Private View: Thursday, 1st of August 2024, 6 - 8pm
London (Wandsworth)
Giant stained-glass orbs hang suspended in space, providing a source of light, a meeting place, a sense of occasion. Commemorations, Joe Bloom’s first solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery brings together a captivating new series of paintings that explore the act of paying tribute: how and why we choose to memoralise moments from our life and history.
While all of Bloom’s compositions are the result of an iterative drawing process, the final image emerges through a more spontaneous use of colour and space. The result is a balance between precise detail and a sense of tumultuous movement or even chaos. This is most apparent in the larger scale works such as A Fruitless Bounty? which depicts a stained-glass orb hanging on a metal chain from the wooden rafters of an attic space. A flock of green parakeets fly around the orb, having entered through a shattered window, drawn to the light or perhaps, to the illuminated image of a fruit tree. There is a bitter irony to the fact that the tree, though bright and bountiful in appearance, is in fact made from coloured glass – a brittle beautiful object – but also a latent sense of violence, even rage. Did the birds break the window? Has the orb been strung up as a kind of trap? As with all of Bloom’s paintings, the composition offers a series of beginnings, rather than a complete narrative, allowing the viewer to create their own stories.
The paintings in this series, however, are connected not only by the orbs they depict but also by an undercurrent of violence that arises through a tension between the fragility and futility of the glass object and the action within or surrounding it. For instance, But Wasn’t It Beautiful? depicts the careful restoration and handling of a stained-glass orb that illustrates the explosion of an atomic bomb. Again, there is irony to the way in which the work of the restorers recalls the assemblage of the bomb itself but also to the memorialisation of a destructive force in an object that is itself breakable. Elsewhere, in works such as Blokes and What Seems to Be the Problem the sense of threat – or suppressed violent energy – is more subtly conveyed through the precarious suspension of the object in space and the ambiguous work of the figures depicted. In the former, a group of muscular men pull at string to lower or raise the orb which itself depicts strong, Grecian-like figures holding hands while the latter invokes two different kinds of procedures or rituals that may be harmful or healing depending on our perspective.
A collection of smaller-scale paintings, meanwhile, offers a more concentrated perspective of the stained glass as a material that is both other-worldly and prosaic. In these works, the orbs appear within hyperreal spaces that are reflective of the imagery they portray but also absent of figures. The orb in A Quick Shared Glimpse, for instance, depicts a busy train carriage that is simultaneously reminiscent of and detached from the empty space in which it hangs. This is largely due to style: the imagery in the orb is fractured, evoking the craft of stained glass, while the setting in which it hangs is seamless to the point of appearing almost like a blurred photograph.
For Bloom, commemoration is inextricably tied up with image-making: it is the prism through which we understand and communicate the world around us on both a personal and collective level. Whether an event, a memory, an aspiration or a world view, what we choose to commemorate, the artist suggests, reveals as much about what we think about as who we are and want to be.
