Scene II: Bumps on Paper

Matt Carey-Williams, London, February 2024

Marc Dennis, Study for Wicked, 2023, (Detail), Graphite and charcoal pencil on paper, 45.7 x 61 cm (18 x 24 in)

Accompanying the first Episode, Bump is a smaller survey – a second Scene - of Bumps on Paper, featuring a medley of works executed in inks, watercolours, pastels, charcoal, pencils, and even blood. Ten artists continue to explore the germination, efflorescence and eventual bloom and boom of the bump in their work; this time, however, in moments invariably more graphic in sensibility and application and always executed on the more supple yet ticklish surface that paper provides. The result is a diverse group of works that engage with a veritable slalom of bumps and consequently deliver a spectrum of unexpected encounters and palpable flukes as they navigate the confines of their object whilst excavating the possibilities of their subject through the alchemy of their craft.

I: LOST IN SPACE

Here am I floating ‘round my tin can
Far above the moon
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do

– David Bowie, Space Oddity (1969).

Marius Bercea, Untitled, 2023, Graphite on paper, 42 x 33 cm (16 1/2 x 13 in)

Space, as physical dimension, or cryptic, transcendental plane is made manifest both as presence and absence and, significantly, by the protagonists – roared, whispered or departed - that penetrate its matrix. Much as Major Tom sits alone in his spacecraft, staring out at planet Earth unable to touch or test its beauty, fragility or meaning, so too do several of the works in Bumps on Paper betray space as the ineluctable vacuum which surrounds and controls Bowie’s Major Tom. Here it’s a ground that engulfs the figures populating or interrupting it; it's a force that manipulates those figures into states of agonised echo, their essence bouncing across the pictorial space in inchoate trembles of abbreviation. Marius Bercea’s pensive figures seem to contemplate such bumps spatial and temporal, yet in so doing they amplify the pause and pregnancy of their respective reflections. Bercea’s Untitled (2023) - a study for his painting, Untitled (The One on the Right is on the Left) (2024) – has a cluster of skater boys pushed to the far right of a pictorial space that hums with the power of nothingness. The group’s marginalisation continues with Bercea’s deliberate swing from hatched modelling to unadorned delineation so that the characters ebb in and out not only of graphic registration but of indexical potency. These boys, and the youthful aspirations they harbour, at first shimmer only to slowly drift back into the silence that suffocates them.

Marc Dennis, Study for Allegory of All That's Wrong with the World, 2023, Graphite and charcoal pencil on paper, 50.8 x 50.8 cm (20 x 20 in)

Bercea’s clever, elegant repudiation of space as architecture sits in direct contrast to Marc Dennis’ firm grip on space and his meticulous, at times mellifluous articulation of it. All three of Dennis’ works on paper are studies for his mesmerising paintings. Wicked (2023) and Sideline (2023) continue Dennis’ interest in the grand theft of several paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. Absence and presence (of art and its thieves) thus continue their bumpy dance as first evinced in Bercea’s inhibited ground but now are governed by a tangible loss in space. However, it’s Dennis’ Study for Allegory of All That’s Wrong with the World (2023) that most explicitly serves its viewer the biggest bump. Another loss; another act of aggression, this work on paper records the aftermath of a Monet painting punched by a visitor. The bump breathes not just in the fracture that wriggles across the famous Impressionist’s seascape, but in the fidelity and faculty Dennis devotes to the astonishing suspension of disbelief he generates but then, equally, to the mimetic rent he inflicts upon it. ‘It’ being simultaneously his object, its subject, the context that colours it and, of course, the fabulous fraudulence of the illusion he creates, then destroys, then recreates all in one dazzling moment.

