Biography
Brendan Fletcher is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader for BA (Hons) Fine Art at the University of Salford. He has exhibited recently in Enough is Definitely Enough: Contemporary Artists Respond to Las Meninas, OA Gallery, Salford, (2020), Fully Awake, Freelands Foundation, London, Inner Landscapes, Hilbertraum, Berlin and Inter-Section, Huddersfield (all 2019). He was long-listed for the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2019. He has presented papers at Albert Irvin and Abstract Expressionism, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, 2019 and Teaching Painting, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2018. Previous exhibitions include: Prefab at Leeds Mint/Leeds Metropolitan University Gallery 2011, Nice to Meet You, Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica, 2005, Terrain: Contemporary British Abstraction, Museum of Non-Conformist Art, St Petersburg, 2004, Chorus, Gorton Monastery, Manchester, 2004, Departure Lounge, Mart’99, 1999, Rising Stars, London Contemporary Art Fair, 1996.
New Paintings
‘When you reassemble linguistic elements in a strange and unusual way you force the reader to slow down his reading, you render his acts of recognition more difficult, while at the same time you appeal to this flexibility, imagination and re-creative freedom’.
Christopher Bode, The Aesthetics of Ambiguity (1991)
My paintings are an attempt to examine and explore this arena in which one can reassemble visual motifs - gestural marks, structural grids, the layering of paint, the opacity and translucency of pigment, colour, tone and form - all in the service of attempting to make these signifiers support and sustain new meanings and fresh associations.
The paintings were inspired by a line from the Irish poet Louis MacNeice’s poem ‘Snow’. He writes of the ‘drunkenness of things’. The paintings are loosely titled after lines of poetry lifted (or paraphrased, in one case) from Irish writers: Louis MacNeice, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon. They hint that identity plays a role in my own motivations and intentions for the work.
Older Paintings: Homer’s Ghost
Homer’s Ghost is a new suite of paintings derived from a poem by the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, Epic (1959). Kavanagh reflects upon the age; ‘I have lived in important places, times/When great events were decided’. He describes a local quarrel between two Irish farmers. He notes how it wasn’t until Homer’s Ghost ‘came whispering to my mind’ that he realised that Homer created the Iliad from ‘such a local row’.
We are living in important places, times, when great events are being decided. The work reflects upon our times using a vocabulary of abstract forms. For Fletcher, a painting is a declaration of sorts. A painting establishes a set of rules and operations that suggest they have always existed. His paintings draw upon tropes of Modernist abstraction and in particular, a very British lyrical abstraction. They make a play of the gestural mark and its importance as a signifier of the hand-made, the ill-disciplined and the transgressive.
The work presents loosely adumbrated motifs sitting on an invisible horizon line. The motifs are intended to be bold and demonstrative. They draw attention to themselves. They could be read quasi-figuratively; preening politicians at a podium, or they might as easily be seen to be cartoon characters entering stage left, or alternatively, they could be sculptures or monuments.
The paintings are an attempt to articulate Fletcher’s concerns about political structures, people and events.
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