Sue Kennington, Clearing, installation view, Curva Pura, photo Giorgio Benni, courtesy Curva Pura
REVEALING DARKNESS: The Shadow of Colour in the work of Sue Kennington Curva Pura has opened the season, presenting Clearing, a solo show by the English artist Sue Kennington, curated by Davide Silvioli.
by MATTEO DI CINTIO
The title of Sue Kennington’s new show made me wonder what I would find in the welcoming and dynamic space of Curva Pura gallery in Rome. (on show from 5 October to 6 November 2023); the English term Clearing resonated in me, in a superficial and somewhat naive way, as a clear (precisely!), as an explicit declaration of intent, of a technical-pictorial nature, aimed at clarification, brightness, the vivid and saturated use of color.
Looking at the work and discussing it in a vertiginous dialogue with the artist, interlaced with life experiences, impressions, technical digressions, and literary-philosophical references, I had to let the word Clearing penetrate, to arrive at a more complex meaning, to outline the slightly doubtful aspect inherent in its semantic reference. If, in fact, it is a process of unveiling, if the act of clearing proposed by the artist is directed towards a clarification of what is essential in the pictorial work, such a process involves journeying through darkness, into that which is overshadowed, eclipsed, and separated from the light. For Kennington, moving forward in the act of painting is like walking in a forest at dusk; it is no coincidence that it is she who tells me that many of the works on display in the exhibition were created following long tenebrous walks in the woods near Siena, an area that has been home to the artist for some time.The series of small paintings on wooden panels seem to "capture" moments of a nature that lends itself to the construction of an abstract pictorial vision, but in no way adheres to any literal representation or reality. On the contrary, in the work a reality more authentic than any verisimilitude gathers, which coincides with the quiet but penetrating tenacity of a nocturnal pathos, of a shadow that incessantly accompanies, underlines, and highlights (as in an act of clarification) the materiality of the pictorial gesture. This can be observed perfectly in the work Flammable System, where the fast and unconditional movement of painterly gesture seems to evoke floral forms, imbued however with a restless chiaroscuro inversion. The series of paintings entitled Gamma, made with tempera on paper, suggest how the process of revealing by way of darkness, involves a vector that goes from system to chance; the artist, in fact, reveals to me that her pictorial research begins in the systematisation of a spectrum of pigments. From the ordered matrix of the chromatic spectrum, we inevitably move on to the contingency of the event, because, for Kennington, there is no artistic realization except in the fall of the color from the brush to the support, an act which explains its strength in the drive to repeat itself, always different, always necessary. Reason and impulse, as pointed out by the curator Davide Silvioli, become entangled in the artistic act, allowing the viewer to glimpse the dark consistency of things. What persists in the shadow, the shadowy, the nocturnal, perhaps allowing me to offer a bold literary connection.In a famous essay entitled In'ei raisan (In Praise of Shadows) Jin'ichirō Tanizaki observes that in the world of oriental tradition, beauty can only be created by the appearance of shadows in the most disparate places. Beauty, writes the Japanese novelist, «is not in the thing itself, but in the chiaroscuro, and in the patterns of shadows that are created by the nuances between one object and another. Just as a phosphorescent gem radiates brightness when placed in the dark, but loses its charm when exposed to daylight, so beauty is lost without the effects of shadow." And a beauty that is enveloped in the folds of shadow is evident in the work Night Flight, where the rapid pictorial gesture lays down a layer that has the tension to elicit a transcendence, be it the call of a flight or the vision of a cross. For the London artist, transcendence becomes the unrestrained abandon to a pictorial act that is clear, even in the shadows, which does not require any direction, any pre-established condition, any armament of reason. «You just have to have faith – Sue Kennington confesses– in the color that falls». To use the words of Claudio Parmiggiani, perhaps «a faith in nothing but total»SUE KENNINGTON
by Sue Hubbard
The sun beating down on earth and stone, bleaching the lines of washing strung out to
dry across narrow mediaeval streets, creating deep shadows on a lime-washed wall - the
intensity and clarity of Italian light is woven into our understanding of Western visual
culture. From Cimabue and Duccio to Giotto a handful of painters from Tuscany were to
change the way we understand and respond to light and colour. That Sue Kennington,
despite an MA from that most conceptual of art schools, Goldsmiths, has made a remote
part of rural Tuscany her permanent home, is evidence of how deeply rooted her art is in
this Italian sensibility. The views around Siena, near where she lives, still look much
like the rural scenes in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s quattrocento fresco, The Allegory of Good
and Bad Government, with its soft blue and pink hues, to be found in Siena Town Hall.
Unlike the later, more naturalistic art of Florence, there’s a mystical streak to much
Sienese art. Duccio – the Sienese master - created tender, often dreamlike paintings
that explore depth, space and a sense of the divine through colour.
Sue Kennington’s work is an investigation into what light and colour can do within
contemporary painting. Although she comes from a family of painters – she is the great
niece of Eric Kennington (1888-1960), known for his portraits and First World War
pictures – she is a late-comer to the practice, having previously worked in theatre
design. There light was an essential part of her vocabulary. The move to Italy, after the
conceptual rigours of Goldsmiths, allowed her to put a distance between herself and the
hard-boiled irony that prevailed during her time as a student. Moving away from her
earlier gestural paintings that flirted with bravura, celebratory mark-making in the
vein of Bert Irving and Gillian Ayres, her surfaces have flattened and simplified to
create veils and skins of subtle fresco-like colour. Touch, geometry and self-devised
systems are combined with the random to create an essentially romantic and expressive
language. In her recent painting Rough Cut, diamond forms created from thin veils of
gold over black paint hover above a grid of soft earthy pinks and browns. There is
something of Sean Scully’s sensibility here, where the ragged edges of the rectangles
reveal the layer of under painting like a glimpse of a hidden domain. This gives a sense
of space and distance, as if a curtain is being lifted to reveal a limitless void. The
Renaissance view that a painting was a window onto the world is suggested by
implication.
This sense of something ‘beyond’ is there even more strongly in Paradiso, where two
blue arches seem to draw apart to lead through to a space in another dimension. While
not a direct reference, there is an implicit nod to Piero della Francesca’s 1445 Madonna
della Misericorda with her embracing outstretched cloak, and to the open blue dress of
his 1459 Madonna del Parto. While Kennington is not making religious paintings, as
such, this oblique reference to the blue of the Virgin suggests the struggle, within a
postmodern vocabulary, to find ways of expressing what cannot easily be expressed and
of reaching towards what is, ultimately, unreachable.
By immersing herself in the light and solitude of rural Italy, Sue Kennington has been
able to distance herself from the brittle vocabulary of Goldsmiths, whilst still having a
keen awareness of contemporary debates about the nature of painting. This has resulted
in a body of work that is entirely her own - full of a subtle insight and authenticity.