![]() ![]() The precarious leaves of paper – including images of Saturn, a seascape, and various facial forms, alongside handwritten text – are desultorily taped to rudimentary wooden cube shelving, replete with stacks of paper and studio detritus. ![]() In the atrium’s display cabinets is ‘A Suggestive Enquiry Into Hermetic Philosophy’ (2015), a tentative gesture towards process and the crystallising and reforming of thought in all its random shards. These objects seem to be remnants from some postdiluvial rubbish dump, also suggesting something of the Duchampian ‘delay’, wherein another piece, Johnson’s wallet –‘Wallet (5 years)’ (2010-15) - has become a meditation on time and objecthood. It echoes a Ballardian obsession with the car as the defining relic of the twentieth century, as well as a prop from one of Ballard’s entropic desert stories. His upended ‘Dune Buggy’ (2015) attests to another dissolution of progress, evoking the radical nature of the fragment as autonomous sliver. Nearby stands ‘Sub-Human’ (2015) a large form reminiscent of a Cornish hole-stone. Johnson’s ‘Multiverse’ (2015), which combines coke bottles as colourful patterns on a paper and a birch plywood megalith sculpture, mixes the language of commercial products and ancient practices to proffer a view of the future. The understanding of ancient peoples and their artefacts are informed as much by twentieth century conditioning as by an impossible notion of knowledge. These are apt ideas for an estuary landscape that is both dream and nightmare, light and dark. Merging recondite reveries on time, failed utopias and the esoteric, both Rick Buckley and Paul Johnson’s exhibitions at Focal Point Gallery are drawn from a convergence of darkness and luminosity. Paul Johnson: The Sunless Sea & Rick Buckley: Black Bile 84 Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea 17 January - 4 April 2015 Review by Sophie Sleigh-Johnson Artist : Paul Johnson Title : Installation view, The Sunless Sea Website : Credit : All images courtesy Focal Point Gallery.Artist : Rick Buckley Title : Installation view, Black Bile 84 Website : Credit : All images courtesy Focal Point Gallery. ![]()
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