Rachel Howard, WW, 2023, Ink on paper, 36 x 30 cm (14 1/8 x 11 3/4 in)

Haroun Hayward, Beaulieu sur Mer (Night) no 6, 2024, Watercolour on paper, Unframed: 76 x 56 cm (29 7/8 x 22 in)

Rachel Howard, WW, 2023, Ink on paper, 36 x 30 cm (14 1/8 x 11 3/4 in)

Haroun Hayward, Beaulieu sur Mer (Night) no 6, 2024, Watercolour on paper, Unframed: 76 x 56 cm (29 7/8 x 22 in)

Major Tom’s disbelief at seeing our planet from his unique vantage point floating in space strikes a chord with similar overview effects – those trippy bumps of awe at feeling outside of yourself – generated in works on paper by Rachel Howard and Haroun Hayward. Howard’s WW (2023) revisits her painting, Station Eleven (2020), included in Bump. Likewise, Hayward’s Beaulieu sur Mer (Night) no 6 (2024) is yet another work on paper that remixes a series of almost identical images, with each phrased only slightly differently because of pressure, pigment, or the artist’s then propensity. WW unveils Howard’s deft handling and administration of ink on paper, arousing the intermixture of thick foliage, muddy puddles, or drizzling rain with the same brush and within seconds of each other’s rendition. What is more rewarding, perhaps, is the way Howard manages to elucidate a mystery out of a vignette so familiar and so apparently pedestrian. A simple gate, framed by an opening of light punched through some verdant trees, becomes a wormhole or portal that, when passed through, institutes permutations both optic and orphic. Therein lies the bump; the very same metamorphosis of space and meaning that fuels Hayward’s tremulous yet achingly beautiful views of Beaulieu-sur-Mer. It’s not the gentle shifts of light, hue, or geology in his repeated images of the same view that feed such bumpiness but, rather, his similar devotion to such a time and space that, after such close examination, becomes so intrinsic an experience that their being, making and critique become inextricably interwoven. Place, protagonist and parable all now massaged by such bumps they inevitably find their conclusion in either their absence or dissonance. Presence and absence now lost in the conundrum and quietude of space.

II: HELLO, KITTY

See these eyes so green
I can stare for a thousand years
Just be still with me
You wouldn’t believe what I’ve been through

– David Bowie, Cat People (Putting Out Fire) (1982).

Bumps like the more of prose just as much as the less of poetry. If Major Tom’s star-struck amazement at being above and beyond all earthly signification results in captivated soliloquys of amoebic saturninity then Bowie’s ‘Cat People’ are far more pragmatic, engaging head-on with the lust and horror of intimacy and knowledge. The bump now morphs from associative, suggestive trickles of thought into gushing rivulets of form, frame, and confrontation. As such, space becomes condensed – it’s air thinner – as protagonist takes centre stage, squeezing themselves and their cohorts into a more compact picture plane. The resulting claustrophobia is both devilish and delectable. Ana Benaroya’s Begin the Beguine (2023), named after Cole Porter’s song from 1935, sung by many but made most famous (and fabulously kitsch) by Julio Iglesias’ version, features two rockabilly, Herculean women, casually smoking but very pointedly eyeing each other as well as us, the viewer. Design and desire throb in the smoky, naked air, lit by an inescapable sexual tension between the two women and nourished by the viewer’s somewhat cloddish point of view at having such sensual incandescence so unavoidably front and centre. Benaroya’s bump, then, bangs in the libidinal energy she unleashes in her work, but it also beats in the extremes she adopts when shaping, colouring, delineating, and proclaiming the female form.

Ana Benaroya, Begin the Beguine, 2023, India ink and marker on bristol board, 36.8 x 29.2 cm (14 1/2 x 11 1/2 in)

Sara Birns, Caught in the Neighbour's Yard, 2024, Oil Pastel and coloured pencil on tan paper, 55.9 x 76.2 cm (22 x 30 in)

Ana Benaroya, Begin the Beguine, 2023, India ink and marker on bristol board, 36.8 x 29.2 cm (14 1/2 x 11 1/2 in)

Sara Birns, Caught in the Neighbour's Yard, 2024, Oil Pastel and coloured pencil on tan paper, 55.9 x 76.2 cm (22 x 30 in)

