John Carter
John Carter’s powerful abstract wood constructions seem divided against themselves. Midway between painting and sculpture, each of the nine works now on view at Belloc Lowndes Fine Art contains flat painted surfaces, but most also have gaps, geometrical “holes” really, between the different pieces of wood. The geometrical figures the 53-year-old Briton paints recall minimalism, but the “perfection” of minimalism’s “ideal” forms is undercut by Carter’s tactile surfaces. He mixes marble dust into the paint and later sands it by hand to create jewellike pinpoint reflections amid a finish that’s irregular and splotchy overall. This approach makes all the shapes, even those of the same color, different–each the unique result of dust distribution and sanding.
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Another way Carter’s work differs from recent minimalist art is that it doesn’t readily reveal its materials. In fact, at times it seems as if he’s trying to fool the viewer. The color bands on the vertical columns in Overlaid Elements, Double Square are separated by tiny black lines that often seem like indentations in the surface, so I began to think that each color band was a separate piece of wood. Only when the gallery owners lifted the piece away from the wall and showed me the unpainted backs of the columns, which were without lines, was I convinced otherwise. Just as the separate pieces of wood create the illusion of continuous beams, so the continuous columns produce the illusion of separate pieces. And the empty spaces represent a third variety of “beam.”
Superimposed Elements Contained Within a Square is perhaps the most elegant work. A large square painted light gray has a smaller square at its center, inside of which are two large trapezoids, which together make a parallelogram, and two small triangles. One of each pair is white and the other gray, and they’re arranged so as to leave a tiny triangular area empty at either side of the smaller square. I eventually figured out that the central shapes represent one parallelogram superimposed on an identical one rotated 180 degrees; the two triangles are the only part of the rotated shape that would be visible.
Stringfellow doesn’t hesitate to mix systems of perspective as well. In Elmer’s Bar B Q Party the cutout figures at the rear are arranged conventionally, with a receding perspective, but the foreground tablecloths are laid down flat, as if seen directly from above. Colored cutouts of tasty-looking dishes, some seen from above and some from the side, add to the contradiction.
Contrasting or contradictory elements within each Carter and Stringfellow work prevent it from becoming a perfectly self-enclosed aesthetic object: Carter appeals to the logical mind, while Stringfellow rejuvenates daily seeing and living. For me neither experience is complete in itself, but since the two galleries are only a block apart, one can easily see the two shows together.
