Alastair Gordon (b.1978, Edinburgh), is an artist based in London.
This, the first major monograph of the artist’s career, includes
over 160 paintings, drawings and documentational photographs, along
with notes by Gordon himself. The book introduces this accomplished
and engaging new voice in British painting. Gordon’s paintings
bring the historic languages of genre painting and the quodlibet
into a contemporary discourse that pushes the boundaries of
realism, figuration and illusionism to focus on everyday moments.
His work often elevates seemingly ordinary objects – feathers,
matchsticks, postcards – allowing them to speak to wider concerns
of beauty, truth, life and death. The documented works, produced
between 2012 and 2023, include paintings made in oil or acrylic on
MDF, wood, ‘found’ wood, gesso panel, paper, canvas and
occasionally linen. Each is distinctive for its style and for the
recurring motifs Gordon selects such as masking tape, paper
ephemera and repeated, subtly different studies of the same
subject. Gordon’s texts describe how objects found mud larking on
the banks of the River Thames, shoes from the London City Mission
and rags and papers discarded from art students’ studios have
been depicted in paintings, incorporating the histories and stories
of each item (and each person) into his work. The book also
features recent works influenced by rural landscapes and parkland.
An introduction by Julia Lucero, Associate Director of Nahmad
Projects, London, emphasises the importance of nature and of
meditation within Gordon’s practice. Specifically, Lucero brings
out the idea of the ‘axis mundi, that metaphysical and mystical
connecting point where heaven meets Earth’. She explores the
significance of quodlibet, a seventeenth-century trompe-l’oeil
painting technique that Gordon favours, rendering brushstrokes
invisible and affording everyday objects new significance, even
‘profound value’. Humble objects such as a matchstick or paper
aeroplane might be elevated to the realms of the divine. An essay
by Jorella Andrews, Professor of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths,
University of London, describes the influence of Gordon’s time on
a research residency in the former studio of Paul Cézanne at Les
Lauves on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence. His experiences there
proved pivotal to the direction of his practice, in which both the
‘visual misdirection’ of quodlibet and the qualities of wood
have become central. Andrews brings art historical texts and works
of art into relation with Gordon’s paintings, making comparisons
between subject, form and approach. Andrews’ text further details
the recent synthesis of two sides of Gordon’s work: precise
illusionism combined with looser observations made in the natural
landscape. Edited by Alastair Gordon Studio, designed by Herman
Lelie, printed by EBS Verona and published in 2023 by Anomie
Publishing, London, the publication has been generously supported
by Howard and Roberta Ahmanson through Fieldstead and Company.
Alastair Gordon (b. 1978, Edinburgh) is an artist working with
painting, drawing and installation, based in London. Gordon
received his BA from Glasgow School of Art and his MA from
Wimbledon School of Art, London. His work has been shown in recent
solo exhibitions at Ahmanson Gallery in Irvine, California (2017),
Aleph Contemporary, London (Quodlibet (2021) and Without Borders
(2020)) and in the group exhibition Unpacking Gainsborough (2021)
at Cynthia Corbett Gallery, London.
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