Pink Painting 1996-2009, Metal, paint, glass, plastic, 400 x 151 x 32 cm // photo © Paul Tucker 2009
Cedric Christie @ Flowers East Gallery
16 October 2009 to 14 November 2009
A mantelpiece, formal remnant of the domestic architecture that once tied house to hearth, is also a form of subverted frame. Objects placed on top of this structure are exalted from the economy of the everyday into the realms of the ornamental. While a frame acts to hermetically seal value within its perimeters, a mantelpiece acknowledges the ideological properties of the boundary/border/perimeter in and of itself. It provides an ‘edge’ on which to realise a microcosmic visual display, exploiting the periphery as a fertile space for the performance of meaning.
Installation shot: Dictionary Pieces, 2002 - 2009, Edition 26, 12 x 8 cm Conflict 2000 // photo © Paul Tucker 2009
Installation shot: Dictionary Pieces, 2002 - 2009. Conflict 2000, Snooker balls on beech ply painted base, Edition 62, 50 x 50 x 18 cm // photo © Paul Tucker 2009
For London-based artist Cedric Christie (b. 1962) , a mantelpiece provides the territory for a form of curatorial play that traces the currents that course through art history. By offering itself as a platform for objectifying the utilitarian and coveting of the quotidian, it becomes the stage on which visual hierarchies are presented and recast. Christie’s work betrays a fascination with the fluid line between art and object, manifesting the mercurial spirit inherent in embracing indistinction.
Installation shot: Light boxes, years and dimensions variable. // photo © Paul Tucker 2009
Installation shot, left - right: Pink Painting 1996-2009. Light boxes, years and dimensions variable // photo © Paul Tucker 2009
Christie’s Pink Painting hangs on a pristine wall, a space commandeered for the painting-as-artwork, its destination, its perfection. On approaching the work, it becomes clear that Christie’s ‘painting’ – that which had appeared at a distance to be an epic ode to colour-block abstraction – is in fact a full-scale car. Crushed to the point of two-dimensionality, it is an awe-inspiring entity, self-consciously absurd in its allusions to minimalism’s valorisation of the ‘flatness’ of the picture plane.
Multi-coloured Phoenix 2009 and White Phoenix 2009, Steel and Snooker balls, Edition 3 each, 245 x 91 x 103 cm // photo © Paul Tucker 2009
photo © Paul Tucker 2009 // Installation shot, left - right:
Shh, It’s Yellow Don’t Tell Red 2009, Scaffolding, fittings, paint, 118 x 74 x 20 cm
Shh, It’s Orange Don’t Tell White 2009, Scaffolding, fittings, paint, 118 x 74 x 20 cm
Multi-coloured Phoenix 2009, Steel and Snooker balls, Edition 3 each, 245 x 91 x 103 cm
Billy Holiday 2009, Painted Scaffolding, fittings, glitter, 50 x 52 x 20 cm // photo © Paul Tucker 2009
Two new works entitled Phoenix, giant curvatures comprising steel exoskeletons and snooker ball anatomies, brazenly wrap themselves around the space they occupy with the gesture of a giant ‘lick’. Whilst their titles suggest their form to be a product of a divine sublimation, the playfulness of Christie’s materials also suggests the works’ debasement of the sacrosanct ideology of Modernist sculpture. De-mythologised, the pieces lurch onto the horizontal; a movement from wall to floor that is a literal and figurative ‘bringing down’ of monumental form.
The show at Flowers is his first solo exhibition with the gallery.
photo © Paul Tucker 2009 // Installation shot, left - right:
So Dance With Me 2009, Steel and Snooker balls, Edition 3, 8 x 189 x 5.5 cm
True 2009, Steel and Snooker balls, Edition 3, 189 x 8 x 5.5 cm
Love Me or Fuck Me but don’t do both 2009, Steel and Snooker balls, Edition 3, 8 x 189 x 5.5 cm
Pink Painting 1996-2009, Metal, paint, glass, plastic, 400 x 151 x 32 cm // photo © Paul Tucker 2009
Love Me or Fuck Me but don't do both by Cedric Christie
16 October 2009 to 14 November 2009
Flowers East Gallery
82 Kingsland Roac
London // E2 8DP
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