble-like circles which resembles
a scummy fizz or subcutaneous layer. The textures of this engrossing
mass are not fixed - sometimes it is light aerial blue; in other
works it is grassy green or a dense putty-brown hue, like the
cross-section of an Aero bar. Each setting establishes a dominant
colour for the composition, and being decorously bulbous and unremittingly
uniform like a rendered wall, it becomes the trackless territory
in which the individual vistas sit in an uneasy relationship.
For it is hard to deduce whether each cameo is emerging from the
receding fizz or if it is about to be consumed by the rising tide
of it.
The origin and purpose of this device is a further mystery. Dennis
has mentioned an astrophysicist's metaphor that he likes, and
this may offer a clue as to why his paintings look the way they
do. In the metaphor, a systematic survey of vast galaxies was
described as a 'slice through the suds in the kitchen sink'. The
notion of shrinking the universe into the domestic area must have
appealed to Dennis: many of his ideas for paintings spring from
home and his surroundings which he sharply observes.
The allusion to scientific research fits these pictures well.
For while the search for answers turns into a long and in itself
ultimately questionable affair, further puzzles emerge. Small
anonymous figures appear, mostly alone, almost indistinct in this
dense, deep-laid tumescent terrain to the point of merging with
it cell by cell. Baffled by the predicament of these people, the
viewer might also become creepily aware of his own position of
observing their antics as if they were laboratory specimens in
a new environment. There a back-packer scrutinises a map while
other figures appear in all manner of costumes, in shorts perhaps
or a dress suit. One sits expectantly, another leans precariously
forward as if expecting a precipitous drop that we cannot see.
Life in these paintings comes across as somehow out of kilter
with itself. It is prone to random displacements and influenced
by unseen, unexplained forces. Yet against a background of grim
sameness, people respond placidly and make do, their earnest actions
often reduced to folly, foolishness and futile gesture. And where
humour intervenes - as with the man seen practising his swimming
strokes at home while balanced on a kitchen stool - it leavens
rather than misleads. The form these paintings take extends this
disquieting sensation of disorder. Many are constructed from unframed
panels of varying sizes, each attached to the last. The resulting
construction seems to meander over a gallery wall with the waywardness
of a game of dominoes unhampered by rules. Moreover each panel
features not only obscured vignettes in the landscape of suds,
but also a bizarre network of ducts. They resemble sections of
underground pipes, some threaded with cable, that for an undisclosed
reason break the surface every so often in gaping sections. The
framework they suggest exposes itself as a sham, because each
facet of it obstructs function. Like channels that cannot conduct
or bones that will not support, the pipes look incapable of a
function. And the progress of the panels is only towards the next
rectangular board.
The strength of these parts is in their effect on one another.
The half-exhumed broken tubes turn up in Barry's
Rich Hours,
for instance, another multi-parted configuration. Here they shuttle
the eye, and perhaps also the duodecimo figures, around the flaky,
bubbling skin of the painting. Pocket images poke through the
rubble-coloured wall of matter like possible escape routes. Some
lead to the humdrum everyday, others present more exotic possibilities.
There is a downward view of a Hoover
skulking in the corner of a kitchen, flex and hose akimbo on the chequer-pattern
lino; a
patch of lush-leaved cabbages; some Moorish tiling along a wall; a supermarket transaction;
a ruined abbey; glimpses of doorways and a
peopleless street in town; some tube
seat fabric.
The patchwork of events crops up like random diary entries, and
plausibly spans dream, memory, banal reality and boredom.
But meaning remains open; and like its physical structure - a
pattern of panels closing in around an empty centre - the picture
could be extended indefinitely in search of its own ending. The
head of this conga of painted panels never quite joins up with
its tail as it snakes around the wall. Similarly, the action does
not flow continuously, but breaks and shifts. What the ensemble
pointedly lacks is fulfilment, like an advent calendar that has
somehow lost its way to a single moment of revelation. Dennis's
painting forms into a state of being, routed with outstanding
acuity through the undramatic epic of urban life. It provides
an acute definition in the vernacular which is made more deeply
poignant by the irony in the title.
None of which means that Dennis's outlook is world-weary. Rather
there is stoicism in his vision, an encouraging persistence which
can unlock new possibilities. these qualities break into the way
he paints, which is always purposefully and inventively. On the
one hand, there is the painter who is fond of his mannerisms and
who puts obstacles in his own way. He sets up perverse difficulties
and then deals with them. For example, from time to time globs
of impastoed paint disfigure surfaces like unsightly blemishes.
These are painted into and through rather than erased. His handling
is anyway often fluid, almost scruffy but dexterous in its variety,
while his colour and drawing can be as direct as a cartoon comic-book's.
Indeed his sources seem frequently to be drawn from the things
that stimulate and amuse him: from the art of the street, from
music and from cinematic techniques. Idiosyncratic touches appear
knowingly on occasions to undermine his own skill, rendering his
painting awkward and gauche, to rough up, as it were, the 'fine'
in fine art.
