James Iveson: Positions at OUTPOST, Norwich

James Iveson
Positions
2 February – 21 February

James Iveson, 2012, OUTPOST

Extract from Interior (with Jane) by Frank O’Hara

OUTPOST is pleased to present Positions, an exhibition of a new series of painting by James Iveson. For this presentation of work at OUTPOST, Iveson has chosen to emphasise the gallery as an interior space, creating a discreet intervention in the building’s architecture to softly illuminate and bathe the space in diffused light. Through producing a precise exhibition environment, the paintings own internal light is constantly acclimatising with the gallery surroundings. Hung in regular intervals, their placement marks the length of walls and corner positions in the space. As a result, the viewer is made aware of the room the paintings are situated in, with each canvas accentuating its dimensions through their mode of installation.

Working within the conventions of a standard painting hang, Iveson’s series of canvases encourage a parallel and perpendicular proximity. Each painting being the same dimension as the next, the works approximate human size in their portrait form; the viewer could flank it with its presence, an arm span engulfing the work from another. Libidinal sensations of desire and lust additionally inform the production of these works, whereby desire is an emotional product of the paintings, as well as an important instigator of the work, as experienced by the artist himself.

“The promise of a painting (which might be said to be its character) is deeply erotic. The bond created between viewer and the object of arousal, instigates a sequence of perpetually unfulfilled desires. The significance of erotic here is twofold, firstly in the relationship between the viewer and the voluptuousness of painted matter, and secondly in reference to the cycle of unfulfilled desires which epitomise consumer culture. Those manufactured desires, which manipulate vague memories of our own childhood desires, of the tastes and colours of pleasure, dictate our ambitions and actions, as well as our perceptions of status. It is clear, however, that in the imaginary space of a painting, the viewer can never truly smell the chlorine that is signalled by a certain blue, nor taste the citrus zest symbolised by a recognisable motif. Yet we can physically feel these sensations, simply by suggestion. What is significant to painting in these reactions and responses is that they function in a realm, which like the sexually erotic, is entirely outside language, and in which language plays only an instrumental role. It is because of its ability to supersede language that painting can express desire so profoundly and so accurately.
The potential for arousal also allows us to explore the presence of the artist’s subjectivity in the work of art. When it is clear that these paintings are not produced in order to instigate arousal, but rather as an articulation of the material desires of the artist himself, they become separated from the world of the viewer’s individual desires. The work feeds from a pool of collective longings, however, and as viewers we recognise and share his impulses. And when such impulses are consummated formally in the work of art, we discover that its erotic charge, for the viewer, operates at the level of the general, and not the specific”. David Buckley (2012)

James Iveson, 2012, OUTPOST