Sacha Craddock, Essay for 'Penumbra' exhibition at Claas Reiss, 2021
Without the painterly equivalent of clothing to represent a definable era, Collins holds on to a lifeline of naked understanding, to the assumption of implication. While James Collins’s paintings carry no specific reference to period, time, or illusion, they do point to a range of signs, symbols, and significances embedded in the apparent logic of painting. The implication here is that this work has always been there, that the artist is delivering rather than inventing from the start. The observer can be thrown into questioning whether the relationship to the work is of one-to-one physicality or about looking from far away; ‘is it a lake or a puddle, a sea or splodge?’, but such insecurity about scale is part of a wider question as to who we are and whether we are all able to start in the same place?
No, while we understand that interpretations do shift, swerve and slide, Collins’ paintings also carry a united matter of fact quality about them that comes out of intense labour over a great deal of time. The artist works like a methodical explorer, hiding, covering, as well as continuously unearthing the surface. He is a detectorist over-seeing and finding his own soundings in the history of his own making. Much in the same way that an abstract painter, knowing what they have just painted, still hope to be surprised by what they see. Of course, with no sleight of hand, or singular virtuosity such layered activity is far from fresh.
Trails, paths, and runes fit like relief carved into an ancient door. Simple form is sometimes wedged into space, a circle, for instance, somehow survives. Visit any museum, experience the way that matters so easily shift from the fundamental and universal towards the more bodily and tangible. Not just about making, but also about looking, there is comfort in the way that meaning and message is projected from outside onto even the most obtuse activity. The painted surface, a body itself, carries the apparent illusion of reaching so far back beneath paths and ruses that have been simultaneously undermined and encouraged by the artist in the same breath.
The surface, an illusion, is actual relief where some marks, found and followed, are encouraged by physical desire to protrude like sinews during an extraordinary anatomy lesson. What illustrious corpses will emerge from such a dark place? The surface, cut out almost metaphorically from the ground, leads us off to a whole history of art that merges the real with the symbolic. Simply found details of a wall or floor, accidental marks or graffiti brought flat and framed by a photograph, which in turn, itself, represents the intended as well as the incidental. So, such projection of meaning onto each innocent happenstance arrives at a sort of still-life that projects a body of exterior resolve with layers of machination beneath.
Clear colour gives way to a darker palette, to a range of reference, to waves of mixed material that becomes the thing itself. The painting becomes a different kind of place in which the eye can acclimatise once used to the dark. The observer imagines knowing this surface with touch that also does not require seeing all at once. Lighter, coloured arteries pulsate, the implication of blood and energy is allowed to rush through. The pleasure at making this fit and therefore make sense is overwhelmed by the natural desire to continue painting till all is dark and covered. Yet the history, like words lost after the computer has failed, remains.
Without the painterly equivalent of clothing to represent a definable era, Collins holds on to a lifeline of naked understanding, to the assumption of implication. While James Collins’s paintings carry no specific reference to period, time, or illusion, they do point to a range of signs, symbols, and significances embedded in the apparent logic of painting. The implication here is that this work has always been there, that the artist is delivering rather than inventing from the start. The observer can be thrown into questioning whether the relationship to the work is of one-to-one physicality or about looking from far away; ‘is it a lake or a puddle, a sea or splodge?’, but such insecurity about scale is part of a wider question as to who we are and whether we are all able to start in the same place?
No, while we understand that interpretations do shift, swerve and slide, Collins’ paintings also carry a united matter of fact quality about them that comes out of intense labour over a great deal of time. The artist works like a methodical explorer, hiding, covering, as well as continuously unearthing the surface. He is a detectorist over-seeing and finding his own soundings in the history of his own making. Much in the same way that an abstract painter, knowing what they have just painted, still hope to be surprised by what they see. Of course, with no sleight of hand, or singular virtuosity such layered activity is far from fresh.
Trails, paths, and runes fit like relief carved into an ancient door. Simple form is sometimes wedged into space, a circle, for instance, somehow survives. Visit any museum, experience the way that matters so easily shift from the fundamental and universal towards the more bodily and tangible. Not just about making, but also about looking, there is comfort in the way that meaning and message is projected from outside onto even the most obtuse activity. The painted surface, a body itself, carries the apparent illusion of reaching so far back beneath paths and ruses that have been simultaneously undermined and encouraged by the artist in the same breath.
