"At Art School in 1969, I made a group of paintings. Instead of using stretcher bars I went to the timber yard and chose a standard timber size often used in general joinery work. After being prepared the size is 4.5 cm, this then would be the depth of the paintings. For the colour I chose the paint with a similar approach. Instead of buying paint from an art shop, I went to a hardware shop. Each painting was a single colour; red oxide, brown, green creosote, black, white and grey. Each achieved what I wanted, no illusions, straightforward and urban in feel. The grey painting however went beyond this. Since that time, I have continued to use 4.5 cm as the module and the paintings are always grey. I use these two constant elements to discover different ways of making the paintings." - Alan Charlton.
Alan Charlton has been painting grey monochrome works for over 50 years, following the same principles of dimension, with the height, width, and depth of each work set as multiples of 4.5 cm. His strictly proportioned works explore the relationship between pictorial body and architecture. The choice of grey emerged from an initial search for a utilitarian colour that had been mass-produced for manufacturing. Grey, a colour with few associations, allows for little emotional response beyond the direct encounter between painting and viewer.
Overtime, Charlton has developed different forms, with new ones emerging during the repetitive process of manual labour. He is inspired by the nuances that inevitably arise through repetition. The works in the exhibition consist of trapezium and circular forms, varying in the number of component parts. The circular form has emerged as a more recent element in Charlton's oeuvre over the past few years, with the curved canvases continuing to sharpen our awareness of surface and edge.
Rooted in a similar concern with spatial perception to American minimalist artists of the 1960s, Charlton's work produces a shifting spatial experience, changing according to the viewer's position and angle of approach. Charlton sees the installation of his exhibitions as the most interesting part of the process, considering it the final act of making the painting, where its interaction with its surroundings and its inhabitation of the gallery space are resolved. The viewer becomes aware not only of the shaped canvas, but of the surrounding space it activates, as well as the continuous changes brought about by modulations in light.
This exhibition is Alan Charlton's fifth solo exhibition with Annely Juda Fine Art. He has been represented by the gallery since 1996 and has had notable museum solo exhibitions at: Whitechapel Gallery (London), Musée d'Art Moderne (Paris), ICA (London) Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam). Born in 1948 in Sheffield, Alan Charlton studied at the Sheffield School of Art from 1965-1966, Camberwell School of Art in London from 1966-1969 and the Royal Academy Schools in London from 1969-1972.