It’s this insurmountable consummation of line, colour and mood that aligns Benaroya’s work with movements such as Expressionism or Surrealism. It’s also this absolute freedom to fuck about with both the Sign and Signifier of her chosen subject that chimes so neatly with the work of Sara Birns. Caught in the Neighbour’s Yard (2024) provides another choked space, this time occupied by the gently twisted face of a young woman holding on to a typically contemptuous Persian cat she has found in her back yard. The sheer weirdness of both the scope and perspective of the woman’s head is simultaneously redoubtable and electrifying. The cat, depicted much more naturalistically, offers a moment of respite from the bumps of Birn’s burning of physiognomy, all the while fuelling the quirk of the image because of its relaxed nonchalance in such juxtaposition. These are not works on paper that thrive because of some hushed poetic osmosis. These are instead sheets that conjure frissons of potential passion or anticipated antagonism. The cat that caught your eye and the one that’s shit on your lawn again. Both images – both bumps – proposed with the same mechanics yet with very different dynamics at play.

III: SHAPES, SHIFTS AND SHOCKS

I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence

– David Bowie, Changes (1972).

It’s only after absorbing the uncanniness of Birns’ woman’s face that one realises that her arm in Caught in the Neighbour’s Yard has transmogrified into the hairy, silky limb mirroring that of her feline captive’s legs. Just when you thought things couldn’t get bumpier, they do. Bumps are like visual enzymes, floating across the surface only to, often suddenly, directly affect passages that surround it. That process of transformation is, for Rob and Nick Carter, the very substance of their work so that the bumps of variation, modification and change are not accidents, warmly welcomed, that redirect the flow of a composition but, in their entirely controlled and studious universe, subjects in themselves. We see that objective cleverly realised in serialised, Warholian fashion in their Chinese Whispers, Roy Rogers after Andy Warhol (c. 1948) (2015). Thirty different pen drawings of Warhol’s own drawing of Roy Rogers were commissioned by the artists who worked directly with illustrators in China, showing the first artist the Warhol image and asking them to copy it as faithfully as possible. That artist then described the image to the next and they then made their version. The project concludes with the inevitable abstraction and estrangement of the original source, even as the process of informing and recording remains consistent. The proof of the bump’s innate capacity to generate alternate forms from other sources is nowhere clearly outlined than here.

Rob & Nick Carter, Chinese Whispers, Roy Rogers after Andy Warhol (c.1948), 2015, 30 drawings by 30 different artists, pen on paper, framed, Framed: 152 x 130 cm (59 7/8 x 51 1/8 in)

Conor Harrington, A Potted History of Pomp, 2023, Charcoal on paper, Unframed: 152 x 120 cm (59 7/8 x 47 1/4 in)

Rob & Nick Carter, Chinese Whispers, Roy Rogers after Andy Warhol (c.1948), 2015, 30 drawings by 30 different artists, pen on paper, framed, Framed: 152 x 130 cm (59 7/8 x 51 1/8 in)

Conor Harrington, A Potted History of Pomp, 2023, Charcoal on paper, Unframed: 152 x 120 cm (59 7/8 x 47 1/4 in)

The bump of transformation can unveil itself in a slightly less definitive fashion. Sometimes that bump likes to dance a little before it goes in for the kill. So it is that Conor Harrington’s A Potted History of Pomp (2023) resounds as a surface built on the wobble of constant change, even as it describes the physicality and psychology of his chosen subject. Immersed in his own thoughts, Harrington’s figure is both incarcerated yet liberated by an ever-fluctuating ground of charcoal and pencil. Fine line quickly becomes subsume by broad swathes of chunky charcoal, only for those looser passages to be infiltrated by skirmishes of detail that mouth the human form if not sound it. Such flux galvanizes Harrington’s mysterious, introspective figure but it doesn’t interrogate him. Subject, object and the process that brings both to life are revealed in equal measure so that shape – and its signification - is here shifted but not shocked.

