Saul Fletcher
24 Nov 2007 - 17 Jan 2008
SAUL FLETCHER
November 24th, 2007 – Mid January 2008
Galerie Neu is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition with British artist Saul Fletcher. In a series of new works, Fletcher presents both landscapes and photographs of interiors, as well as paintings on canvas.
A soft, grey winter light envelops Fletcher’s photographs of the English landscapes. The bucolic motifs he portrays are simple and stark: fields, hedges, barren trees and a lonesome house by the water. Each motif is captured in front of a cloudy sky, the lugubrious weight of which occupies nearly half of each image. One photograph pictures the artist himself; posed in a wide, empty field, partly facing the viewer; he appears to hesitate.
In their simplicity, these landscapes evoke a fascination with the seemingly accidental, a quality that also manifests itself in older works by Fletcher, like his photographs of negligible interior details. Fletcher’s compositions and palette are, however, anything but accidental. The artist plays with colour and texture with agile sensitivity. This is evident in the landscapes, for example, in the placement of the light grey sky and the water against the earthy tones of the winter landscape, or the play between the horizontal aspects of the landscape against the vertical accents and the obscure textures of the bushes in the foreground and the filigree branches of the trees on the horizon. Rather than projecting a vision of the romantic sublime, the calm, dark mood of Fletcher’s landscapes serves as a sentimental space, an atmospheric projection screen for a wordless melancholy.
In earlier photographs, Fletcher employed the walls of his studio to similar effect, using them as a stage for alternating productions featuring painted and collaged images, raw colour and textures and emotionally charged objects. Although the gestures and marks in these works seem to emanate from a bygone era, their iconographic simplicity and frank emotion address the viewer directly. Though visually and emotionally charged, Fletcher’s works are deprived of a clear legibility, leaving the door open to a wide variety of individual interpretation. The photographic medium creates a remarkable distance between the viewer and pictorial expressivity of Fletcher’s tableaux. The craggy surface of the wall, coated with the traces of earlier works, blends together in these works with ghostly fragments of signs that hint at the past and/or death. They unfold as quiet and dramatic scenes that convey a remarkably suggestive poetic dimension.
Saul Fletcher’s work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions, including the 4th Berlin Biennial (2006), The Carnegie International and solo shows in New York, London, Cologne and Munich. This is his first solo exhibition in Berlin.
November 24th, 2007 – Mid January 2008
Galerie Neu is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition with British artist Saul Fletcher. In a series of new works, Fletcher presents both landscapes and photographs of interiors, as well as paintings on canvas.
A soft, grey winter light envelops Fletcher’s photographs of the English landscapes. The bucolic motifs he portrays are simple and stark: fields, hedges, barren trees and a lonesome house by the water. Each motif is captured in front of a cloudy sky, the lugubrious weight of which occupies nearly half of each image. One photograph pictures the artist himself; posed in a wide, empty field, partly facing the viewer; he appears to hesitate.
In their simplicity, these landscapes evoke a fascination with the seemingly accidental, a quality that also manifests itself in older works by Fletcher, like his photographs of negligible interior details. Fletcher’s compositions and palette are, however, anything but accidental. The artist plays with colour and texture with agile sensitivity. This is evident in the landscapes, for example, in the placement of the light grey sky and the water against the earthy tones of the winter landscape, or the play between the horizontal aspects of the landscape against the vertical accents and the obscure textures of the bushes in the foreground and the filigree branches of the trees on the horizon. Rather than projecting a vision of the romantic sublime, the calm, dark mood of Fletcher’s landscapes serves as a sentimental space, an atmospheric projection screen for a wordless melancholy.
In earlier photographs, Fletcher employed the walls of his studio to similar effect, using them as a stage for alternating productions featuring painted and collaged images, raw colour and textures and emotionally charged objects. Although the gestures and marks in these works seem to emanate from a bygone era, their iconographic simplicity and frank emotion address the viewer directly. Though visually and emotionally charged, Fletcher’s works are deprived of a clear legibility, leaving the door open to a wide variety of individual interpretation. The photographic medium creates a remarkable distance between the viewer and pictorial expressivity of Fletcher’s tableaux. The craggy surface of the wall, coated with the traces of earlier works, blends together in these works with ghostly fragments of signs that hint at the past and/or death. They unfold as quiet and dramatic scenes that convey a remarkably suggestive poetic dimension.
Saul Fletcher’s work has been featured in numerous international exhibitions, including the 4th Berlin Biennial (2006), The Carnegie International and solo shows in New York, London, Cologne and Munich. This is his first solo exhibition in Berlin.