Here and now
The work of two British based artists who have a love and understanding of Cyprus goes on show in Larnaca
A few months ago I met British artist Terry Atkinson, who had just returned from the Basle Art Fair in Switzerland. Atkinson visits a lot of the international art fairs and I asked him if he thought there was any difference between art in different countries. “Not really,” he said. “Contemporary art has an international style”.
I am not sure whether Jennifer Harding and Geoff Rigden would appreciate me beginning this introduction to their work with a recollection of Terry Atkinson. They are very different artists and nowhere more so than in their attitude to place. Over the last two decades the art world has split into two irreconcilable, and often hostile, camps. One of these attends all the art fairs, fills the mainstream galleries and glossy art magazines with a bland international style of faux neo-Dada. The other has to fight to be seen, is far more diverse in its use of materials, and, most importantly of all, is founded on intimate relationships to specific locations. To put it briefly, one camp is rootless and dead, the other in a living communion with a spirit of place. It is in this latter camp I would locate Harding and Rigden.
At first sight this might appear a strange statement. Looking at the works of Harding and Rigden it is easy to see the influence of international modernism. Both artists clearly enjoy abstraction, and seem willing to draw on various modernist traditions when forming their paintings. Yet I would suggest they also root themselves in a specifically English cultural environment that results in a series of dialectical tensions. Harding and Rigden make work in a specific place – a ‘here and now’ – but they also pull against a knowledge of art made elsewhere and at other times – a ‘there and then’. This can be seen in Harding’s 2000 painting ‘Ibelin’ and Rigden’s 2006 work ‘Nude going down stairs’. In ‘Ibelin’ the flat red and black abstract shapes have an echo of New York modernism, but this has been filtered through the sensibility of an English mind. Similarly in ‘Nude going down stairs’ there is what appears to be a conscious reworking of Marcel Duchamp’s quasi-cubist painting ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’, painted in 1912. Yet it too has passed through the filter of an English mind, so that any conscious reference to Duchamp is counterbalanced by colours and forms that are decidedly English, what we might call the English tradition.
Marx once wrote that tradition is a burden that ‘weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living’, but to escape from this nightmare one should not reject the traditions of one’s birth. That can only lead to falsehood. Instead one has to transcend tradition by juxtaposing it with other forms and experiences in a dialectical tension. That this happens in the works of Harding and Rigden is perfectly clear in their Cyprus paintings. Look at Harding’s ‘Black Ships at Limassol’, of 2003, and you will see a dominant colour from Cyprus – the flat cerulean blue of our sky. Perhaps too there is an echo of Cyprus in Harding’s artistic references, so that the work might vaguely remind us of the paintings of Stelios Votsis or Andreas Ladommatos. Yet there is something more painterly and rougher in the treatment of the trees and boats, something that seems to come out of an English romantic tradition. Harding has a deep and long-standing knowledge of Cyprus that allows her to fuse Cypriotness and Englishness so successfully, holding the two together, but in tension. Harding’s ‘Linear C’ and ‘Walleye’, both 2001, also make the point, with the colours of Cyprus used again – and perhaps the forms of Cypriot plants – but juxtaposed with an English sensibility, an English handling of paint and an English construction of picture space.
Terry Atkinson was wrong. Contemporary art does not have an international style and if it ever looks like it does then it means an artist has failed to engage with the physical and cultural environment in which he or she is working. Recent events in Cypriot art have taught the island a lesson in remaining true to its own environmental values, and not to attempt to reject and replace them with imported cultures that have nothing to do with this particular place and even despise it. Yet that does not mean Cyprus should retreat into insular parochialism. Harding and Rigden show us an alternative. They are London-based English artists who love Cyprus and know its history, culture and environment probably better than most people who are born here. Through their art they show us that it is possible to bring together different cultural experiences in a creative fusion – a dialectics of place – through which oppositional elements are forced together, like male and female participles, to give birth to a vital and living art. It is a paradox, but true, the work of artists such as Harding and Rigden is the true international art of Cyprus.
Jennifer Harding and Geoffrey Rigden
Painting exhibition. Opens September 14, 8pm, until September 30. Kypriaki Gonia Gallery, 45 Stadiou St, Larnaca. Monday to Saturday 10am-1pm and 4.30pm-8pm, and Sunday 11am-3pm. Tel: 24-621109
