JAMES FISHER / PHIL GOSS: 'After-Image': Co-curated by Emma Hill and Vivienne Roberts

AFTER-IMAGE
James Fisher / Phil Goss

The silver crinkle-crankle of the road twinkled below in the balmy twilight. 

They had climbed to a pause: grasshoppers crackling.

Honeysuckle smeared the back of his throat. He lay with his back to M, 

and twisted his legs to look over his shoulder … (1) 

For any work of art to be truly affective, whatever its origins, it must ultimately transcend its form and float free. The operations of music, perhaps of all the arts, are closest to ‘… the dreamlike movement of the free and undirected conscious mind over the miscellaneous, banal and exotic, objects of everyday life, and their presence, immediately visible, or else disguised, imagined and recollected, in the spaces and places we inhabit …’. (2)  The physicality of a painting inevitably takes us back and forth to its features as an object, yet the same necessity applies. A painting must move beyond its material properties, if it is to achieve this sense of transference. 

After Image is an exhibition that explores an overarching theme of imagined landscape. It brings together two contemporary artists whose work could be described as the residue of extended iterations. James Fisher and Phil Goss share affinities. Both work in sequences or series, initiating images from drawings (also in Fisher’s case, small hand-made models and collages) and employ a back and forth process in which a painted canvas or wooden support acts as the template for ghosted impressions. Both draw on multiple references outside themselves to construct their own discrete imaginative spaces. Their images present places of the mind – conjectured worlds – where reality coincides with motifs taken from art, literature, music and manga. As with poetry, the images combine abstract and representational elements, to become the visual equivalents for thoughts.

Fisher’s ostensibly bucolic scenes mesh reality with pictorial details from different eras and cultures. His paintings combine landscape schematics from Rajput and Persian miniatures, Japanese print and kigurumi characters, that are worked over gold grounds and decorative fabrics which he lays down on the surfaces of canvas or wooden supports. His recent images are executed in a vivid palette that is reminiscent of the virtual world of computer games and carry a heightened sense of atmosphere in which the shifting panoramas of figures, pattern and lustre leave ambiguous undercurrents. He has spoken in the past of trying to give his paintings the qualities of music and says of the recent work: “I am now thinking about the idea of drawn in breath going into the painting spatially, and the exhale going across the surface...it feels like this makes sense of swells of colour...a drawn thing doesn't always have a line. In my work, snakes are great because they are like brushstrokes: as are elephants trunks, penises, branches and leaves, goat fur. They can all be suggested or indicated by the curl of a brush; they fit the way a brush draws.”.

Goss investigates the resonance of a single image, unpacking its potential meanings through a sequence of process-led manoeuvres. Prompted by a line of poetry or a film still, he begins work from observational drawings that are developed as carved woodblock prints. Multiple impressions enable him to calibrate an emotional charge through shifts in tone or texture. Ultimately he chooses a single impression and returns to the wooden matrix, using it as the basis to make a new painting in which the echoes of his cut marks remain imbedded. He writes eloquently of the inspiration for the panoramic monotypes in the current exhibition (Figures in the Dunes), which were made after a visit to Camber Sands in 2019: “The dunes were deserted and the wind had erased all human traces. The low winter sun cast dramatic shadows in the hollows, giving them an otherworldly feel. The dunes had a mystery and theatricality about them like a stage set or music video. The landscape seemed to be waiting for a wandering troupe to cross it. The long grasses being moved by the wind created mesmerising patterns. It was as if the grass and wind were inseparable.”. 

In both artist’s work the gradual accumulation of visual information (that is textural as well as metaphorical) accrues from the depths of the image and is held at multiple levels in the picture’s surface. It gives these paintings and prints a diffused form of patina, offering glimpses and echoes of strange, poignant and wonderful things – whilst holding the eye to tiny moments of engagement with the tactile beauty of the material stuff from which the image has been formed.

Emma M. Hill

June 2024

1. James Fisher: Extract from Cockaigne text – a collaboration with Tansy Davies

2. Mel Gooding: Mick Moon. Royal Academy Publications, 2019, p 27