Matt Calderwood & Guy Allott — Sculptures & Prints — Grey Area Multiples — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 1 → May 14, 2011

Sculptures and Prints is of course a show that presents these two types of object. But it is also a show in which both artists play with a relationship between the two formats. The show revolves around interplay between sculptural artworks and 2D representations that develop out of sculpture and vice-versa. The relationship between what is flat and what is solid is continually in limbo in this show. There are prints of sculptures, bronze sculptures of what would normally be card, and sculptures that are eternally changeable, evolving from flat to relief to pointedly physical.

Matt Calderwood has created a new modular artwork made from cast black natural rubber that is both industrial in appearance and playful in tone. A set of 6 geometric shapes, dense dark ingots that stand alone as curious abstract shapes and yet the work is unlike standard sculpture; we are encouraged to pick the elements up and to move them around, to look for satisfying arrangements. Sometimes the arrangements are geometric, at times they are on the limit of what the materials will allow and at other times we push them beyond those physical limits. To accompany this work Calderwood has produced a printed work showing selection of these arrangements that acts as a kind of menu or instruction manual, suggesting directions to pursue and points of departure.

Guy Allott has made a series of 6 woodblock prints continuing his enthusiasm and fascination for space travel. Allott immerses himself in the nostalgia and euphoria of space. They speak of the space-aged future promised to us; soaring rockets and day trips to Mars, that never materialised. These prints evolve from and inform a series of new bronze sculptures which, like the prints, use traditional artistic techniques to address an apparently futuristic subject. In fact both the subject and the materials are archaic and endearing, bronze suddenly seems just about appropriate for a space-craft and woodblock printing an utterly apt way to illustrate a space orbit.