from: The Independent 15th July 2003
ART FOR SALE: JEFFREY DENNIS @ ART
SPACE GALLERY
Crisis of Connections, Art
Space Gallery (Michael Richardson Contemporary Art), 84 St
Peter Street, London N1 (020-7359 7002;
www.artspacegallery.co.uk)
to 2 August
Culture broadly follows
trends, and art is no exception. One minute, everyone is a pop
artist;
then, they are all conceptualists or neo-realists, heavy on the
old irony. But Jeffrey Dennis is a
real one-off. His paintings do not look like anyone else's. He may
have the academic
credentials behind him - one-time tutor at the Ruskin School of
Fine Art, now senior lecturer
in painting on the Chelsea School of Art BA - but it is not the
academic qualities of his
paintings that strike the first cord, but their oddness and
idiosyncrasy.
Whether or not you fall in love with them will probably depend on
a rather intuitive and
personal response - but they certainly demand attention and time.
They are hard to describe.
The surfaces are a disarray of tiny circles - rather like clusters
of pebbles or reptilian skin -
and fragmented objects. Sometimes the paint is so thick that it
becomes nodular and lumpy.
Juxtaposed against these areas, like stills in a film or views
through a window, are odd
scenes painted with meticulous realism.
The works have names such as The Interrupted Meal,
2001, and The Delivery, 2002,
which
features a white van in the window-like frames. The titles imply a
narrative that is impossible
to pin down. Things seem as though they should make sense but they
don't. As if this wasn't
complicated enough, the "scaly" areas are littered with strange
sections of white pipe. Some
are broken, some have U-bends and often they have been loosely
connected by a line of
white thread, like a row of bones. Other objects such as a bicycle
wheel or machinery also
litter these sections. It is hard to know what to make of such
paintings.
One of the most profound influences on Dennis has been the work of
the Victorian fairy artist,
Richard Dadd. In Dadd's The Fairy Feller's Masterstoke,
c1858-64, (now in the Tate), the
artist creates a convincing Lilliputian world that is at once mad
and utterly convincing. Dennis
is clearly not mad. Yet there seems to be some way that he uses
this counterpoint between
the "reality" of his "window" images and the fragmented surfaces
to explore the nature of
dreams and how we remember things and try to make connections.
On a more technical level Dennis seems to enjoy playing with the
nuances that exist between
painting and photography (to which he acknowledges a debt). Though
the small "windows"
seem photographic in their realism, they in fact owe everything to
the technical mastery of
paint. Prices range from £900 to £6,500, including
VAT.
Sue Hubbard
home