Jane Kelly - Art - Black Paintings

The Black Paintings were first exhibited in the mixed 'Lie of the Land' exhibition at Ikon, Birmingham. Created with artex and bitumen on canvas, the fifteen foot wide 'Alaska 1' was the focus of a subsequent one person exhibition at Walsall Museum and Art Gallery. Curated by Director Peter Jenkinson, it was the first show of the new The Other Space gallery specialising in contemporary artwork.

The exhibition was supported by the artist's sketchbooks and source material including Byron's poem 'Darkness', itself inspired by the effect of volcanic eruption ash on London in 1816. The soundtrack was Gavin Bryar's 'Sinking of the Titanic' and Henryk Gorecki's Symphony No.3. Artist Francis Gomila was commissioned to take the process photographs and David Patten to write the catalogue text...

In these Black Paintings Jane Kelly undermines traditions in landscape paintings (the picturesque. the romantic etc) to remind us of matters more relevant to our times - the 'drew drops like diamonds on every tree' have been replaced by gobs of black bitumen surging through the underpainting of white artex. As these paint-stuffs are pushed and pulled across the canvas surface they echo the artist's movements, thoughts and intentions until action and medium stabilise into gestures indicating pressing concerns.

The real and implied weight of the heavy black surfaces seem to stress the painting's support to a point of final collapse - a silence before the storm, and the violation of the underlying white artext by bitumen slicks calls forth primeval fears:

I had a dream which was not a dream
The bright sun was extingushed, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space.
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air:
Moon came and went - and came, and brought no day.
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation: and all hearts
Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light

The irony is that despite this horros, the lusciousness of these (apparently) endless surfaces seduces us into closer inspection on which we realise that the very materials used as paint-stuff will make their own contribution to our final destruction. These filthy, smelly, brooding paintings strip-away the antiseptic platitudes with which we now surrond our lives. Under the 'greening' of this green and pleasent land, the evidence of industrial blight actively accuses us of wilful neglect as we become the rotting echoes of our misdeeds.

In a week when the United Nations Security Council agreed a timescale for war, and the Soviet people joined the 'Third World' food queue, and a Sunday paper hihlighted the pollution of Swan Lake, it is appropriate that our gaze should become haunted in front of these Black Paintings.

The world was void.
The populous and the powerful was a lump.
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless.
A lump of death.
Byron: July 1816

Byron Darkness