Then on the other hand, there is the artist who persists with
ideas and sees them pay dividends. In the past he has painted
on a surface curved like a television screen's. He distorts images
with the delight of a computer graphics operator: they can come
come at the spectator curved and flattened and stretched. But
with each device he makes a wider point to his audience, about
the transmission of information, perhaps, or about our expectations
of a painting. And since the early 1990's, Dennis has moved on
to wrapping a painted surface around an object which is then placed
on the floor or a table top. In a number of these works, scenes
emerge from densely painted base to take three-dimensional form.
In Cello from 1992, the painted
surface covers a tube and the oil can it is joined to. The title
raises musical connotations that the construction seems eagerly
to deny. But Dennis's action prods the mind, as if teasing out
a train of thought about the trick that transforms a mere form
into a object through the agency of art, just as it takes a musician
to create an instrument from a crafted wooden shape.
Dennis's recent exhibition at the Anderson O'Day gallery in London
was his first solo show of depth in England since filling a room
with paintings at the Whitechapel almost eight years earlier.
In this surprisingly long interval Dennis has established a reputation
internationally among curators. He has been included in significant
group shows in Frankfurt and Amsterdam, and has been the subject
of four one-man exhibitions at his dealer's New York Gallery since
1985. The Tate, the Stedelijk, the Arts Council and British Council
possess examples of his work.
Born in Colchester in 1958, he studied painting at the Slade.
His strength became apparent in the mid 1980's with paintings
that were small in scale with flat, impermeable surfaces. They
displayed his interest in tangential musings sparked into life
by a touring imagination. Scenes of an intriguing diversity were
conjured out of bizarre and unpromising points of departure, such
as wallpaper patterns or the colours and forms of food packaging.
In the
Beachcombers,
painted in 1985, there is a screwy logic in the transition from
the background of tomato-red baked beans to a blue, cloud-swept
sky with sea birds circling over a pebbly shore where a man and
woman are scavenging. Then between the two figures a vignette
of a well-stocked grocer's shelves erupts, throwing out spliced
tentacles of camera film though fissures of bean-bedappled cloud
and wrack-strewn shore alike. The picture evolves on the canvas
as a distracted mind scrolls through thoughts; each incident emerges
to displace the last, though not completely. Shape gives rise
to shape - bean begets pebble - and colour generates colour as
hot oranges and browns frustrate the beach-scene's fresh seaside
tones.
In these pictures, Dennis took the imagination for a walk. His
process was no more aimless than it is now; that is, not aimless
at all. In fact they prick like a pin at states of self-absorption,
from the languor of boredom to a poignant alone-ness, that strike
chords in his audience. His pictures are attractive because they
know our own game. Dennis puts his finger on the hypnotic, friendly
allure of fantasy that, largely inconsequential and built over
nothing, distracts us momentarily from something tedious or unpleasant.
Dennis continues
to work in London and lives on the eastern outskirts. William Morris was born nearby and the museum dedicated
to his aims and the work which embodied them commemorates this
fact. The area was changing into a dormitory suburb in Morris's
time, and has since become shadowland as local shops give way
to recession, or to edge-of-town shopping centres which have transformed
it into a place more driven through than stopped at. There is
also a high incidence of Underground stations. These tubes inserted
through glutinous clay drain Dennis's locale daily of commuters,
like those he depicts as a faceless crowd, spilling out of trains
and onto city platforms in his paintings, leaving the streets
as long and empty as the Sunday afternoons of memory. Dennis's
studio is served by that loop at the end of the Central line which,
punctuated by abrupt off-peak terminations, resembles the layout
of his paintings. Station names too resound to an antiquarian
England like gobbets of Mallory.
Morris lies behind much of Dennis's new work. Literally, for in
many cases Morris's ornate floral wallpaper designs provided Dennis
with a starting point he is fond of. Acanthus leaves and chrysanthemum
stalks peep through the foaming overlay at intervals and occupy
the edges of paintings like Barry's Rich Hours. This choice of
material seems to resonate through the evolving images. It is
possible to think of Dennis, provoked by the history and actuality
of his surroundings, being impelled into imagery with Morris's
example as a catalyst - the Morris who wanted to return art to
the people, or the writer of News from Nowhere, perhaps, at his most readable when he
envisages the future utopia of equal relationships between people,
beyond the ugly capitalist society of his own time. When Dennis
obscures Morris's designs, he obscures the man's vision too. Taking
its place is an over-ripe richness of colour and form, the look
of something seriously on the turn towards decay.
Dennis would not reject the tag of romanticist. But then reality
is always present in his work. In one painting from 1985, little
figures populate a fantasy derived from floral wallpaper. In the
picture's hothouse colours, the budding fruits of the print themselves
appear to progress on the life cycle to maturity and death. Then
a light-switch and cable intervene as a sort of momento vitae.
Now in Dennis's more organic turn of mind, there is a sensation
of imminence, too, of things yet to happen. More of the same,
perhaps, or a big surprise?
© 1995 Martin Holman
First published in London
Magazine
February/March 1995 Volume 34 /#11&12
edited by Alan Ross
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