The same cannot be said for the monotypes of Christian Rex van Minnen. Their shocked status lies in van Minnen’s unabashed determination to let multiple layers of act, mark and consciousness pulsate on top of one other, always allowing each individual layer, idea, colour, or form to revel in its own transparency yet still allow his viewer to delight in their juicy moments of nexus, both forged and unforeseen. Much as in the work of Rob and Nick Carter or Conor Harrington, performance here continues to act as a visual enzyme, nourishing a litany of bumps across van Minnen’s body of work. The artist has employed live Instagram stories to directly engage with his many viewers watching him paint, asking them to offer words or quips that he then immediately scribes across his painted surface in real time. Such is the case with Word is Magik (2022), where van Minnen itchily scrawls ‘Black Magik’ across a series of lemon, lumpy undulations that could be sand dunes, a pachyderm’s skin or the ooze of a peristaltic motion. Further adding to the artist’s delicious hypnagogia is the appearance of a cartoonesque gnome-like figure, sitting, cross-legged, as if taking a breath whilst on a wander in the woods. To the right a large snake slithers up and out of the composition. Nothing connects in this ‘scape other than each element’s forthright independence from one other and therein lies the bump, choreographing a surface out of sheer incongruity that becomes populated and problematised by a cabal of antagonists hellbent on a most bejewelled, befuddling schism.

Christian Rex van Minnen, Word is Magik, 2022, Monotype (Oil-based ink on Rives BFK), 49.5 x 33 cm (19 1/2 x 13 in)

IV: TRANSUBSTANTIATION

Would you still love me if the clocks could go backwards?
The girls would fill with blood, and the grass will be green again
Remember the dead, they were so great, some of them

– David Bowie, How Does the Grass Grow? (2013)

It’s the final bump that usually sends you over the edge. The one that shifts the prism of thought and application from one flourish to another; redirects an image from one stream of signification into another. It can kill its past whilst birthing a whole brand new now in just a few flicks of the artist’s wrist and drops of the media their hands control. Rachel Howard does this by making ink bleed on her surface and using that hemic blur to both voice and numb her subject. Her Kind (2019) is a female nude, of sorts. A hieroglyph of the Feminine, Howard’s abbreviated figure – supine, with thighs lifted to emphasise a pudendum – is further estranged by the appearance of four breasts, each of them somehow revealing an optical, ocular potency. The bump jumps off the sheet the moment you lay your eyes on Howard’s figure – seductive yet also tumbled – but it remains not because of the directness of the artist’s image, but because of her fluctuant, teetering line, teeming with possibilities, unveiling the flow of life even as the image it depicts appears to gradually be drained of it.

Rachel Howard, Her Kind, 2019, Ink on paper, 41 x 34 cm (16 1/8 x 13 3/8 in)

Mathew Weir, Salome (after Hans Baldung), 2022, Blood on paper, Framed: 45 x 39 cm (17 3/4 x 15 3/8 in)

Rachel Howard, Her Kind, 2019, Ink on paper, 41 x 34 cm (16 1/8 x 13 3/8 in)

Mathew Weir, Salome (after Hans Baldung), 2022, Blood on paper, Framed: 45 x 39 cm (17 3/4 x 15 3/8 in)

Like Howard, Mathew Weir is an artist who dissects the logic and logistics of mark making. His is an inquest that disentangles the usually knotty junctures of subject, object, medium and process into independent trajectories of significance. Once such partition has been executed, Mathew slowly bleeds the gravity of each orbit back into each other, but now unnerved with the plangency of estrangement. So it is that angels and demons play out dramas of legitimacy that speak to the naivety of the Medieval weltanschauung but also nod to the constant flux that shimmers between the artist, their craft, the image, and the beautiful lies that conjure their illusion and feed our delusion. Such desire for constructed truth has plagued religion, politics, and art for centuries. Mathew’s “Salome (after Hans Baldung)” (2023) cuts that penetration for and of such truths to the quick. It’s an almost identical copy of Baldung’s woodcut of “Salome Holding the Head of St. John the Baptist” from c. 1511. The only difference being that Mathew has removed Baldung’s monogram signature in the lower left. Is this art that seeks to ignite the wobbly inclinations of past gospel - now lies - one stroke at a time? Perhaps. But this work hides a secret that stresses and distresses the art and act of making marks to its coda because this work is made with Mathew’s own blood. One drop at a time, stolen from his pricked finger, death – and its bubble of bumps - is brought back to abject life by draining life because death is the only fucking truth we can be certain of.

The bump is dead. Long live the bump.