John Chilver / Keith Talent Gallery, Time Out London, 2-8 July 2009
It’s been a good nine years since John Chilver’s last London solo show and much has happened in the interim. Most noticeably paint has been replaced by swatches of translucent fabric over the windows, and magazine pages arranged within branching segments of aluminium tracking on the walls. This may signal a switch of concerns from mimesis to immediacy, or a world of possibilities usurped by the realm of reality – but, more presciently, it suggests intellectual honing.
While Chilver’s previous, cartoonesque paintings investigated the semantics of painterly languages, this work seems at once less hermetic and more academic. Adverts of luxury goods and financial services usher associations of arch-consumerism, while their international sweep – which takes in Korean banking, Turkish sports pages and, though Cyrillic text, capitalist Russia – presses home issues of globalisation. Through Chilver’s formal approach, though, these not-so-subtle intimations of subject matter do not impose their full didactic weight. Such semiotically over-laden images as offensively expensive alligator-skin sofas are wielded with the same apparent off-handedness as the diffused square of yellow light in the window, thereby negating any system through which to analyse culture or generate meaning. Here structure, cultural politics, signification and aesthetics overlap to an extent that would leave the sensualist cold and the poststructuralist livid.
© Copyright 2021