The surface, an illusion, is actual relief where some marks, found and followed, are encouraged by physical desire to protrude like sinews during an extraordinary anatomy lesson. What illustrious corpses will emerge from such a dark place? The surface, cut out almost metaphorically from the ground, leads us off to a whole history of art that merges the real with the symbolic. Simply found details of a wall or floor, accidental marks or graffiti brought flat and framed by a photograph, which in turn, itself, represents the intended as well as the incidental. So, such projection of meaning onto each innocent happenstance arrives at a sort of still-life that projects a body of exterior resolve with layers of machination beneath.
Clear colour gives way to a darker palette, to a range of reference, to waves of mixed material that becomes the thing itself. The painting becomes a different kind of place in which the eye can acclimatise once used to the dark. The observer imagines knowing this surface with touch that also does not require seeing all at once. Lighter, coloured arteries pulsate, the implication of blood and energy is allowed to rush through. The pleasure at making this fit and therefore make sense is overwhelmed by the natural desire to continue painting till all is dark and covered. Yet the history, like words lost after the computer has failed, remains.
The Internal Grid, Essay by Rae Hicks, 2020
I’ve always been sceptical of phrasing which tries to lend art a power that it does not have. Poetry SLAMS or ACTION painting.
It’s a familiar idea we create by destroying in some way. Forgivably, this steers thinkers invariably towards melodrama. In describing punk as ‘torching the establishment’, we might sometimes conceal the humanistic genius of certain protagonists, perhaps overlooking complexity and humour in favour of pomp.
Witnessing the slow gestation of James Collins’ paintings is to experience these two seemingly opposed processes. On the one hand, we have the familiar advance of a growing painting, but on the other, erosion is taking place. What seems to be happening is indeed destructive, although more of a gradual decay than a righteous performance. Something is being addressed. Something internal and stubborn, illustrating the notion that to grapple with an establishment is a multi-faceted war of wit and spontaneity won by attrition and copious channels of negotiation.
If you are to visit the works in earlier stages, you might see something resembling a fresh, if eccentric imposition of order uniting the expanse of the canvas. But months later, the brightly coloured arteries only describe an obsolete network to those that know it was ever there at all. Their ungainly conventionality will have since been used as examples of what not to do, where not to go. Their numb unsuitability replaced by a topography of desire lines. Similarly, the colours have graduated from a flat stratagem to paint that is more earthly matter than medium.
This form of destruction is the creeping mould and the bloating of rust, the slow re-knitting of sinew and fibres.
The comparisons to the rise and ruin of civilisations suddenly abound, as well as those regarding the rectangle of a painting, but it is the square or grid beneath these that is the subject of the Liquid Engineers series. It is the internal framework of cognition that governs but relation. Like in the Gary Numan song Metal from which this title is borrowed, the works are attacks, and lamentations on the crutch that limits as it supports.
I’ve always been sceptical of phrasing which tries to lend art a power that it does not have. Poetry SLAMS or ACTION painting.
It’s a familiar idea we create by destroying in some way. Forgivably, this steers thinkers invariably towards melodrama. In describing punk as ‘torching the establishment’, we might sometimes conceal the humanistic genius of certain protagonists, perhaps overlooking complexity and humour in favour of pomp.
Witnessing the slow gestation of James Collins’ paintings is to experience these two seemingly opposed processes. On the one hand, we have the familiar advance of a growing painting, but on the other, erosion is taking place. What seems to be happening is indeed destructive, although more of a gradual decay than a righteous performance. Something is being addressed. Something internal and stubborn, illustrating the notion that to grapple with an establishment is a multi-faceted war of wit and spontaneity won by attrition and copious channels of negotiation.
If you are to visit the works in earlier stages, you might see something resembling a fresh, if eccentric imposition of order uniting the expanse of the canvas. But months later, the brightly coloured arteries only describe an obsolete network to those that know it was ever there at all. Their ungainly conventionality will have since been used as examples of what not to do, where not to go. Their numb unsuitability replaced by a topography of desire lines. Similarly, the colours have graduated from a flat stratagem to paint that is more earthly matter than medium.
This form of destruction is the creeping mould and the bloating of rust, the slow re-knitting of sinew and fibres.
The comparisons to the rise and ruin of civilisations suddenly abound, as well as those regarding the rectangle of a painting, but it is the square or grid beneath these that is the subject of the Liquid Engineers series. It is the internal framework of cognition that governs but relation. Like in the Gary Numan song Metal from which this title is borrowed, the works are attacks, and lamentations on the crutch that limits as it supports.