Charles Mason: Structure and Other Anxieties
Galerie Cortex Athletico
5 November – 5 December 2009
Cortex Athletico is delighted to present the largest exhibition to date by British artist Charles Mason comprising seven pieces together with a room of drawings. The new works draw the viewer into a subtle game of recognition hovering somewhere between the playful and the unnerving.
Five sculptures are accompanied by a framed photographic print (wall drawing 2008) depicting an oblong shape cut out of a canvas. This shape functioning as a visual palindrome is stencilled in pencil as a repeat, forming a huge frieze in the second gallery making Wall drawing (camera della morte) 2009. The seemingly shallow space created by this work is echoed in the sculptures whose Perspex screens act producing a similarly artificial and disorienting surface - reflecting the light and sucking it in.
“Their imposing sheets of dark Perspex refer obliquely to our lives lived increasingly through a screen. The articulated and curving forms of Between you and me 2008, Dummy 2009 and Stay 2009 can be contemplated through this highly industrialized material, a plastic made from gallons of oil that rebuffs us like a riot shield, shows us our shallow reflection framed within the work, distorts our perception of reality and engenders a very particular way of looking..
Rock 2009 though made of concrete and named after the most immobile of natural forms, when touched gently rocks (note the pun) back and forth. Taking inspiration from sources as diverse as Le Corbusier’s designs for Chandigarh and the concrete ‘rocks’ that dot the enclosures of unfortunate animals in the zoo, this strange, pod-like form evokes a quasi-organic architecture. Streamlined in shape, smooth on the inside and rough on the outside, its form and texture reveal the process of its making. A daylight bulb shines through milky white, opaque Perspex in one of the two ‘arteries’, flooding the interior. This is a development following Mason’s 2009 Model for Mood Altering Public Sculpture (SAD version), a work imaging a structure in public space that might – in everyday parlance – ‘give something back’ to its environment and audience.”
Zoë Gray
A small publication accompanies the exhibition with a text by Zoë Gray
Stay 2009
Between you and me 200
Model for a Mood Altering Public Sculpture (SAD version) 2009