cntrl-shft-pwr (2018)

The simulated domestic setting of 1 Godley VC House is synonymous with Freud’s 1919 essay Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny), in which he writes about the feeling of discomfort or dislocation when faced with something strangely familiar, or ‘unhomely’. At the beginning of his text, Freud denotes the uncanny as an aesthetic category, as ‘the theory of the qualities of feeling.’ He described the uncanny effect as when the distinction between imagination and reality is erased; when something that we have previously considered as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the functionality of the thing it symbolises. As an abstract painter, my work is not concerned with representing the exterior world or shaped by external referents but moreover employs a formal language based on colour and spatial composition – the work can be affiliated with the dual sensibilities of the rationality of hard-edged abstraction, while embracing the painterly touch of more intuitive painting. I do not consider my practice to be one of self-consciously mannerist abstraction, but on reflection I can also see that contemporary abstraction could itself be perceived as exhibiting something of the uncanny – its ‘symbols’, the once radical, iconoclastic gestures of the non-picture have today become neutralised through computer screensavers of digitally blended colours, graphic desktop icons and the disrupted visual order of our screen-based image culture.

This work was commissioned for the exhibition 1 Godley VC House, Griffin Gallery, London.

1 Godley VC House is an opportunity for a collaboration between site and painterly physicality. My work cntrl-shft-pwr (2018) is a walk-in painting situated in the fabricated bedroom space of the curator’s apartment. There are multiple illusions at play in the work, the room itself is a replica of a bedroom, but not a bedroom itself. The illusions of reality dissolve where the material inconsistencies of the space are revealed; the open roof, the stud walls, the blurring of the boundaries between inside and outside. A painting is also an illusionary space, or can imply one through its uncanny ability to record spatial depth and demarcate physical expanses within the picture plane. The work is made from a limited palette of red, green and blue (RGB), the colours of the screen. Today’s screens are similar to stage sets, in which we can chose the backdrop of our desktop and bring together multiple windows to sit adjacent to and overlap each other – they present the duality of an inferred three dimensional encounter experienced through a flat surface. The illusionary and spatial considerations of cntrl-shft-pwr are significant; in a virtual information world physical engagement with the painted surface is a temporal, sensory experience unlike that which we feel from the computer monitor.

The title of the work, cntrl-shft-pwr, alludes to a keyboard shortcut on a mac that sends the screen display to sleep – an immediate way of turning off the image information. Presenting painting as a physical encounter encourages us to ‘see’ it as a material object in an often dematerialised world. In turn 1 Godley VC House helps us to consider how contemporary art and architectural space have a rich dialogue with each other beyond the margins of the traditional white cube.

*text from catalogue for 1 Godley VC House, written by Charley Peters

1 Godley VC House was curated by Tim Andrew Shaw, Niamh White and Emma Smale

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