Kiss on the Blue

Season Opening
Wednesday, August 24, 2011, 5 to 8 pm

It is with great pleasure that we announce our second solo exhibition with Zurich-based British artist Clare Goodwin (*1973 Birmingham) at Rotwand.
The work of Goodwin draws from the tumultuous era of the 1970s, particularly in middle-class Britain. It is the material trace of this time, the décor of suburban homes and the patterning of clothing designs that provide the basis for her art. Through the careful composition of colour and line, many of her works convey a feeling of limitation and movement, conformity and dissent that cleverly conjures that period’s conjunction of tight social codes with immense societal upheaval.
There are few sports more reminiscent of 1970s Britain than snooker. The familiar pastime activity of smoky gentleman’s clubs had fallen into decline in the mid-twentieth century, but was revived in 1969 with Pot Black. This was a series of tournaments broadcast in colour for the first time that transformed the game into one of the most popular sports in the UK, its popularity fuelled, in part, by the charisma of players such as ‘Hurricane’ Higgins, who won the first of his two world titles in 1972. It is this game that the artist turns to in her exhibition at Rotwand gallery, Zurich, a new series of paintings and works on paper that make use of its distinctive formal characteristics. With frames as tightly cropped as a camera close-up on a player striking a ball, works such as Samantha recall the sharp geometry of snooker - its tapered cues and triangular racks - and the knife-edge concentration of the players. This new series is a departure from the artist’s previous work, particularly the works on paper, collectively titled ‘Kiss on the Blue’. Devoid of the vivid colour Goodwin frequently uses, the focus here is on stark formal composition. Painted thinly and with extreme precision, leaving large sections of the page blank, what comes to the fore is the delicate relationships between forms, the (mis)alignments and chance encounters between angles, straight edges and curves. The series’ title, ‘Kiss on the Blue’, is a snooker term that is used when the ‘cue’ and ‘object’ balls unintentionally come into contact. We are reminded that art is also a game, one in which a wrong move could draw consequences, sometimes unlucky and sometimes to ones advantage. We might not know more about these restrained, minimal pieces, if it weren’t for the referential threads that Goodwin weaves into the work. A set of titles, for example, suggestive of names from the 1970s (Robin, Ian, Kay and Glen and Glynis), conveys the notion that her paintings are a form of abstracted portraiture and sets spinning narrative fictions featuring the eponymous characters and their daily lives. It is from the perspective of their everyday suburban worlds that the art references are perceived, as transmuted or secondary material. Here the utopianism and grand gestures of Modernism’s big players, Frank Stella or Barnett Newman, have been incorporated into the popular (and slightly kitschy) mainstream, redesigned to decorate a new set of curtains for Glen and Glynis, a twin-set for Samantha. There is a gap between the mute abstraction of some of Goodwin’s work and the stories she ignites by way of the works’ titles. These don’t explain the work, but open it out to imaginary scenes like a book opening out its pages. Does the slight misalignment of Tom, Noel, Frank overlaying lines describe an underlying tension in the group’s interactions? Such stories are suggested, but not given away. Goodwin’s works let us know that meaning is not encapsulated in each painting, a code to be cracked by the viewer, but is elusive and chancey. It collides, swerves and rolls off in new directions, like a cue ball side spinning in snooker.

Text by Frances Loeffler